Category: Communism

Fight Club: A Dystopia We Can Learn From?

“Fight for us.  And regain your honor.” – The Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King

What’s a robot’s favorite Mexican food?  Silicon carne.

When I was a kid growing up, I read 1984 by George Orwell.  This was the grim version, as opposed to the much funnier version by Mel Brooks.  It had a profound effect on my worldview, as books often do when you read them in 7th grade.  In it, a globalist group of communists fought each other continuously, while subjugating the entirety of the human race.  Hmmm, wait, that sounds familiar?

1984 was a bleak book.  I’m not sure who I talked about it with, outside of writing the chicken scrawl of a report in schoolboy block letters and handing it to my really hot 7th grade English teacher.  Since my reading scores were, well, advanced, she just let me read what I wanted to read while the rest of the class all read the same book.  It felt nice being a special pretty pony.

I followed 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  I think my teacher suggested it.  Whereas 1984 was a dystopia built on the subjugation of a boot eternally stomping on a human face, Brave New World was a dystopia built on frivolity.

I fell into a vat of chemicals once.  My quick reaction nearly killed me.

Frivolity was where the masses were, more or less, endlessly drugged and entertained and so that their opinions never had a chance to develop, or impaired at birth so they could never think.  The tyranny in Brave New World was the tyranny of a vapid public who never thought beyond the most recent mindless and sexual encounter (strongly encouraged by the state) and the latest movie.

Oh, wait, that sounds familiar too.

Yet another dystopia is the movie (and book) Fight Club.  Fight Club is a 1999 movie based on a 1996 novel that (mostly) tracks the movie.  It is a creation of the 1990s, but, to quote the most excellent YouTube® movie reviewer, The Critical Drinker (LINK, some PG-13 language), it is very relevant to today’s world.  If you haven’t watched this 21-year-old movie and are interested, I suggest you watch The Critical Drinker’s review afterward – he includes spoilers.  I’ll warn you – the R rating was earned, and there are some very dark moments to the movie.

There won’t be any spoilers here – what I have to say doesn’t require me to spoil the film.

Tyler Durden told me handcrafted soap is the best.  No lye.

To really get Fight Club?  You have to watch it at least twice.  It is a thoughtful movie.  Does it have detractors on the Right?  Sure.  It’s R-rated.  Some have called it nihilistic (I disagree) and there are other complaints which I won’t go into here.  Regardless, I won’t beat myself up for going against the grain of other folks who didn’t like the movie.

Very few movies are perfect, but this one is very, very good.

I first watched Fight Club in 2012 or so.  It made over $100 million at the box office, so at least someone talked about Fight Club.  When I finally watched it (which was no fewer than three basement furniture re-arrangements ago) I was stunned.  How stunned?  It’s the only movie that has its own tag on this blog.

Vegan Club?  Everyone talks about Vegan Club.

The constant, pervasive theme of this movie is that the systems of globalism have created boxes for men that make them less than men.  Here’s Tyler Durden (one of the movie characters):

“We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.”

This is a simple translation.  A large proportion of the citizens of the United States define themselves by:

  • How much and what kind of furniture do they have?
  • How nice is their apartment?
  • How well can they write reports in a soul-killing job where large corporations seek to avoid liability in a cold, systematic way?  Does that kill their soul?
  • How can they avoid deviating from the norm to wear the right tie to the meeting?

These things are death to the soul.  As the character Tyler Durden explains:

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (deleted by J.W.) khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

I saw a robbery in an Apple® store once.  I was an iWitness©.

Marcus Aurelius and Seneca nod in approval.  They’d follow up:  you are your virtue.

And you, dear reader, are not your money or your clothes.  In many ways we are conditioned by society to believe that those are the things that define us.  We are not.  And if you believe that, you’re not alone.  Tyler describes the twilight of the soul brought about by a life dedicated to consumerism and status.  Live for the material world, and you’ll be swallowed by the material world.  You can never achieve enough, because someone always has more, does something better.

With that philosophy?  Money becomes the god that men seek:

“Damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy (stuff) we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

I saw a meme (didn’t save it, don’t have the author but I’d love to credit them) that I (sort of) reproduce below:

Michigan is going to ban car sales based on popular Internet videos – the governor wants to stop car-owner-virus.

This meme gets me.  It’s the essence of Fight Club.  We’re a species that is, more or less, programmed to achieve.  For who?  For our group.  It’s why the NFL® is popular today.  Okay, that’s why the NFL™ was popular until they showed us that we’re really not part of their group at all.

We run races for a reason.  We play basketball.  We wrestle.  We have swim races.  Well, you guys have swim races.  I was in a 100-yard swim race in sixth grade and placed 11 out of 12.  I wasn’t dead last because some poor kid got the cramps.  My 11th place finish wasn’t close.  I think they ended up timing me with a calendar and an abacus.

Regardless, we compete.

Why?

It’s wired into us.  Competition partially defines us.  And the stakes have to be real.  There is, of course, a religious aspect as well.  A man has to serve a higher power.  It’s not just competing for today.  There is a bigger game, and there are bigger stakes.  That’s what makes it worth playing the game.  Life is more than consumption and procreation.

Q:  Why did the Libertarian cross the road?  A:  TAXATION IS THEFT!!!  

But men who can run a race fairly and lose with grace are men.  They don’t have to like losing – no man does.  But loss is a forge that makes us stronger, gives us incentives.  Thomas Sowell (I think?) once said that if he were designing a car for safety, he’d put a Bowie knife pointed at the driver in the center of the steering wheel, not an airbag.

Incentives matter.

Now?  We insulate children from the Great Game.  Lose?  That’s okay, you tried.

No, it’s really not.  I lost the swim meet because I suck at swimming and am only slightly better than a car at swimming.  Slightly.

Did I cry?  No.

Antifa protestors – never have to take time off from work.

Did I focus my energy on something where I could be as good as nearly anyone in the state?

Yes.

Swimming was pointless.  Telling me that it was okay was worse than pointless.  It was a lie.

Back to Tyler:

JACK, in voiceover:  On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK:  Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER:  Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND:  How’d you know?

TYLER:  They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.  Raymond, you’re going to die.  Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND:  Yes.

TYLER:  Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND:  Please, God, no!                            

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER:  An expired community college student ID card.  What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND:  S-S-Stuff.

TYLER:  “Stuff.”  Were the mid-terms hard?  I asked you what you studied.

JACK:  Tell him!

RAYMOND:  Biology, mostly.

TYLER:  Why?

RAYMOND:  I… I don’t know…

TYLER:  What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

Tyler cocks the .357 magnum Colt© Python™ pointed at Raymond’s head.

TYLER:  The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK:  Answer him!

RAYMOND:  A veterinarian!

TYLER:  Animals.

RAYMOND:  Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER:  Stuff.  That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND:  Too much school.

TYLER:  Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND:  No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER:  I’m keeping your license.  I know where you live.  I’m going to check on you.  If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead.  Get the hell out of here.

JACK:  I feel sick.

TYLER:  Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click.  It’s empty.

JACK:  I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER:  Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

How many people would love to have Tyler come into their lives and make them live their dreams?  How many people struggle through life, because they can’t take the next step?

You’re not too old.  If you’re breathing, you can make a mark on this world.  You’re not too poor.

My limiting factor is my imagination.  I realize that – it’s probably yours as well.

Regardless of the dystopias of 1984 and Brave New World, Fight Club shows a dystopia where we can win.  How do we win?

By understanding that our lives are in a precarious balance, just like Raymond K. Hessell.  And the first step to living life?  It’s letting go.  Achieving.

I learned to swim when I was very young.  My dad taught me.  I thought I’d never get out of that bag. 

And if you lose at swimming?  Try again.  Or try a new game.

At the end of Fight Club, men prove themselves to be stronger and larger than the dehumanizing systems that they serve.  It’s your choice.  How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?

Also:

Avoid the clam chowder.

 

 

Unrelated:

Steve is a blogger who is a FOW (Friend of Wilder).  Unlike me, he’s talented.  Because of the idiots who run his state, you’re lucky he has time to create something like this for you.  Do it.  No, I don’t get paid.  Steve does.  He’s Our Guy.

Do it.  Here’s the LINK.  There is just enough time for Christmas.

The Four Best Stocks For After The Death Of The Last Human On Earth

“You kids change partners more than square dancers.” – That 70’s Show

Marie Antoinette should have known the time was right for a revolution in France – she had a Coup Coup clock.

Okay, the title is clickbait.  We all know the Four Best Stocks For After The Death Of The Last Human On Earth are Rock, Paper, and Scissors.  Oops.  I think the real answer is Rock, Rock, and Rock.  I mean, who is going to make the paper and the scissors?

Oh, wait, I said four.

Add Google®, I guess.

One constant theme of this blog since I started writing it is that I want to convince everyone I can that tomorrow may not look like today.  I think this is important, because too often we start to think that our lives of today are the lives that people will live forever.

Why?

That’s the way we’re wired, to think that tomorrow will look like today.  It’s complacency.

Dozens of my ancestors lived as kings, having all the food they wanted and the choice of the peasant maidens in the dozen miles (metric conversion of one deciliter) around the mud hovel they lived in.  It may sound dreary, but it’s still better than Netflix®.

Genghis Khan is far better known than his brother, Gingivitis Khan.  

My ancestors lived every day of their life just like that, until they died at age 32 after they got a nasty infection because they were sharpening their bronze and flint nosehair trimmer, and accidentally conquered China.  That seems to keep happening.  I blame . . . well, all the people that conquered China.

For 100,000 years our brains, as wrinkly and wonderful as they are, grew up in a world where yesterday was mostly like today, and today is mostly like tomorrow.  Except for you people who have wonderful smooth brains.  I think I have some Bernie Sanders™ coloring books for you.

There’s a danger to thinking that tomorrow will be just like today.

Let’s pretend you’re a turkey on a farm.  There’s a nice farmer that feeds you every day.  What a nice guy!  You keep gaining weight, and getting bigger.

What a nice farmer!  Farmers must love turkeys.

Then, one November near Thanksgiving the impossible happens:  the farmer fires the turkey due to the COVID-19 outbreak and his turkey 401k drops 90% and his turkey wife tells him that . . . all those eggs?  Not his.

That turkey has found a fate worse than being roasted at 350°F for three hours (6.02×1023 Watts for six fortnights).  Turkey alimony.

The point remains:  life changes in an instant, never to return to the way things were.

I shot my first turkey this year.  Scared everyone in the meat aisle, and now I’m banned from Wal-Mart.

Here’s another one (I’ve used this example before):  I’m quite sure that there was a British guy at the dock watching as the last Roman Legion left Britain in 407 A.D.  What was he thinking?

“The Romans have been in Britain since 43 A.D.  They’ll be back.  Why wouldn’t they?”

It’s nearly a 100% chance that was exactly what he was thinking.  Our hypothetical British dude had never lived a single day when Roman troops weren’t controlling Britain.  They have to come back, right?

Well, not really.

There are reasons that hordes of Roman coins are found buried in Britain.

When Rome was strong, a Denarius (Roman coin) contained about $4.00 worth of silver at today’s prices.  As Rome continued, successive Caesars trading in Rome’s military might, reduced the amount of precious metals in the Denarius until it hardly contained a whiff of silver.

I hear there are extraterrestrials living in Rome – someone said that there were Italiens there.

Then one November near Thanksgiving, the impossible happens:  the guy in Britain gets fired and the Roman 401k drops 90% and his British wife tells him that Joe Biden (who was only 35 in 407 A.D.) was elected.  The worst part?

Joe Biden is carrying the British woman’s baby.

Our Roman’s world collapses.  Everything that he knew changes overnight.

When archeologists go digging in old British trash piles, they find something interesting.  The trash at the bottom of the pile (when Rome left) contains really cool broken plates.  Archeologists love plates.

Why?

Because angry wives break them all the time, so they make it easy to date a culture by the number of wives that go crazy and start throwing plates.  Apparently, the number of mad wives that throw plates is a scientific constant like the speed of light, so trash pickers archeologists can date the change in a culture based on broken plates.

The archeologists determined this:  the broken dishes at the time the last Roman Legions pulled out of Britain were awesome.  They were great dishes.  And everyone had them.  It turns out that dishes in the Roman Empire were mass-produced in southern France and shipped everywhere in the Roman Empire.  Southern France was the Wal-Mart® of quality dishware.

You can plainly see that Indiana Jones’ least favorite band is the Rolling Stones.

Then archeologists looked at dishes that were 100 years later in the trash pile.  They knew this particular trash pile was a king’s trash.  The dishes in the king’s trash were something that a kind parent would have congratulated a mildly retarded child for because the mildly retarded child tried really hard.

But these Roman plates weren’t widely available – only a king could afford them.

History happens one day at a time.  People lived it, the hard way.  Let me give you some examples that might add some perspective:

  • A French girl born at the start of the French Revolution would have been 26 and had multiple children when Napoleon finally lost at Waterloo.
  • A German girl born at the end of World War I would have been 27 and had multiple children before the end of World War II.
  • An American girl born at the end of the Clinton administration already has 43 earrings, sixteen tattoos, and herpes.

What I’m trying to explain that there are two types of changes the first one is fast, really fast, like the turkey’s bad November day.  The second type seems fast only when viewed from 200 years in the future.  Remember, love can last for a lifetime, but herpes is forever.

In my estimation (for what it’s worth) we are in an atmosphere where both types of change will happen.  We will have sudden changes, like the turkey, or like Marie Antoinette. These will be changes we cannot go back from.  If you burn a receipt from Arby’s©, there’s no going back to get those curly fries if they shorted you.

We all burn our receipts from Arby’s™ as soon as we get home, right?  Otherwise The Man would know how much we like Horsey Sauce®, and you where that leads:

Tyranny.

I digress.

But I will* note that I had a conversation with a friend over a year ago.  He and I were talking about investing and other things.  During this conversation, I had an epiphany.  Where was my money?  Mainly in a single bank (this has now changed).

Where does the Federal Reserve hide its economic failures?  In debasement.

My question to my friend then was this:  “How much of your money is diversified?”

His response was, “Well, it’s in mutual funds, and in a wide variety of stocks and bonds.  So it’s diversified.”

I followed up:  “No, I mean how much of all of that is in dollars?”

There was a long pause.  “All of it.”

I guess this post is mainly to point out that just like we don’t buy things in 2020 with a pocketful Roman coins, and we don’t buy things with French Francs from before their Revolution, and we can’t buy things with Soviet Rubles, how long will we be able to buy things with Dollars?

Just asking.

I’m not even suggesting any particular path, though I will disclose that if everything goes well, my kids might inherit some silver and gold when The Mrs. and I pass on.  Like any turkey, I know one thing:  tomorrow generally looks like today.

Until it doesn’t.

*Standard I’m Not A Financial Wizard Blah Blah Blah And If You Listen To Me For Financial Advice You’re Insane Differently Mental Disclaimer.

Equity And Equality – Why Leftists Cheat At Elections

“Equal, but not even.” – Die Another Day

What did the Frenchman yell as he went down the slide?  “YES!”

On Wednesday after the election, I consciously decided to sleep in – I had taken a vacation day from work.  I slept in.  It was luxurious.  Like a Roman soldier, I really enjoy resting on my pila-case.  At a time that was later than I’ll admit to, I rolled over in bed and picked up my phone.

Substantial leads for Trump from the night before had evaporated.  For whatever reason, this reminded me of the story of the Fox and the Scorpion.

Fox and the Scorpion both wanted to cross a river.  Why?  Probably a decent discount on quality unpainted furniture on the other side.  Scorpion wants to ride on the back of Fox.  Fox, not being stupid, says, “Dude, you’re a scorpion, you’re going to sting and kill me!”

Scorpion, logically, responds, “C’mon, man!  Let me tell you what my dead son Beau would say.  You know the thing. But if I sting you while we’re crossing the river, I’ll die, too.”  Scorpion paused, ”Just like I died when I fought Corn Pop.”

Fox, remembering his mandatory training on systematic speciesism, agrees and apologizes for his microagression and his foxist privilege.  Fox says, “Hop on.”

Fox begins swimming through the river.  Halfway to the other side, Scorpion stings Fox.

Fox, through the haze of pain and spreading paralysis as Scorpion’s neurotoxin spreads through his system says, “Scorpion!  You’ve killed us both!”

Scorpion responds, “C’mon man!  You knew I was a scorpion when I got on your back.”

I pushed the fable out of my mind as I slowly scrolled through all the data.  I then turned off my phone.  I went into the front room and sat down to read for a while.  Pugsley and The Mrs. were off at school and work, respectively.  It has been as rare as late-night TV show hosts with a sense of humor since 2016 that I’ve had the opportunity to just sit in silence without any work or a blog deadline hanging over my head.  I decided to grab a burger and a beer.

How many vegans does it take to eat a Double Quarter Pounder® with cheese?  One, if no one is watching.

In Modern Mayberry, we have five fast-food restaurants.  The day was perfect in temperature, which means it was on the cold side for most people.  I got to the speaker and ordered.  I then drove home, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and ate my burger.  I tried to remember what my doctor said.  I think it was “Don’t eat anything fatty.”

It was good – cheesy and greasy and just the right amount of pickles.  I then remembered what my doctor had really said, “Don’t eat anything, fatty.”

For me, Wednesday was about balance.  It’s easy enough to fall into the trap of getting so wound up about politics that you lose perspective.  Honestly, one of the nicest things about living in Alaska was that Lower 48 politics was thousands of miles away.  You could nearly ignore it.  I’ve found that turning off my phone works almost as well.

On Thursday, it was back to work, and back to writing.  Of course, I have thoughts about the election, and you can probably guess what many of them are.  But the big thing that comes to mind with the 2020 election is fraud. It’s easy enough to look for fraud, heck, when that psychic told me she’d take my check I knew she was a fraud.

These ballots are from Seattle, so they definitely got mac n’ cheese.

Honestly, if you look at nearly any election, you can find things that look like fraud if you look hard enough.  The exception, of course, is my election to LOCAL OFFICE, where I estimate I had 335.33% more votes than the nearest competitor.

Hmmm, that sounds suspicious.  33533 is the same backwards as forward.  And it’s all 3’s with one five.  Normal numbers never look that way . . . except . . .  I was running unopposed for a job that no one else seemed to want.

You can confirm your bias that I stole the election – that 335.33% just looks too perfect.

From an ideological perspective, stealing an election is the last thing I’d do.  What ideology says that?  The ideology of the Right

The ideology of the Right is very different than that of the Left.  The Right is focused on Equality.  The Left is focused on Equity.  It’s really the fight between Equality and Equity that best defines the split between thinking on the Right and thinking on the Left.

A Marine with a salt and pepper beard is likely a seasoned veteran.

Western Civilization has always been a civilization of Equality and the philosophy of the Right.  You are born.  If you make your peace with God?  You can go to Heaven.  It’s up to you.  No one will drag you across the line.  If you want to create a business?  Be a glorious hero?  Sure, class may have come into it, but there was always room for the barbarian to make it to king.

The Right is Equality.

Equality is a 100 yard (3450 meters) dash.  I line up on the same line with my opponent.  When the starter pistol goes off, we start running.  If I’m running against a moderately athletic high school-aged boy who doesn’t have tularemia, tuberculosis, typhus, and tetanus, he’s going to make it to the finish line first.  If it’s a fat kid?  Okay, I might dust him.

As long as he has typhus.

Equality is about having the same opportunities.  The opportunity, in this case, is the open track.  It’s the same for both of us.  The opportunity includes the starter pistol.  We’ll hear it at the same time.  Each of us have the same conditions.

I have had many of the same opportunities in my life as Elon Musk.  I’m thrilled that he’s doing so well.  We had an equal shot at the world, and he ended up with billions.  I’m good with that.  He ran the race very, very well.  His running allows us to win, and in the end, makes us all wealthier.

If Musk flew his Tesla® through a black hole, because of tidal gravity forces, he’d be Elon-gated.

Equality is obsessed with fairness.  One person, one vote.  In Modern Mayberry, I think that getting the local officials to bend the rules during voting would have a penalty worse than speaking loudly in the local library.

The rules matter, and we follow them.  When The Mrs. had to get her license when we moved to Modern Mayberry, you could see the gleam in the DMV clerk’s eye as she ticked off the things The Mrs. had to produce to get her license.

  • Birth certificate?
  • Proof of address?
  • Current electrocardiogram?
  • Head of John the Baptist?
  • Marriage certificate?

Yup.  She was denied because she couldn’t prove that I’d married her.  Ha!  You can bet that The Mrs. wasn’t very happy when I drove her home singing, “Guess you are my property, doo-dah, doo-dah; my wife’s my chattel property all the doo-dah day.”  Of course, as I said this I had a brand-new Upper-Lower-Midwestia license in my wallet.

The Mrs. was not amused.

But the DMV clerk was 100% being fair.  The rules are the rules, no matter how stupid they might be.  The rules are the rules, no matter who you are.  And DMV clerks should follow them.

To the letter.

That’s Equality.  No matter who you are, when you walk into the DMV office, you’re all equally dirt in their eyes.  I think the DMV clerk even shed a tear when I had every single document she requested.  Getting through on the first time was like cheating to her.

Never get behind the Devil at the DMV if you need to do paperwork – the Devil can take many forms.

Believing in Equality is why people on the Right don’t steal votes.  They want to see the race run fairly.  If you don’t have the right paperwork?

No license for you.  I will say that when I got my license, the DMV clerk tried to get me to be an organ donor.  That was a girl after my own heart.

The DMV, at least here, is Equal.  Equity is different.

Equity is the belief that fairness isn’t measured on the starting conditions but on the outcome.  If a 100 yard (.31 centimeter) race was run on Equity measures, I would only have to run, say, 50 yards if I was running against someone twice as fast as me.  The goal of Equity isn’t to see who is fastest, it’s to structure the race so that people finish the way you want them to finish.

Given that Leftists are focused on Equity, or the outcome of the race, does it make sense that they’d try to steal an election?

Certainly.

Leftist focus only on the outcomes.  If a process like the 100 yard (34 milliKelvins) dash produces results where someone is faster, it’s the process that’s wrong.  If the process consistently produces a race where the fastest person wins?

To a Leftist, that’s unfair.

Not mine.  Second time I’ve used this recently.  The main problem is that the Equity in Reality panel is missing the pile of skulls that Leftism always, inevitably produces.  And the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist, either.

Equity, in the mind of the Leftist, isn’t in the casting of ballots.  Equity is in the counting of them.  Your favored candidate is losing?  What’s a few hundred thousand extra ballots?  They can punch them with a hammer or a sickle.

Why do Leftists cheat?

C’mon man, it’s because they’re Leftists.  What did you expect?

The Archbishop, Trump, And The Coming Great Reset

“Jahr null. Year zero. An experiment. A reset. A new America.” – The Man in the High Castle

I hear that Noah kept his bees in the Ark hives.

I first became aware of “The Great Reset” last week.  There are quite a few YouTube® videos about it, but one of the more unusual mentions was in a letter to President Trump from a retired Catholic clergyman.  This particular clergyman is Archbishop Carlo Viganò.  I don’t know what the difference is between an Archbishop and a Bishop, but I suspect it has to do with a better quality of footwear.

Anyway, Archbishop Viganò wrote the following in the letter:

A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.

You can read the whole letter here (LINK).

Okay, the story the Archbishop was sharing seemed like an Infowars® segment, but with less tinfoil.  What was up?

I hear that Alex Jones’ wife left him because she said he was paranoid.  Alex was okay with that – he said he’d rather live alone than live with a government clone.

Well, it is stuff that’s directly out of an Infowars™ segment:  as I dug into the Archbishop’s clues, it was exactly correct.  The World Economic Forum©, which runs that annual Davos conference in Switzerland where 3,000 of the elite of the business world, academia, Hollywood, and the press get together to discuss how awesome they are for sacrificing themselves by flying their private  jets to visit a Swiss resort.

Alex Jones regularly says they’re up to no good when they meet at Davos.  Not everything is a conspiracy:  I’m certain that Alcoa® and Planters™ will never be allowed to merge, since everyone is afraid of the AlumaNutty.

I will say this about Switzerland – their flag is a big plus.

I know the Leftists complain about the 1%, but this is the 0.00004%.  The amazing thing?  The 0.00004% agree nearly entirely with Antifa’s® agenda.  Here’s what the Great Reset entails, as showcased in articles on the World Economic Forum©’s own website (LINK):

  • “We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.” The Davos folks describing freedom:  “Be free.  No!  No, not like that.”
  • “In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles.” I’d like to point out that some things didn’t change at all:  WNBA games have always been empty.
  • “. . . will require stronger and more effective governments . . . .” I’m against both of those things.  If we have strong government, I really hope it’s Three Stooges®-level incompetent.
  • “ . . . governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes.” Remember – equality is we all have the same chance.  Equitable means we all get the same outcome.  Except, of course, for the 0.00004%.

Not mine.  Why doesn’t everyone just buy a ticket?

There are three main points that the World Economic Forum© is currently selling as the Great Reset:

  • International coordination on almost everything is the first component. If you thought we had too much globalization already?  Get ready for armies of international bureaucrats to write legislation and regulation that no one is accountable for.
  • “The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.” Who shares these goals?  Well, at least the 0.00004% do, and they know best, right?  Especially when they spend your money.
  • Finally, they want to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” The Fourth Industrial Revolution is Davos-speak for the post-Internet acceleration in information technology and the way that it interacts with the physical world.

But the World Economic Forum dives deeper.  One of the more chilling aspects is that they no longer want individuals to own, well, anything.  You can read the article here (LINK), right off of the World Economic Forum’s© website.  I did a little digging, and found the author was a member of Danish parliament, but prior to that?  She had spent 8 years getting a Masters in theology, became a part-time theology teacher, and then was in parliament.  Sound like a blonde version of AOC?

I you can’t tell socialists jokes – not everyone will get it.  Photo by Johannes Jansson/norden.org, CC BY 2.5 dk

Everything that Archbishop Viganò suggests is an aim of the Great Reset is plainly on the World Economic Forum© website, with the exception for the Archbishop’s claim that that people would be put into camps if they didn’t comply by being vaccinated and chipped.  That, in my mind, makes sense.  It’s not normally something that a country advertises, “Hey come for the free stuff, stay for the concentration camps.”  Or, “Virginia, it’s for Lovers of Barbed Wire.”

I hear the socialist student got top Marx in school.

My review of the Great Reset is simple:

It’s the same hokum that the Left has been selling since before the French Revolution.  The Left promises they will make people into new men and they will share the prosperity with everyone.  But those in control will then ask the question – how many people do we need, really?  The answer is a simple one, and it’s always the same:  fewer than we have now.

In reality, the 0.00004% never even start to share.  The 0.00004% will make life easy and free.  All you have to give up?  All of your freedom.  Hmm, I can get the Devil to grant my wish in exchange for my soul, and I don’t even have to go down to the Crossroads?

Which is why an Archbishop might write a letter in the first place . . . .

Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Don’t eat the eggs. We put LSD in the eggs.” – The Men Who Stare At Goats

I never trust a goose journalist – too much propa-gander.

Aesop (no, not our modern one who appears to have just emerged from his self-imposed technological monkdom by solving the riddle of Aesop’s Cables– LINK) was a storyteller who died in 564 B.C.  This was long enough ago that the Greeks had yet to find the drug that stops the aging process:  hemlock.  To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”

But one of my favorite of Aesop’s stories is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

The story is very simple, though when I was a kid they tarted it out so that it was fifteen minutes long and they could keep us shut up while the film ran so our teachers could take smoke breaks.  The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg involves a farmer and his wife.  They have a goose.  Each day, the goose lays a golden egg.  I know this sounds like the details found on page 347 of Joe Biden’s economic plan, but bear with me.

11 year old me thought that was amazing!

In Greek mythology, Chiron was a half-horse, half-human doctor.  I guess he was the Centaur for Disease Control.

Current day me?

I’d sell the goose to a private equity fund for $3 billion dollars and buy myself an island and then start a podcast where I drink bourbon every week with Elon Musk and lie to our wives about when we were going to come home.  We could call it Manhattans With Musk®.  Elon and I would just sit back and laugh as the private equity fund clones the goose and then crashes the gold market with goose clone gold.

Or maybe the cloning process doesn’t work and the private equity fund then has 45,000 cloned geese that lay eggs made out of whatever fake metal the Chinese use (Chinesium®?) to make all those tiny metal statues of Bandersnatch Combersnoot.  I mean Blandercrab Clambakehatch.  Blendersnout Clumberbake?  Oh, yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, that I bought on Ebay® after too many Manhattans.

Okay, this is actually a chocolate statue of Bunderslam Camberthatch.  We had a dog that weighed six pounds and ate a one pound bag of chocolate.  Killed him.  14 years later.

But back to Aesop.

In Aesop’s story, the stupid farmers couldn’t cope with getting a single, solid gold goose egg each day.  Nope.

An aside:  How much would a golden goose egg be worth?

The answer, at $1900 per ounce gold, is $176,640.  (For those of you playing our home game:  remember to convert to troy ounces.)

So, yeah, these greedy Greek peasants couldn’t just wait and have $176,640 a day show up out of the goose’s butt.  So?

They killed it.

What do the Irish call fool’s gold?  Shamrock.

Yes.  They killed it.  And when they took their pudgy stupid fingers and looked for gold?  They found nothing but Greek goose guts.  Oops!  Instead of having a creature that slowly made them immensely wealthy, they ended up with whatever it is you eat that’s made out of goose.  Pâté de foie gras?  It’s okay if you want your goose . . . de-livered.

I bring this up, because that’s what’s happening to Western Civilization.  I mean, not being made into pâté, but having the goose that gave Western Civilization our prosperity is being killed.

And it really is happening.

Right now.

The wonderful and amazing thing about Western Civilization is that it has produced, by far, the greatest amount of prosperity and wealth ever seen in the history of mankind.  Heck, North Korea loves western rock:  Sweet Child In A Mine is one of their favorite songs.  They love the Guns,  but said we can keep the Roses.  Regardless, there has never in the history of the world been a group as amazing as Western Civilization has been.

Ever.

Nearly every invention that’s worth mentioning has been invented by Western Civilization.  Nearly all the wealth that’s been produced in the world, has been produced through ideas started in Western Civilization.

So, we all win, right?

Well, no.

I’ve heard (years ago) propaganda that claimed that every culture is equally valid.  This is, of course, a Big Lie®.  I’m not saying that people who live in mud huts who really know how to wok a dog must move to the suburbs and eat McDonalds®.  Certainly not!  If people wish to live in mud huts and eat cât-e de foie gras?  That’s fine – I sincerely hope that they enjoy it.  Nah, I don’t – just kitten.

But they have no right to move to the suburbs in Minnesota and have people pay for their every need.

Cannibals never eat entitled kids – they always taste spoiled.

But in 2020, the idea that everyone on Earth is, somehow, entitled to live in a society that they had exactly no part in creating?  Sure!  Let’s call it a right.  They devastated their home country, so why not let them do that in Minneapolis, too?

As near as I can figure it out, the only answer as to why this happens is Leftism.  Leftism is fixated on creating a world where equality of outcome is the biggest goal.  That means that no person on Earth should have anything more than any other.

Except, of course, for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaires like Bill Gates and important people in Washington D.C. like the guy who writes the tax code.  I sincerely hope that Leonardo DiCaprio never gets injured in a car accident on a Star Wars® movie – I would hate it if he were Han DiCaprio.

The answer is always famine.

But to a Leftist, a murderer in prison is due the same physical comforts and opportunities as an upstanding member of the community that has worked 2500 hour years for decades and saved their money for retirement.  Of course, the irony is that when everyone has the right to move to the United States, it ends with no one having any rights at all.  Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and that guy who writes the tax code.

This is the reality of Leftism in the West:  Leftists feel that prosperity comes from (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) luck.  Except when they win, in which case it was completely deserved.  Leftists believe that since prosperity is unequally distributed, they can just redistribute it at will because prosperity isn’t earned.

This is the same idea that led to walls around the communist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s:  People are the property of the state.  Differences in outcomes aren’t the result of cultural differences.  Differences in outcomes must be a mistake, right?

According to Leftists, yes.

As I write these words, the West is facing a crossroads in every single Western country.  The idea corrupting it is simple and insidious:   that Western achievement is based on nothing but theft and lies, and that all men on Earth should be able to move to Western countries because everyone on Earth is owed the same lifestyle as people in Western countries have.

Used with permission.

This, my friends, is killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg as Aesop described over 2,500 years ago. The major theme of Leftism in 2020 is that cultures that exists on a pre-technological level, and that the residents of said culture should have the right to not only live in, but live in and direct the cultures of Western culture.

For whatever reason, the cultures of many nations have failed to produce a society that is capable of producing Western Civilization levels of comfort and wealth.  It’s beyond this post to describe why that is.  I’m sure that a culture producing wealth and prosperity is all random.  Speaking of random, what’s the difference between a Leftist and a random word generator?  Sometimes the random word generator tells the truth.

But hey, at least we’ll still have hemlock.

Right?

Free Speech? This Week Proves It Is Not On The Menu If The Left Wins.

“If you got a gun in your hand, you’re free to make any speech you want to.” – All in the Family

I believe this meme to be false.  Does that mean Snopes® has been debunked?

The biggest story of last week wasn’t the emails that allegedly show that Hunter Biden snorts coke off of hooker butts.  Oh, and that he and his father worked in an alleged scheme to illegally take millions of dollars from foreign companies and governments to gain influence inside the United States, or what politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C. call “Tuesday.”

No.  That wasn’t the story.  Corruption?

The biggest story of last week was censorship.  Again.

This time, the censored were targeted by two of the usual suspects, Twitter® and Facebook™.  What they censored (fairly effectively) was all of the Hunter Biden-related pictures and emails.  Sure, millions of people have seen them, but they have largely been effective at shielding voters who are undecided from this information.  Let’s face it – the Democrat idea of a bookmark is a lit match.

And it wasn’t random “conspiracy theorists” – this time it was the New York Post®, the newspaper with the fourth-largest circulation in the United States.

Yes, that’s a real headline. 

Twitter® suspended account after account for publishing links to the New York Post™, including a White House press secretary, James Woods, and journalist Jack Posobiec.  Yes.  Twitter© turned off their accounts for publishing a link to a story in the New York Post®.  Then Twitter© changed their software so you couldn’t even post the link.

Normally they also delete posts that are connected to barbed wire – they don’t want to cause a fence.

What reason did Twitter™ give?  That the story contained personal email addresses and phone numbers, and that the story relied on illegally obtained material.  Well, there certainly are email addresses and phone numbers in the story, but those had already been obtained by thousands of Ukrainian strippers and also printed in the New York Post™ for over 200,000 people, and unknown (but huge) numbers of readers on the Post© website.

Yet, when Trump’s taxes were the subject of the disappointingly boring story that Trump has good tax attorneys?  Twitter® censored those posts, right?

No.

But Twitter™ took the account of the New York Post© offline.  Yup.  A newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton before he became black were taken offline for  . . . publishing news.  This like when they canceled the Chicago performance of Hamilton, the Musical because it was too cold.  Once again Brrr killed Hamilton.

I once locked my keys in my car.  Bothered me because it was going to rain and the top was down.

Twitter™ even placed a message on a Tweet® by a Senate Committee that the link listed was “potentially unsafe” and Biden hadn’t even sniffed anyone.

My mechanic told me my car was unsafe.  I told him that bad brakes had never stopped me before.

Facebook™ did much the same, by “limiting sharing” of the story and noting that it would be fact-checked.

By who?  Who is in charge of making these decisions?  Generally, the “fact-checking” executives and organizations are heavily Leftist.  And why not?  The Left views control of speech as a primary weapon in the cultural war.  Thankfully, there is someone checking on the checkers:

See, I thought corruption was only a problem at pretzel companies, where they’re all twisted.

Effectively, Facebook® and Twitter© have taken sides in an election.  How much would the Biden-Harris campaign pay for those companies to shut down negative coverage of Joe?  $100 million?  $200 million?

Yes.  They would (and could) pay them that much.  But they don’t have to pay them, because they are doing it for free.  At least it’s just Twitter™ and Facebook©?

Well, no.  Try Wikipedia®’s article on the Hunter Biden controversy.  If you were to believe that article, you’d be told that it was absolutely false that Hunter Biden ever did any of the things that we are now getting email confirmation of.  Here’s a Breitbart article on this (LINK) subject.  Thanks, Wikipedia™.

But not to be outdone, the New York Times™ shows that it’s been in the bag for Joe for months:

I heard a lot of New Yorkers had to use the newspaper for toilet paper during the Coronavirus shortage.  The Times were rough.

I suppose that everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  But when factual information that shows that potential crimes have occurred at the highest levels of our government are suppressed?  That shows that, finally, Leftist ideology will triumph over journalistic integrity every time.  But the biggest integrity champion?  The swimming pool on the Titanic.  Still full.

There is, of course, the big libertarian argument:  Facebook™, Wikipedia©, and Twitter® are private companies and can do as they wish.

Well, no.  They are private companies and can do any legal thing that they wish to do.  As I mentioned above, the Biden-Harris campaign would pay hundreds of millions of dollars for favorable treatment like they have been getting.  Have they written a check to those companies?  No.  But Biden and Harris intend to give them billions of dollars.

How?

Through laws that have yet to be put in place that will favor them.  Today’s actions to repress knowledge are (in my non-lawyerly opinion) nothing more than in-kind campaign contributions, even though Kamala has the California black vote all locked up.

Poor Bernie – he has Post Traumatic Debate Disorder.

YouTube® has joined in, too.  Thirty big channels were just permanently shut down – big in that some had nearly a million subscribers.  Here’s a list of just those greater with more than 200,000 subscribers, thanks to USSA News (LINK), H/T to Vox for the source (LINK).

  • X22 Report (952,000 subscribers)
  • SGTreport (630,000 subscribers)
  • Edge of Wonder (467,000 subscribers)
  • Praying Medic (391,000 subscribers)
  • And We Know (385,000 subscribers)
  • Amazing Polly (375,000 subscribers)
  • Joe M (367,000 subscribers)
  • Dollar Vigilante (304,000 subscribers)
  • Mouthy Buddha (296,000 subscribers)
  • JustInformed Talk (281,000 subscribers)
  • RedPill78 (269,000 subscribers)
  • The Patriot Hour (248,000 subscribers)
  • In Pursuit of Truth (242,000 subscribers)
  • Destroying the Illusion (238,000 subscribers)
  • TRUreporting (215,000 subscribers)

I wasn’t a regular listener of any of them, but I had heard a video or two from some of them.  The common thread?

All of them were on the Right.

This has been a theme since Alex Jones was shut out of the Twitter®-YouTube™-Facebook© ecosystem.  Jones was a canary in the free-speech coalmine, and when they attempted to silence him it was greatly disturbing to me.  Someone asked why I was so upset that a conspiracy theorist had been banned, and I said, “Why?  Who are you working for??”  It was obvious that this would not be the last banning, and the reasons for banning would become increasingly frivolous.

Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar.  You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence!

Now, banning takes place regularly and goes after increasingly more innocuous content.  Innocuous unless you are on the Left, that is.  If you’re on the Left?  No dissenting voices are allowed.  How bad are they?

Worse than you can imagine.

A Reddit link sent me to a comment section there, where they argued that all (and I mean all) of the 1980’s action movies were fascist.  The people commenting were unwittingly sharing their true agenda – the destruction of everything that the United States ever was, or ever stood for.  I heard that Arnold Schwarzenegger was upset, even though he has given up movies for the pest control business: he is an ex-terminator.

Earl could talk for 70 minutes at the Town Council meeting about the best ways to feed gophers.

Freedom of speech was popular with the Left as long as they could use it to push their minority opinion.  Now?  They realize that freedom of speech is their mortal enemy once they get into power.  It’s fine to pretend that Leftism provides answers as long as we don’t actually use those ideas.  Every time, and I mean every single time they’ve been tried they lead to misery.

How do you keep miserable people under control?  No freedom of speech.

Oh, and never forget, the Second Amendment?

It protects the First.

Fear And Loathing In Modern America

“There is nothing so deranged as a man in the depths of an ether binge.” – Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

I hear an angst-filled teen robot is called a sigh-borg.

Artificial Intelligence may be taking us down the path to Civil War.

How?

Artificial Intelligence is upon us.  To be clear, there’s little likelihood that A.I. in 2020 is conscious in any way that would be recognized by a human even though it has exceeded human ability in things like “playing” chess and “not forgetting to pick up Pugsley at school for three hours in winter.”  A.I. doesn’t need to be conscious to be amazingly useful.  Even in its limited form it is already important to the economy, and becoming more important every year.  Here are some ways that A.I. impacts us here and now:

  • Shipping – from individual route selection to package delivery schedule, no single package is managed by an individual until the UPS guy pulls it off of the truck and walks to your door. The rest of it is scanned and the delivery path is optimized by computer as the delivery guy drops it at the wrong house.  I wonder why my neighbors needed all that latex and baby oil?
  • Shopping – Amazon™ (or any other retailer I purchase from with consistently) knows my buying patterns as well as I do. Is it super accurate at picking things that I’d to buy?  Yes and no.  I went to the site to give an example of a ludicrous suggestion.  And I bought a book instead.  (Darn you Allie!  Whatever you do, don’t go to her website and read it (LINK) the hilarious chapter from her new book because then you’d blame me if you bought it.)  Then I went back to Amazon® to look for a bad purchase suggestion and bought yet another book.  So, it beat me tonight.

I hear even A.I. is having to deal with LGBT stuff – they keep talking about trans-sisters.

  • Banking – three years ago I got a text from my credit card issuer – they thought a purchase charged to the card was fraudulent. It was.  The A.I. was smart enough to realize that I probably wasn’t in Chicago at 4 A.M. on a Monday morning buying $300 sneakers.  And, no, Amazon® didn’t recommend them to me.
  • Advertising – the websites I go to feature personalized ads meant to match my interests, but yet no human ever made the decision of what ads to place there – it was all based on the profile they’ve built of me. This might explain why they assume I need binoculars, dehydrated “survival” food, duct tape, a machete, and a subscription to “Sour Patch Kid®” candy of the month club.
  • Job Search – résumés of job seekers are submitted based on A.I. recommendation to be read by the A.I. that the hiring company bought to read them.   People are being rejected for jobs by computer programs.  I suppose it’s better than the future when unemployment claims are kept low by use of the Terminator® HRBot 3000.

A Terminator makes a really bad sales clerk.  Whenever anyone asks where something is, they always say, “Aisle B, back.”

  • Journalism – simple stories such as football or baseball game descriptions have been written by A.I. for years. One could argue that any intelligence at the Washington Post® or New York Times™ has been artificial for decades.
  • Social Media – Twitter® and Facebook™ and YouTube© are carefully calibrated to maximize use engagement to maximize company profits. And they’re the companies that are causing all of the problems.

The easiest emotions to get engagement on are:  fear, outrage, and anger.  The reason is that it’s easier to make someone mad than it is to make their day better.  Sure, we love “I can has cheezburger” cat, but to get people to click you need to get them scared or mad.

What emotions do you think the A.I. amplifies?  Yup.

Fear, outrage, and anger.

It’s also sad when your navy can be defeated by asking it to identify which pictures contain a stop sign.

If A.I. has a profile of you that can select what t-shirt you’re most likely to buy, what else does it know?  Well, it knows what your ideological profile is.  It knows what stories resonate with that ideological profile, and will make you mad.  Then?  It shows them to you.

The motivation isn’t evil.  The motivation is entirely neutral.  The A.I. is there to make profits for Twitter©.  Since it makes money for employees and investors, people will stop you from turning it off (to paraphrase Scott Adams from a recent podcast).  Their 401k’s depend on the A.I. making money for them.  I think Glenda from Accounting would slit your throat if you killed the goose that made the golden 401k.  And the stock options!

But this A.I. behavior reflects back into human behavior even beyond Glenda from Accounting’s bloodlust for anyone who messes with her 401k.  A.I. is also making divisions show up in the country.

Let me give an example:

A.I. was great at feeding polarizing videos on YouTube™.  Up until a year or two ago, YouTube© was great at giving me a list of suggested videos that were farther and farther Right.  Then, the great purge started.  Content creators of any degree of popularity were banned, forever, if they were on the Right for no particular reason that YouTube© would share.  Alex Jones was among the first banned, which is strange because he’s like the WWE® of radio hosts.

Sean keeps his pistol in his library.  It’s for shelf defense.

The Right has stayed, from an ideological standpoint, in about the same place for the last 30 years.  The Left, especially since 2004, has moved wildly Left.

Was A.I. to blame for all of that Leftward movement?  No.  There are other factors at play – especially a demographic shift of population with a huge influx in immigrants that come from countries that are all further Left than the United States.  Why they want to escape their Leftist hell-holes and then vote for Leftism here is beyond me.

But A.I. certainly pushed people who were leaning Left, farther Left.

So, A.I. can change people by surrounding them with a nice, warm Leftist echo chamber.  In what might be worse, A.I. is likely no longer just changing people, it’s changing events because that echo chamber exists.

Let’s take St. Louis, when Mark and Patricia McCloskey defended their own property.  Most people who reviewed their actions who have a legal background have said everything they did was clearly lawful.

Except.

Not an original.  Is this all the Terminator that 2020 could give us?

An elected prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies.  What amount of A.I. inspired Twitter®-fueled hate-rage against the McCloskey family resulted in her having the courage to file the charges?  It feels like to me, that online rage influenced her in some fashion.  It probably doesn’t hurt that Ms. Gardner’s election was funded in part by George Soros’ foundations, but even one of Soros’ creatures knows they need to get votes in an election year.

To what extent is the decision of the District Attorneys around the country to release violent rioters aided by a compliant A.I. that feeds the idea that arsonists are, somehow, freedom fighters?  People on the Right generally shake our heads in confusion as blatant criminals are charged with only the most minimal of charges yet bail for Kyle Rittenhouse is set, in cash, at $2 million dollars?

If the goal of the Left was to destabilize the country, causing everyone to lose faith in the justice system is a great start.  But none of that is the goal of A.I.  It doesn’t care.  If an A.I. was programmed to make shopping carts, and turned the entire planet into a big ball of shopping carts orbiting the Sun, well, mission accomplished!  A.I.s simply do not care.

Meanwhile, use of A.I. tech helps Google™, Twitter®, and Facebook© reach record stock prices.  The big danger is that the forces of polarization and the actions that the various A.I.s unleash gets out of control.  It’s not like those A.I.s are designed to realize that they’re destabilizing an entire country in a way that might lead to the most destructive war the United States has ever been a part of.

But, hey, those guys at Twitter still have stock options, right?

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened.  I’m kidding, of course.  I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living.  Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race.  For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President.  By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored.  Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump.  His other advantage is, well, you know.  You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind.  Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open:  21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day.  Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

  • Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
  • Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
  • Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
  • New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

  • Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
  • News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
  • California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
  • Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
  • Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
  • Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward.  It won’t be.  Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire?  A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states.  A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later.  But has anything about 2020 been best case?  The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth.  In reality, the tension has been building for four years.  In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt.  We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable.  This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good.   This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral.  I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic.  In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week.  I ignore most of them.  Today?  I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate.  You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses.  Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability.  The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral.  Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it.  It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California.  Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%.  California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants.  The result?  The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money?  You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times.  They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

The Silenced Majority: How The Left Censors The Right

“You can’t stop the signal.” – Serenity

Joe Biden wants to win, so his kids can get jobs closer to home.

Sometimes my jokes are greeted with silence.  You could hear a pun drop.

Nixon famously used the phrase, “The Silent Majority,” during a speech in October of 1969.  Leftists were demanding an end to the Vietnam War.  There were plenty of valid reasons to end the Vietnam War, but hating America wasn’t one of them.  This was a speech to the American people about just that – and Nixon knew that the people not out in the streets were with him.

But in 2020, we face a different world, but in the movie.  We still have a group of silent people who aren’t on board with the Left – and I believe them to be an absolute majority, or you and I both would be in a gulag right now.  But there is another group, a group that would speak, but can’t.

I call them the Silenced Majority.

I write about the first type of the Silenced Majority almost every month in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.  Why?  The amount and type of censorship tells you a lot about how far a country has fallen towards a Leftist totalitarianism.

Also the Left:  It puts the sanitizer on its skin, or else it gets quarantine again.

The vanguard of this behavior has come from Silicon Valley.  YouTube® has been the great censor, keeping dogma from Leftist organizations but banning content from only moderately Right of center sources.  But there is one way that YouTube© is like the United States government – both break their own rules.

The libertarians and Right-libertarians make the point that these are “private companies” and that free speech doesn’t apply.  Sure.  That’s what the cashier at the Burger King drive-through keeps telling me.  But it’s not just Facebook®, Twitter™, and InstaSnap©.  It’s also Gofundme.

Jason Blake, the guy in Kenosha who got shot while allegedly stealing a car with kids in it from a woman he allegedly raped, has a Gofundme® of nearly $2.3 million dollars.  Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old whose previous brushes with the law included being in a youth crime prevention organization, was prevented from having a Gofundme® at all because self-defense is the scariest thing in the world to the Left.  You don’t need Papa and Mama Government when you can protect yourself.

Hmmm.

Living with the systems of the Left is difficult.  Discover® recently said it won’t process payments going to Gab®, the free-speech alternative to Twitter™.

Twitter® has banned the term “treason.”  Now it’s supposed to be “undocumented foreign supporter.”

Why?

Does it matter?

The Left has co-opted the media.  And it’s not just from wild-eyed people on the far-Right.  On my YouTube™ feed a video showed up from a (as far as I can see) balanced, centrist journalist.  Like a real journalist, who has news Emmy® awards and everything.

The video was about Antifa®.  This video was so good that I subscribed to her channel, along with 67,000 other people that week.  That’s rare – I think I’m subscribed two three or four total YouTube® channels.  Total.  It was that good.  And it was fair.

She got a million hits on that video.  People are fascinated about Antifa™, and they want to learn more.  To have the opportunity to learn about it from an unbiased journalist with credentials?  What a hit!

Until YouTube™ shadowbanned it.

What’s a shadow ban?  It’s tuning the search and recommendation algorithms so they don’t point to specific content.   She’s got a great example in the video below where she searches for her exact video title with her name . . . and, well, she’s not the number one hit, I’ll tell you that.

You can search her channel for the vidya on Antifa®.  The first one hit over a million people.  This one  was at less than 15,000 (LINK).

For whatever reason, Antifa™ is a sensitive subject for the Left.  They don’t want people knowing about the group that’s responsible for riot after riot all across the country.  The FBI® has joined them, with the Director noting that Antifa™ isn’t an organization, it’s an ideology.  I wonder if he wear Stalin PJ’s?

YouTube™ will, if they bother to answer it at all, blame it on the algorithm, expecting us normies to not understand that every single algorithm is written by a human.  Or at least an autistic person who they pay with chicken tenders.

Fox News™ doesn’t have that excuse.  Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, was on some news show on Fox®.  Newt was shut down for mentioning that George Soros funded the campaigns of dozens of far-Left District Attorneys.  Fat George is proud of this.  He’s bragged about this.

But Newt mentioning this?  Forbidden.  Fox News© shut him down.  Cold.  Don’t take my word for it, watch it here (LINK).  It’s less than a minute.

It’s like the computer chip that Fox™ HR put into their heads started putting electroshocks into their brainstems.

What subjects can’t you even mention anymore?  Antifa® and George Soros, certainly.  How many others?

The second type of Silenced Majority are people who don’t speak.  Why?  Fear.  They live in fear because a person on the Left can make the most outrageous claims and have job security.  Heck, job security?  Make outrageous claims in some organizations and you’ll be rewarded.

“All White people are racist.”  Yup.  You can say that and not get fired.  Heck, in some companies you’re required to say it.  You can work in academia and call people who disagree with you “subhuman” on Twitter® and pray for their extermination.  As long as the people you’re insulting are on the Right, of course.  Your punishment for that?  Enjoying your tenured position and taxpayer-funded job.

After I asked my astrophysics professor how stars died, he responded, “Overdose, usually.”

But saying something simple and factual like, “The autopsy report on George Floyd showed that he was as high as my electric bill in summer after I left all of the windows open, the AC set on 60°F (8,675,309°C. or “Jenny” degrees), the oven open and set at ‘broil’, and a pack of 37 blenders running continuously for a month.”

Factually, that’s correct.  George Floyd was so high you can see his footprints on the Moon.  George Floyd nearly certainly killed himself with drugs.  But could you say that at the typical workplace that has offices and desks and HR?

I was amazed at how many people are offended by breastfeeding.  Heck, I was just trying to bond with my dog.

Sure!

But if you offended someone?

Then you’d be fired.  And then HR would whisper “fillintheblankaphobe” every time you tried to get a reference.  Good luck finding work after that, right?

And, yes, the idea isn’t that you said something offensive, it’s that you offended someone.  That’s the standard.  And in 2020, every single Leftist is looking to be offended.  Wear a Trump 2020 hat?  I’m sure that you’ll say something to upset some Leftist burrowed into your organization.  They’re watching.  Understand they don’t want justice, they want Social Justice, which to them means you being fired.

There are dozens of other, equally factual comments you could make that would get you fired.   Cisco Systems® fired several people after diversity training.  What did they do?  Well, on was fired for saying “All lives matter.”  So you can be sure that whatever those people said was the worstest evar!

I Googled® cigarette lighters, and got over 56,000,000 matches.

Another example?  James Damore was fired from Google®.  Why?  He questioned the “ideological echo chamber” at Google™.  Since (for now) it’s illegal to fire an employee in California for their political ideology, it’s likely that Mr. Damore walked away with a big pile of cash – but he’s the exception, not the rule.

The idea of the Left is to take us from the Silent Majority to the Silenced Majority.  They don’t want anything to spoil their “ideological echo chamber” because the one thing that Leftists cannot tolerate is competing ideas, especially competing ideas that work.

Nixon had this one right.  He wasn’t alone, at least not then.  But you’re not alone now.

And they can’t stop the signal.

Fragility, Resilience, Or Antifragility?

“When we finished he shook our hands and said, ‘Endeavor to persevere!’” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

I guess there are a lot of rivers in France, which makes sense.  Water follows the path of least resistance.

In our lives we have choices in how we react to the world, just like you have a choice of computer passwords.  I tried to choose “hi-hat” but the computer responded that “Sorry, password cannot contain symbols.”

While models always come with limitations, I was struck by an analysis that Vox Day (LINK) posted the other day.  In this, the original author that Vox discusses, Samuel Zilincik, refers to three types of opponents – Fragile, Resilient, and Anti-Fragile.  The author discusses these qualities in terms of how certain nations fought through the history of time.

When I was reading, I thought that’s one way of looking at people as well as civilizations engaged in conflict, so, why not?  Bear with me a little bit as I use World War II as an example that relates three nations to three states of being.

As an example, France was Fragile during World War II.  Yes, I know that World War II France wasn’t a person since if France 1939 was a person they’d have been Inspector Clouseau, but stick with me.  After the German invasion, everything about the French and British response was fragile.  Horrible communication, absolute battlefield collapse of poorly disciplined and trained soldiers, failure of leadership to create even the most rudimentary strategy against mobile warfare, and a general collapse of all French public will after the Germans showed up on the doorstep of Paris.

And the food wasn’t great, either.

We know the jokes about French military performance.  But France was fragile.

How are people fragile?

Bakeries in Denmark don’t add too much sugar to pastry – they don’t want to be sweetish.

I’ve been in tough situations with people, and seen some give up.  In extreme cases, it took very little for them to break down – relatively minor incidents led to implosions.  It was like an Antifa® member losing their cellphone with all their Starbucks™ points.  A complete catastrophe!

But I’ve seen normal people lose it, too.  More than once.  Ever see someone break down because of a bad test score?  Ever seen someone break down because they couldn’t get over a break up?

Fragility comes from having to defend things that aren’t your principles.  The French couldn’t stand to see Paris become a war zone.  My friend couldn’t stand to see a girl that he wasn’t suited for go away.  I wasn’t there to give the French emotional support, but I was there for my friend.  And he was there for me when I got divorced.  The core of fragility is holding on to things that aren’t principles.

Once you understand that everything that you own can be taken from you, but that you still own your attitude and the way you feel about things, you are less fragile.  In fact, you move toward the next stage:  Resilient.

In World War II, the one country that screams resilience more than any other was The Soviet Union.  Yes, Stalin was perhaps the most horrible man to have ever lived and communism is the worst system ever devised, unless your goal is human suffering and misery.  But the Soviet people fought.  And fought.  And fought.  Whenever a Russian dropped, he was replaced by another Russian and a Mongolian and two Uzbeks for good measure.  The Soviet Union had redundancy.  Even though they were generally inferior in many ways, the Soviets didn’t give up.  And, when the German supply lines were overextended?

I hear the bread was great in the Soviet Union.  People would wait in line 8 hours for a single piece.

The resilience worked.  The gradual wearing down of the technical superiority by numerical superiority and a willingness to not surrender.  If you have to choose to fight an enemy, a resilient one is far worse than a fragile one.

What makes a person resilient?  That’s the focus on values.  Sure, the Soviet Union had some really lousy values, but they were willing to fight in what they called The Great Patriotic War for the idea of Russia, even though sometimes the troops advanced with guns pointed at their backs, that was more the exception than the rule.

When you live for values and refuse to give up, you become resilient.

The last way a person can live is to become Anti-Fragile.  Anti-fragile is a term that I saw for the first time from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the econo-philosopher.  It means that if you drop a vase, it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t persist, it becomes stronger.  Vases don’t do that.  But systems do.

Well, maybe not drop it, but attack it with several carrier air groups?

The United States in World War II is an example of an anti-fragile system.  When attacked at Pearl Harbor, it became stronger.  Even though Battleship Row at Pearl was in flames, that attack mobilized the American people.  Pa Wilder signed up on December 8, 1941, as did millions of other men.  But those that didn’t sign up formed a pool of men and women that filled empty factories, constructed new ones, pumped oil, farmed, and built ships and planes and truck and tanks on a level never seen before in history.

Although it’s certain that the majority effort that it took to win World War II in Europe was done by the Soviets, it’s arguable that the Soviets would have folded in 1942 or 1943 without the food, trucks, planes, and ammunition that were provided by the United States.

The United States won the War of the Pacific nearly singlehandedly, although it’s early efforts in North Africa left the British shaking their heads and wondering if the United States could even field an army capable of fighting.  The United States emerged after World War II as an industrial, economic and military behemoth.  No one would argue that the United States of 1945 was weaker than the United States of 1941.  The United States in 1941 is a great example of anti-fragility.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget the atomic bombs.

The prettiest atoms become atomic models.

How do people become anti-fragile?  Well, start by being resilient.  Then?  Add learning.  If you can recognize your mistakes and learn from them?  That’s a good start.  Capacity?  Oddly enough, a person operating at peak capacity has less anti-fragility – they have little capacity to improve and a great deal of capacity for failure.  Efficient systems are prone to failure.  The two-income household was, even before this economic downturn, more prone to bankruptcy, rather than less.

Why?

Because the system is too efficient – most couples tend to use every dime they earn.  When one income goes away?  They system fails.  Unused money (savings) is redundancy.  It’s inefficient, but it’s capacity that you have for the unexpected.

And if you’re not focused on keeping everything, you can take risks.  Lots of them – just so long as the risks aren’t so big that they crater you.  This blog is one of mine.  And the younger you are, the bigger risk you can take without cratering your life – you have time to make it up even if you lose everything at age 25.

I wouldn’t let my kids sleep in the bed with me when they were little.  I told them I couldn’t risk the monster following them into my room.

A vision of Truth is required.  One time a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and he noted that I might be trying to write what people want to read, rather than what I believe.  Nope.  My soul is in this.  Do I agree with everything I’ve written?  Of course not.  I’ve written over 535 posts over the course of 3.5 years.  I’ve learned.  Some of my views have changed as I have changed.  I’d be foolish to not change my views as I learn and understand more.  But as I experiment, my soul has to be involved – I have to be a seeker of Truth, even in my experiments.

I’ve had a few moments of being Fragile in my life – mainly when I was trying to hold on to things and situations that I should have left behind me.  I’ve had the majority of my life lived in a Resilient mode, putting one foot in front of the other and moving onward.

I can see that the best and most productive times in my life are when I’ve lived it in the Anti-Fragile mode.  It may seem odd, but in many ways the Resilient mode is the enemy of the Anti-Fragile mode.  Resiliency is about persevering.  It’s not bad.  There’s rarely any traffic on the second mile and working harder is, in some ways, the easy way out.

But when you achieve an Anti-Fragile life?  Sometimes you achieve something amazing enough to even surprise yourself.

And always remember that when Germany and France go to war, you know 100% who will lose.

Belgium.