The Cold War . . . A Victory?

“My name is Drago. I’m a fighter from the Soviet Union. I fight all my life and I never lose. soon I fight Rocky Balboa, and the world will see his defeat. Soon, the whole world will know my name.” – Rocky IV

sovietcat

Result of Soviet experiment to mix Lenin with a cat.

It was an autumn night.  I was driving back to college after a weekend visit home.  My car sped uphill as fast as it could – my foot pushed the gas pedal until it was flush with the floor and all 1800cc’s of General Motors® engine that I owned was working at peak capacity.  The steep grade kept my car from going much over 70 mph, but that was breaking the law all the same.  Thankfully, there was no place for a cop to hide, and if one did by chance catch my speed on the radar, he’d be more likely to congratulate me on being able to go that fast up the hill than give me a ticket.

The trees slid by, growing straight up even though the slope they grew on was steeply slanted.  I looked up at the starry sky through the driver’s side window.  The stars were everywhere.  The cold, dry mountain air and utter lack of light pollution and haze made the night sky here confusing – how can you see a constellation when the sky is so filled with stars that no pattern can be found?  The mountain pass also took me into a radio dead zone – not a single channel, AM or FM was available.

On a Sunday night, there was no other traffic.  My headlights were the only lights within twenty miles – not even a lonely mountain cabin.  And that’s when I noticed the glow from the north.  A deep red glow, one like I’d never seen before spanned the entire northern horizon.

fidget

“Did they finally blow it all up?”  I quickly hit the radio button to scan stations.  The orange LED numbers sped endlessly by without finding a channel to fix on.  I switched to AM.  Again, spinning numbers, repeating back at the beginning.  No signals.  I pulled over at a wide spot in the road meant for truckers to put chains on when the pass was snow packed and icy.  I got out and closed the door behind me.

The night was still, the only sound the pinging of contracting metal as the engine cooled.  And the only light, outside of the stars, was that red glow from the north.  I knew a major military installation was on the other side of that hill, maybe 75 miles to the north.  One that would certainly be on the list for missiles coming over the pole if the Russians decided that it was time to play.  Was this what a nuclear glow looked like?

For the next fifteen minutes I drove on, the radio searching in vain for a station.  As quickly as I left the pass, the radio hit and grabbed a station.  Nothing strange, nothing unusual – “the hits keep coming!”   I breathed a sigh of relief and settled on the rock station.  AC/DC©.  Thunderstruck.  That would work.  The lights of the next town appeared as I followed the road.  The next morning I read in the paper – “Northern Lights Visible Over Half the United States.”

raindance

Maybe one day communism will work . . . though rain dances have a better record.

Looking back, there is a tendency to think the Cold War was a farce, a fake war that the United States was destined to win since we were fighting against a bunch of fat vodka-swilling goofs in fur hats.  That wasn’t what we felt at the time, as it seemed that the Soviets went from victory to victory, and communism kept spreading.  We knew that we were caught up in a clash between economic systems, one that could change from taking turns feeding rifles and grenades to various flavors of rebels in countries that no one really cared about to full mobilization and launch of nuclear weapons faster than the Dominos® thirty minute delivery guarantee.

In addition to being a clash of ideology, the Cold War was also a clash of economic systems.  Freedom was given a chance, not because of its efficiency and all of the awesome blue jeans, but because the war planners thought it would produce more.  Even as free markets “wasted” money on consumer pursuits, they also gave people incentives to create more.  The economy of the United States was an open book, and it was mainly flourishing, having survived both double digit interest rates and Barry Manilow.

pros

The Soviet Union, however, didn’t share information with the world on its economy, except good news about Soviet technical triumphs.  From the outside, the Soviet Union looked strong – exceptional world athletes at the Olympics, technical triumphs like the first satellite and the first man in orbit made the Soviets seem a technical machine that would destroy the West.  There was the idea that the Soviets were ahead of us, technically, even though the first pocket calculator they produced was based on a Texas Instruments® calculator that they bought, gutted, and presented as their own.

Their fighter jets were, however, real.  And very good.  If their missiles weren’t accurate, they had thousands of them.

But what we didn’t see from the West was, despite the technical achievements and strong military, the Soviet Union was rotting inside.  What caused the rot?  You could argue corruption, you could argue a lot of things, but when it comes down to the true root cause, it’s simple.  The Soviet system did not encourage individuals to greatness.  It relied on central planning – the equivalent of having Congress describe what the economy should make, down to the smallest details.  The Soviet Union collapsed.  Slowly.  Unlike the economies of the West, it couldn’t grow fast enough to fund a response to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as Star Wars.

And that was it.  SDI was one more thing than the Soviets could cope with.  The Soviet system collapsed like systems do – first at the edges in Eastern Europe, then finally at the core in Moscow.  This slow collapse played out over more than a decade, and only really started with the Berlin wall coming down.

The biggest part of the Soviet Union ending was the most likely threat of the world ending all at once.  With that ending, the West was cut adrift – it ceased to have an opponent in any real fashion.  Without its opponent, in Solzhenitsyn’s speech to Harvard® (LINK), what the West really lost became evident.   There’s a lot to this speech, more than one post or even two or three.  I’ll probably revisit it again in time.

“. . . in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature.  That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.  Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years.  Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.  Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.”

In our struggle with and defeat of our Soviet enemy we’ve lost two things.  We’ve lost who we are as a people.  A generation ago it was clear to every American that your mere presence in America didn’t make you an American – much more was required.  Now our division multiplies and it becomes apparent how “satisfaction of instincts or whims” has shattered us.

sovietcomp

We’ve also lost any sense of purpose, a national goal worth achieving.  It’s not that there’s not a lot to be done – there are plenty of goals left that are worthy of humanity to accomplish:  interplanetary flight, immortality, understanding physics.  But right now we can’t agree on anything.

In the end, if we can’t solve this, we’ll fragment.  Thankfully, that will give us a whole new batch of enemies . . . .

Maps, the Secret of Weight Loss, and the Source of Coke Syrup

“Maps, my dear, are the undergarments of a country!  They give shape…to continents.” – The Englishmen Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain

sovietmappin

I call this the Cruel Map.

Excellence requires consistency.  Consistency does not imply excellence – a visit to any McDonalds® will prove that.  But consistency is required for excellence.

And excellence is required for health.

The human body is an incredibly complex device, even when you ignore the brain like most television executives involved in programming selection do.  The human body is robust.  The only way that humanity can create something as wondrous as a human is to make a baby, which is generally pretty fun to attempt, even if you don’t succeed.  About as close as we have gotten to a really complex machine that approaches human complexity is the toaster.  Bread in – toast out.  Works every time, but I still can’t figure out where the bread went.  Maybe the bread powers the toaster?

warrentoast

Humanity’s most complicated machines can’t even come close to the versatility that is a human:  if your car were able to fuel itself like a person, you’d be able to feed it gasoline or junk mail or plastic bags and it would turn that into a trip to Cleveland leaving only carbon dioxide and water vapor exhaust gas, and some form of car-poop that you presumably would compost so you could grow more car food.  Oh, and the car would self-repair for decades – your tires would grow back in the middle of the night.  Unfortunately your car would try to pick up on other cars, and might identify as a truck, but that’s a longer story.

The human body is excellently designed, and very, very consistent in its response to inputs.  But the owner’s manual sucks, and many times we don’t operate it properly or fuel it very well.  Case in point – achieving excellent health requires measurement.  Of what?  Unless you’re an adolescent reading this, you’re not getting taller.  What parameter might be changing that you could measure, say, every day?  Besides armpit hair length.  That’s too obvious, and everyone does that, anyway.  Think harder.

Oh, yes!  Weight!

There is a discipline in measuring, especially when you ate a cake and don’t want to see what the scale says that those extra calories did to your weight.  This is no small problem – 74% of Americans were overweight in 2007, and there has been plenty of time since then for more Nachos Bellgrande®, Cheeze Whiz® and Twinkies™ since then while watching videos from Blockbuster®.  I was reading an article about it a few months back, and one doctor noted that a “big” patient used to be ~220 pounds early in his career, but now they have to buy equipment that can handle people exceeding 400 pounds in weight.

romefini

Fun Fact:  The number of Blockbuster® video stores in the Roman Empire (117A.D.) is off by one when compared to the number of Blockbuster™ video stores in the United States today.

Unexpectedly (at least I wasn’t expecting it), heart disease has gone down as weight has gone up (Smoking, Orphans, and the French) but a whole host of other medical problems seem to plague our newly-larger Americans.  I won’t go into the details, you’re aware and you’ve read ‘em all.

But excellence in health is tied (at some level) to excellence in measurement.  Thankfully, there’s a $20 item that can provide excellent measurement:  a scale.  Oh, sure, counting calories might be your default position, but that simply won’t work.  To gain a pound a month, you have to eat an excess 3600 calories during that month.  How much extra, on a daily basis, is that?  2.7 Oreo® cookies.  Each day.  It’s 9.6 ounces of Coke® (a can is 12 ounces, or 4,530 liters in communist units).  On the average American diet of 3,600 calories per day, it’s less than 3% of you your total daily calories.

scaleweight

Okay, maybe the metric system has one use.  One.

No one measures calories in that closely, at least not for long.  So, a pound.  That’s not so bad.

No, I said a pound a month.

If you went to college and graduated in four years, that would be 48 pounds.  All from less than 10 ounces of Coke™ a day.  Measuring the input is futile unless you live in a bubble and measure everything you eat, all day.  That’s why everyone is fat – the wonderful machine we own is adapted to live in a world where food is alternately scarce and plentiful – a world without refrigerators.  A world where Sonic® bacon cheeseburgers are available until 11pm (Midnight on Friday and Saturday!) and an extra 74 ounces of Sprite® are available for only $0.25 wasn’t really planned for when your pancreas was designed.  If the pancreas had a staff, they would be very, very tired from all of the soda.

“Oh, hell.  More soda coming in.  Insulin production to maximum.  Again.  And someone call storage and tell ‘em we’ve got to get fat production moving.  It’s overtime tonight for sure, boys.  And someone call the liver and wake it up.  He may be hungover still, but it’s time to get to work.  This fat won’t make itself.”

I drink about a soda a year, so that’s not a problem my pancreas has.  The Boy, who is 18, burns approximately 100,000 calories per day between sports and whatever it is he does in the basement that makes him all sweaty, and he drinks soda by the liter.  A liter is a Canadian gallon, I believe, but it is less expensive in the 2-liter bottle because things that are measured in metric are just not as good so you can’t charge as much as a non-metric premium product which would be sold in pints or quarts or ounces.  I think Coke™ is actually made by Pakistani slave children who are forced to milk genetically engineered badgers for the Coke© syrup.  Or at least that’s what I read on Wikipedia®, or maybe on Huffington Post© or CNN™.  So it’s certain that it’s true.

But while The Boy can consume endless calories, I can’t even think about having a Chick-Fil-A™ sandwich without buying larger pants and immediately expanding to the size of the British Empire in 1910.

bigemp

Does this Empire make my butt look big?   

Okay, if measuring the inputs doesn’t work, how do you manage to eat and manage to be smaller than the USSR?  You have to measure the output.  Ruthlessly.  And don’t gain that first pound.  If you do?  Get rid of it.  That day.  Or that week.  But don’t wait.  And you can’t lose more than one pound at a time.  And you know how to lose a pound.  It may not be easy.  It may not be quick.  But you know how to do this.

soviet

This map shows the USSR and communist bloc countries at their greatest extent.  Also pictured:  all of the happy Soviet citizens.

You can afford to compromise – outward, on those things that aren’t intrinsic to you.  But if you want to have excellence in anything, you can never compromise inward on the things that are important to you.  You have to have a line.  And health should always be important to you, unless you’re Johnny Depp.  If you’re Johnny Depp – you already know that death will be no obstacle to your lifestyle.

Health determines what the quality of your life is really like.  And I’ve got some new goals.

The Boy will be out of the house in August, and off to the next stage of his adventure in life.  But that leaves Pugsley as the only chick in the nest.  Pugsley needs a sparring partner to practice with so he can defeat the hordes of Orcs™ that will be unleashed when the monetary system is abducted by Sauron® and Frodo© is unable to stop inflation by throwing Ruth Bader Ginsborg into Mount Doom®.  My goal?  To be in sparring shape and size by August.

There is no shortcut.  But I have a map.

I’ll let you know how it goes . . .

Soviet Map via:  User:MaGioZal [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs

“Grab a brew.  Don’t cost nothing.” – Animal House

changeingdp

The future economic expansion is so bright, she’s gotta shield her eyes with a hat.

So, today I’d like to talk about economics.  No, wait, don’t leave!  I promise pictures of girls in bikinis if you stay!

Today’s economic idea is a particularly stupid one.  Just about as stupid as when the Ming Dynasty tried to disarm Japan by buying all their swords.  This really happened around 1432 A.D. (according to some experts) but was less successful than the Ming projected:  the Japanese just made more swords – at least 128,000.  Today’s stupid idea is called, “Modern Monetary Theory.”  Epsilon Theory had an article on it (LINK), and I did some research and thought I’d give you a rundown on this horrible, horrible idea which smells worse than Johnny Depp’s sweat socks after a night running through a farm ditch in Utah.  Don’t ask.

Okay, John Wilder, I’ll humor you if you promise bikini pictures.  What is Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

curves

This poor person is deprived by a Marxist economy, so poor she cannot afford proper clothing and is weak enough from hunger that she’s forced to crawl along the beach.

Here’s a bikini picture to prove that these will be the sexiest graphs in the history of economics.  Now pay attention and I’ll explain Modern Monetary Theory.  MMT is simple:

The main idea of MMT is that since government creates money there are exactly no limits to how much money government can create.  Back when money was backed by gold (say, with one ounce of gold being worth $20) there was a physical limit – by definition you couldn’t have more $20 gold coins than you had ounces of gold.  MMT says, “Hey, since Nixon took the world off of the gold standard, we’ve been making up this money stuff anyway.  So let’s go all in.”  This is not exactly like a drunken 21 year old with Mom and Dad’s credit card in Las Vegas.  Not exactly.  The credit card has a credit limit.

So, under MMT, there is no limit to how much money government can print.  The genius idea (from Bill Mitchell, an Australian economist who came up with the name “Modern Monetary Theory”, and whose dog’s name is “Dog” and daughter’s name is “Girl”, and whose pet name for his wife is “That Woman On The Couch”) is that there is also no limit to the amount of money that government can spend.  This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high school prom fantasy where Justin Bieber picks her up in a pink helicopter and makes her all warm in her special place.  Oh, and by special place I mean other people’s wallets:  this is a family-friendly blog, get your mind out of the gutter.  The implications are stunning.  “Why not just pay for everything?  The government can just print the money, right?”

AOC

Yes.  She really said that.  See, pure economic genius!

Yes, this is exactly the logic of a twenty-something girl who can’t figure out how to pay for an apartment, and wonders what fruit Froot Loops® are made of.

Bill Mitchell has a doctorate in economics, which shows you how easy it is to learn absolutely nothing while getting a doctorate, just as Ocasio-Cortez can demonstrate that an undergraduate degree in economics is essentially majoring in pure pre-barista.  An analogy used on a website that promotes MMT is that football referees don’t have a limit to the number of points that can be awarded during a football game.  There’s no requirement that they come from somewhere, and giving someone else a point doesn’t take a point away from you.  Therefore points are infinite and don’t change the way the game is played.

Genius.

gunsbuttergraph

You can clearly see the equilibrium required in an economy consisting entirely of tequila shooters and cocoa butter.

Why not make every dollar worth, oh, say $10?  That way everyone could just add a zero to their bank balance?  Doesn’t cost anything, right?  And why not pay for every person’s medical care?  We’re just making up the dollars as we go.  While we’re at it, there are unemployed people.  Why not pay your average unemployed art major to make Xir’s (a gender-neutral pronoun) armpit-hair sculptures each and every day?

Don’t cost nothing.

This is an amazing idea!  Government can have it all!  There is no limit to the amount government can spend because Tom Brady can make all the touchdowns he wants during a game.  Yay, tortured grade-school logic!

There’s a corollary to this – Dr. Mitchell thinks we can have all of this infinite money and low interest rates.  There’s no need for inflation.  Print the money.  Prices won’t go up.  MMT says we can spend ourselves into prosperity*.

*As long as you appropriately tax people to soak up excess money.  Mitchell, in the fine print, says that we can spend up to the entire productive capacity of the nation on, well, whatever.  When we get to that capacity, then we have to soak up the extra money with taxes.  The taxes don’t really go to anything, we just use them to pull money out of circulation.  Government still buys stuff with whatever money it prints.  Taxes exist only as a sponge to soak up excess cash.

gdpdrop

Two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction make a recession, and they’d also leave a nasty sunburn.

This puts the printing of money into the hands of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the spending and taxation into the hands of Congress.  Sadly, Mitchell never postulated putting adults in charge.  Regardless, Congress never ever spends too much money and certainly wouldn’t structure taxes to be punitive against groups they don’t like.  So, sober people like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would have infinite spending ability.  I’m sure, like Goldilocks, they’d get the porridge “just right.”

MMT will be the next economic pied-piper of the political class in Washington, and will probably be the torch carried by the next Democratic presidential nominee.  It has no downside!  Spend today because deficits don’t matter.  Interest rates are 100% controllable.  Only have to pay a few taxes, and we’ll have free prosperity for all.

We’ll just print the money.  “You just pay for it.”

And, no one will have to be a barista!  We can guarantee a living wage to each and every artist so that the United States can be the undisputed leader in the creation of sculptures made out of armpit hair.

There’s no reason this can’t work.  Why, The Boy, when he was in kindergarten, came up with a system that was very similar.  For whatever reason, his class had made “feathers” by cutting out feather-shapes out of different colors of construction paper.  The Boy got into his Gummi-bear® addled kindergartner brain that these construction paper feathers were actually worth real money.  He even had an exchange rate in mind – each feather was worth three dollars.  He had three feathers, so, he demanded nine dollars.  I tried to negotiate, but it was useless – he drove a hard bargain, what with the laying on the floor and crying.

But he made the same mistake that Karl Marx and MMT make.

realgdp

GDP is proportional to the height of the girl in the bikini.  That’s a basic economic concept.

You see, Marx’s theory (as well as MMT) both incorporate a fascinating idea – that the value of an item is based on the inputs that it takes to make the item.  So, from that standpoint, our armpit-hair artisan should be able to charge the cost of her Xir schooling (plus that summer in Europe with Marco!) and her Xir apartment and food cost for that armpit hair sculpture.  It is that valuable.

Real world economics that don’t result in economic collapse and the starvation of millions of people would disagree.  An armpit hair sculpture is worth only what someone is willing to pay for it, and not a penny more.  It’s a market, and it’s based on free exchange.  It’s that simple idea of the market setting the price that makes capitalist economies work.  And it’s the brutality of the market that ensures that armpit-hair artists have to have a real job actually producing things that people want.  Like coffee.

Ideas like MMT seem to be too good to be true because they are too good to be true.  They always end in failure, poverty, and human suffering.  Thankfully they can use that taxation sponge to soak up all the blood after the revolution.

But “infinite free stuff” is sure a great line when you’re running for office.  Worked out great in Venezuela….

The Feminine Mistake

“Behind the stubble and the too prominent brow and the male pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing.  And it just slew me.” – Being John Malkovich

soldier

Maybe it’s good we guys aren’t more in touch with our feelings?

Last Monday’s post (American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America) provided ample evidence of the singular goal of communism:  power.  Raw, naked power.  In order to get this power, ripping apart the fabric of society to either foster or create ethnic strife is clearly on the table.

What else could socialists attack to destabilize Western Civilization?

The family structure itself.

The family structure is difficult to attack.  It is based on thousands of years of cultural evolution, and is inherently stable.  Recognizing that men and women are fundamentally different, the family structure plays to the strengths of each.  Mothers are warm and nurturing and like margaritas.  Men are stoic and strong and willing to die to protect the family and like beer.  Mothers depend on fathers to provide for the family.  Fathers depend on mothers to be faithful and care for the hearth.  The family structure is built on mutual interdependence.  Add in extended family, and a marriage is the atom of society.

marxmom2

Enter socialism.  To make it worse than just plain socialism, it was a French socialist, Charles Fourier, who coined the word feminism in 1839.  Fourier used feminism as a concept mainly to indicate that women should be able to have lots of sex without marriage, presumably with Charles.

But even a curmudgeon (say, me) will admit, feminism started admirably enough:  the idea that women should have at least some of the same rights to education as men.  It evolved to the more advanced concepts that women should be able to have custody of children after a divorce, own property, and eventually vote, with Iran(!) granting women the right to vote before it was granted in France, probably because Charles was still sore that his idea of “getting women rights so he could have sex” scheme didn’t work.

If it would have stopped there, it probably would have been fine.  Maybe.  But it didn’t.

Fast forward to 1960:  Women’s Liberation® was the next idea that attacked the West, and it was firmly led by Marxists such as Betty Freidan who wrote The Feminine Mystique, which made lots of bored middle-class suburban housewives upset, for some reason.  Mainly because things were too good?  Stupid patriarchy, feeding us and keeping us safe and creating a prosperous economy.  We’ll show them!

waves

But the 1960’s also provided a huge technological change through the availability of the birth control pill.  Add in other leftist and feminist goals achieved such as no-fault divorce, welfare for single women with dependent children, changing family court laws to favor women in child custody, alimony, universally legal abortion, and you have fundamentally changed the institution of the family.

Attitudes towards children changed drastically at this time – look at how children were viewed in cinema:  Rosemary’s Baby was literally the devil’s spawn.  The Exorcist was exorcising a little kid.  Damien from The Omen (again, the devil’s spawn) was yet another kid, and Michael Myers from Halloween starts the movie as an evil child.  Although Generation X was the first post-pill generation, it was also the genesis of the latch-key child, the child who was less important than mother’s career or her search for self, and a generation of children that were marked by parental strife in ways that their predecessors weren’t as the divorce rate peaked in the 1970’s.  No wonder children were shown as figurative monsters in this decade.

And it was all due to the success of feminism.

The previous contract between men and women was broken.  Women no longer relied on a man, in many cases it was sold that woman could break from her oppressive husband and have freedom with her new provider and husband-replacement:  government.  Government would enforce alimony.  Government would enforce child support.  It would provide housing and food for children.  Government could stay out late and drink too much and not even call and flirt with Stacy, that tramp.  There was no need to stay in a marriage that wasn’t fulfilling in every manner or even have a husband – or so the promises went.  Actual quote from that era:  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Be unhaaaaaappy?  Get a divorce.

divorcesper1000marriedwomen1

Source Dalrock (LINK)

And, yes.  There are valid reasons for divorce.  Unhaaaaaappy?  Not one of them, which is why no-fault divorce is so corrosive.

Many people didn’t fall for the trick, and stayed married.  My parents did, probably because they realized it would require both of them working together to beat some semblance of civilization into me.  Those stable marriages provided a much greater degree of prosperity and wealth than their divorced compatriots.  Stable marriages provided great role models for stable children that didn’t go to jail.  Stable marriage provided the anchor for civic life.  Thankfully, this wave of feminism crashed on the rocks of pornography – one group decided it was horrible exploitation and should be outlawed, and the other thought that it was an expression of womanly power and should be celebrated.  You can guess which group was cuter.

Leftism itself waned during this time, and one primary exporter of communism went out of business – the USSR.  And if that was the end of feminism, well, it had already greatly hurt the viability of Western Civilization, but maybe we can heal.  So, we’re done, right?

No.  In the last few weeks the work of communism feminism continues.

agree

The first thread is the 36 page guidelines of the American Psychological Association® (APA™) that seeks to classify traditional masculinity as a mental health problem.  It reads like a bad Marxist senior thesis from an elite liberal school.  Here’s an example from the report (LINK):

“Because of the pressure to conform to traditional masculinity ideology, some men shy away from directly expressing their vulnerable feelings and prefer building connection through physical activities, talking about external matters (e.g., sports, politics, work), engaging in “good-natured ribbing,” exchanging jokes, and seeking and offering practical advice with their male friends.”

Yes.  This is how males work.  This is how males form hierarchy.  This is why we aren’t known as women.

Wait, John Wilder, you’re telling me that men and women are different?  I have been clearly told that they are exactly the same.

Dear reader, it is clear that men are different.  Why else would Gillette© have an entire commercial telling men how awful we are, which happened just last week?  Clearly, we don’t have a commercial from Playtex™ telling women not to kill their kids by drowning them in a car which would be equally as valid, but it’s still not there.  So, men and women are different, in that men are evil.  Men are so evil that a razor company, which theoretically sells to men, can spend nearly two minutes telling men how awful they are.

How bad was the commercial?  This bad:

Gillette-meme

(H/T Bookwormroom LINK)

But at least The Woman’s March which happened this weekend is non-partisan, right?  Just seeking to help women, right?

Here are excerpts from their goals (LINK):

  • We believe that gun violence is a women’s issue and that guns are not how we keep our communities free from violence.
  • We believe it is our moral imperative to dismantle the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system. The rate of imprisonment has grown faster for women than men, increasing by 700% since 1980, and the majority of women in prison have a child under the age of 18.
  • We believe in Gender Justice. We must have the power to control our bodies and be free from gender norms, expectations and stereotypes. We must free ourselves and our society from the institution of awarding power, agency and resources disproportionately to masculinity to the exclusion of others.
  • Immigration reform must establish a roadmap to citizenship, and provide equal opportunities and workplace protections for all.
  • All workers – including domestic and farm workers, undocumented and migrant workers – must have the right to organize and fight for a living minimum wage.

So, we have it.  Feminism is strong and growing.  Feminism is clearly leftist.  And not just a little leftist, but full blown Marxist.  There are other implications of feminism that are flowing through society now, but those will have to wait for a future post.  But feminism continues.

areyouopressed

Strangely, I didn’t see this list on the Women’s March website. 

Again, the idea is clear:  Create a victim culture.  Create alienation with the social norms that underpin Western Civilization.  Divide a nation.

The goal?

Power.

The irony?  In every single socialist paradise, from the USSR to Cuba to China, feminism isn’t tolerated.

Why?

Once they have power, they won’t share.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life.  All competing pleasures will be destroyed.  But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.  Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” – 1984

American Apartheid:  Resurrecting Communism’s South African Playbook – In America

“Yes, wherever bicycles are broken, or menaced by International Communism, Bicycle Repair Man is ready! Ready to smash the communists, wipe them up, and shove them off the face of the earth.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

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There are times when you write something that you think is important, and you want to get it right.  This is one of those times.  I hope you find this post worthwhile.

A few weeks ago, a very good friend sent me an article.  The article intrigued me, and I began to research the background of the article.  What I found was stunning.  The article itself is this (LINK), from Time® magazine, you don’t have to click – I’ll summarize it below.  Time™, I’ll note, very appropriately has a red border but they haven’t added the hammer and sickle yet.  Yet.

I found this article disturbing, but it really matched with the research that I’d done up to this point.   There is a cultural shift of the Left, and the Left is moving ever farther, ever faster left.  I wrote about that here (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg), which is probably what made my friend send the link.

I read Tayari Jones’ Time® magazine piece.  I found it to be an example of the outcome of the most brutal form of programming and child exploitation that I’ve seen recently, though I will admit that I try to shy away from Disney® movies.  In short, her parents were Black Nationalists (Her description, not mine.  “Black Nationalists” refers to a group that wants to either repatriate to Africa or to carve out a separate nation for blacks in the United States.) that convinced a five-year-old that Gulf Oil© was responsible for killing black children in Africa so much so that the child, Tayari, would not ride in a car fueled by Gulf Oil® to the zoo.  The piece ends with simplicity.  All to the Left is joyous and moral.  All to the Right is evil death.

Should we celebrate our tolerance and civility as we stanch the wounds of the world and the climate with a poultice of national unity?

Jones wants to further divide us, or destroy those who don’t and won’t conform to her (undefined) viewpoints.  Also, the last time the word “poultice” was used out loud was by Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies.  But her title says it all, “There’s nothing virtuous about finding common ground.”

That led me to wonder more about the author – what was going on in her head that led to this article?  What are her ultimate goals?  Featured prominently in the article was the Soweto Uprising, a 1976 confrontation between black students and the police, which appears in hindsight to be an unplanned 4th Generation Warfare (The Caravan:  Warfare by Other Means) offensive.  I hit Wikipedia to learn more.  Then, there it was, the missing link.

“No Middle Road,” an essay by Joe Slovo is listed as influential in the communist African National Congress (ANC) at that time.    The original title of the article by Jones, as enshrined in the URL, is telling:  “Moral Middle Myth.”  Obviously they are connected.  Again, from Jones:

I find myself annoyed by the hand-wringing about how we need to find common ground. People ask how might we “meet in the middle,” as though this represents a safe, neutral and civilized space. This American fetishization of the moral middle is a misguided and dangerous cultural impulse.

Okay.  Now you have my attention.  We have a person actively preaching division and implied violence whose suppressed essay title echoes an influential essay from 1976.  My next question was simple:  Who the heck was Joe Slovo?

Joe Slovo was communist, born Yossel Mashel Slovo in Soviet Lithuania who moved to South Africa with his family when he was eight.  Slovo was a deeply loyal communist who admired Stalin.  He was exiled from South Africa for 27 years and spent that time launching and orchestrating terrorist strikes in South Africa while abroad.  His operations included bombings of civilians.  Slovo did have some spare time to oversee the murder and execution of people thought to be traitors to the cause, often through putting a tire around their neck, filling it with gasoline, and setting it on fire.  The nickname for this practice was “necklacing.”  Now Slovo didn’t actually do these things himself, he merely planned them and was in charge of the organization that made them happen.  See?  His hands are clean.

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Slovo was such a leftist, the only thing he on the right of is this picture.

Slovo had to be an influence on Tayari Jones.  Understanding the influences can be important, besides, Tayari Jones didn’t mention exactly what she wanted done with those she opposes.  Maybe the essay she was influenced by would?

I decided to look for it on the Internet, where I can find out what was on TV on NBC® on a Sunday evening in June of 1983.  I spent more time than I’d like to admit spend sifting through Marxist websites, looking for the essay.  I went to the second page of Google© results.  Exhaustive research, indeed.  I even found where Marxists who had previously posted a copy were looking for a copy to post.  It’s like the document had been purposely scrubbed from the web.  Odd – once information hits the web, it normally flies free and multiplies.  Not this.

I finally found that the essay was included in a book, Southern Africa:  The New Politics of Revolution (Penguin/Pelican, 1976).  That’s the only place I could find it.  A seller on Amazon had a copy for less than $8, so I bought it.  It took weeks to arrive.  It was old – the pages were yellowing.  It also looked like a socialist’s mind:  it had never been opened.

What had I expected?  The usual Marxist language designed to be confusing and cult-like.

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Whenever anyone talks like this?  They want you to nod and pretend you understand.

No.  Slovo was very clear in his writing.  Much of what Slovo writes are about conditions and history that are unique to South Africa.  And, reconstructing and solving the problems and historical injustices of South Africa, real as they were and are now, is far beyond this post.  But Slovo very clearly sets out a battle plan that is being used against the United States right now.

For instance, on page 118, Slovo states:  “To be born white means by definition to be born privileged . . . .” I hadn’t heard of the concept of “White Privilege” until 2014 or so, and then it was related back to an essay (White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack) by Peggy McIntosh, who you can read more about here in this excellent essay on Quillette: (LINK).

The important idea is that McIntosh didn’t originate this divisive concept – Slovo wrote about it in his 1976 essay.  It may be even older, but this is the earliest reference I’ve found.  And Slovo specifically introduced it to open additional divisions in South Africa.

Slovo continues:  “. . . the struggle to destroy white supremacy is ultimately bound up with the very destruction of capitalism itself.”  In a further parallel with today, Slovo describes the history of struggle for liberation as “The Resistance” as he builds a case that his dreamed-of communist state can only be brought about via violence, which he calls “armed struggle,” rather than “killing people I don’t agree with, and also kids on my side, if we can get good pictures for the press.”

Slovo clearly expected and desired a war.  In the time he lived, Slovo completely misread what happened in the communist takeover in Vietnam and he was thinking that the Vietnamese had won a military victory.  They had not.  The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been defeated in almost every engagement.  The North Vietnamese won because they demoralized the United States and made the politicians feel the war was unwinnable – clearly a Fourth Generation warfare victory.

Ultimately the ANC realized, however dimly, that the deaths of black South Africans during the Soweto Uprising was their victory.  They won by appearing to be the victims.  And they won by creating a coalition of victims who would never feel that they could never be repaid for their pain – no reparations would ever be acceptable.

Page 205 contains the telling sentence:  “The struggle can no longer be centered on pleas for civil rights or for reforms within the framework of white dominance; it is a struggle for people’s power, in which mass ferment and the growing importance of the armed factor go hand in hand.”  Slovo worked to use the ethnic divisions in the country to create a situation where raw power would end up in the hands of the communists.

There we have it:  the end goal is not rights, or prosperity, or freedom, or liberty.  The end goal is naked power.

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Back to the United States, we find that could never happen here:

Nothing you have is yours. Let me be clear: Nothing you have is yours. Also, Let me be see through: Reparations are not donations, because we are not your charity, tax write off, or good deed for the day. You are living off of stolen resources, stolen land, exploited labor, appropriated culture and the murder of our people. Nothing you have is yours.

Reparations for us are not only necessary because we are economically harmed, exploited and stolen from — while the violence against us is never acknowledged — but because in order for us to create and move work for Black liberation, it requires resources and MONEY. We live in a white supremacist capitalist world, so ain’t no spinning webs of lies around “money isn’t the answer.” It is because money and exploitation and power are interconnected concepts of violence. Y’all spent hundreds of years selling, mutilating, raping and beating our bodies and labor but you think money doesn’t matter to our freedom and liberation? Cute. Write me a check for this shade because it comes with 400 years of trauma.

We need housing, transportation, food, clothes, free space for meetings and work space; we need laptops, cell phones, encrypted systems for communication, solar power and LAND. Stop playing. Y’all really thought pulling up to the protest in your Hyundai was gonna be enough? Nah. You have to give us everything we need and more, because even if it means you go without — it doesn’t matter because that’s how we been living for 400+ years. Reparations will never be negotiable. So if you’re not willing to talk money, you are not here for #BlackLivesMatter as a movement or for us as individuals.

(H/T Liberty’s Torch (LINK)) Original that I tracked down is wearyourvoicemag.com.

I thought this quote was a parody until I found it at the website it was originally posted on.  It appears that she’s serious.  That’s from Ashleigh Shackelford, who seems really nice when talking to people that support her, as that passage above was a shout-out to her white supporters.  I left her spelling, emphasis, and capitalization intact.  Ms. Shackelford is the product of the same mentality of Marxist Joe Slovo and (I’m assuming) Marxist Tayari Jones.

As I wrote about earlier (Seneca’s Cliff and You), it’s far easier to destroy something than to make something.  In our culture, today, we actively have Marxists attempting to undermine the fabric of our society using a variety of weapons, and especially trying to create a majority coalition of disaffected people to destabilize society to create, in effect, an American version of apartheid to fight.  This is one reason that illegal immigration is actively supported – it brings in people entirely unrelated to the current society.  Outside of the future leftist votes, this group is used to help create additional fragmentation in the country.

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He’s going to have to work awfully hard.

One thing we’ve seen – when this tactic works, ending it is difficult – look at the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland.  Once before in the comments on this blog people brought up the Irish Troubles and people started arguing about who was responsible in the comments.  On this blog.  In 2018.

I was certain that when the Soviet Union fell, that the world was safe.  In my mind, it should have been clear from the horrors of Cambodia, to the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe winning their own freedom from oppression that the subject was closed.  Even if people couldn’t see that communism was evil, at least they could see that it didn’t work, right?

No.  Like Jason or Michael Myers communism keeps coming back.  It appears that, like Freddy Kruger, communism will keep going as long as people like Slovo, Jones, and Shackelford will fight and kill (even kill people on their own side) for power.  But only as long as there are people stupid enough to believe them.

Thankfully there’s no one like that in the United States.

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Slovo grave picture:  Andrew Hall [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons