Opinions. A Small Book Review. Bad Jokes.

“That’s right. And if I think that Kirk is a Denebian slime devil, well, that’s my opinion, too.” – Star Trek, TOS

I’ve found that telling pizza jokes is all in the delivery.

Opinions.

Marcus Aurelius (dead stoic guy with a crappy son) said, “It never ceases to amaze me: we love ourselves more than we love other people, yet care more about their opinion than our own.”

I was talking with a friend about opinions today. Which opinions matter?

Well, if a toddler had an opinion, I’d generally disregard it because, like Joe Biden, they poop themselves and can barely string a coherent sentence together, even if you spot them a verb.

Toddler opinions generally don’t matter to me. And I never feel bad making fun of toddlers because, just like students in Baltimore government schools, toddlers can’t read.

Are chubby babies heavy infantry?

Okay, toddlers are out. Not that toddlers are always wrong, even they can see that I’m bald, for instance. Bald, however, is not an opinion. But try explaining that to a toddler, those drooling idiots with their Cheerio® encrusted fingers.

When I hear an opinion, I generally don’t accept it at face value. I try to filter it.

First, does it matter? Most people have opinions about most things. And most of those opinions don’t matter, really, to anyone. I don’t care about what anyone’s favorite color is. When The Mrs. wanted to paint my study, I didn’t really care about what color The Mrs. picked, as long as it’s not purple – I hate purple more than blue and red combined.

I don’t, however, let The Mrs. pick my cigars. My opinion on them matters, really, only to me and the company that I buy them from. I mean, when I looked up “how to light a cigar” on a search engine, I got 70 million matches. I might be interested in your opinion on good cigars, and might even try one, but it won’t change my world.

Can a cigar box? No, but a tin can.

The second filter is whether I can do anything about the opinion. If it passes the first filter, of “it matters” then I ask if I can do anything about it. This is a bigger question – I do have opinions on things I can’t do anything about. But as I go through life, I’m finding that often I have the ability to do things I never thought possible, like live in a country at the edge of civil and nuclear war with a president that has a dementia patient meth addicted son. So, there’s that.

I often find that, when I really try, that things I thought impossible were, in reality, really not that hard if I put my mind to it and dedicate myself to them. Of course, to really dedicate myself, then I face the risk of failure. Failing is tough, but it’s worth it on something that really matters.

I wonder why Ma Wilder always said “Embrace failure,” when she gave me hugs.

So those are the two big filters on whether an opinion matters to me.

The other opinions are opinions about me. I’d like to say that the opinions of people about me don’t matter, but I’d be a liar. I actually enjoy it when I troll people Leftists on X™ and they start frothing at the mouth. I guess you could call X© my troll booth.

I keep seeing Cthulhu memes, but I’m disappointed because all I ever see are the Old Ones.

But when people I respect share that opinion, well, I listen. And I run it through the filters.

This was a short one, and it’s also time to mention I just finished reading Hans Schantz’s latest book, The Wise of Heart. Full disclosure, I did get a review copy. I enjoyed it, as I have the other works of Mr. Schantz – especially the first book of his trilogy, The Hidden Truth.

This particular book was fully funded on Kickstarter®. When Kickstarter™ found out that it was a take on Leftist sex politics that didn’t follow the Leftist line, they kicked Hans off. He was fully funded (and then some) on FundMyComic©. Reminder – the people who run most tech companies hate you. Anyway, if you want, you can buy it at Amazon© (LINK) or other places. I get no compensation either way.

Like I said, I enjoyed it. But that’s my opinion.

14 Signs Of An Unfree Country

“Keep working on the window if we’re ever going to regain our freedom.” – Star Trek TOS

The homeless voted for Obama.  They heard he’d bring change.

I hadn’t heard of Benjamin Carlson until today.  I had another post that I was planning on doing, but when the perfect content presents itself I become as flexible as a Romanian Olympic® gymnast whose parents are watching from the GULAG breakroom.

Carlson wrote about his time living in China as a journalist.  The title for his X® thread is, “What can an unfree society teach you about freedom?”  In it there are 14 lessons that he learned in China.  He’s now warning us about them, for, I guess, reasons.

All the bolded bits are Mr. Carlson’s words.  The other bits are mine, since I want to give Mr. Carlson credit, but don’t want anyone to think he endorses any of my interpretations, opinions, or bad jokes.

  1. People will adapt to oppression sooner than they will rebel.

That is true of a compliant people.  The makeup of heritage Americans is anything but compliant – to come across an ocean to hack a life from trackless wilderness is mostly the opposite of compliant.  Different people came here for different reasons, but the big takeaway is a lot of us have oppositional defiant disorder, but the good kind.

But that doesn’t get them into Congress (except for a handful) and it doesn’t get people invited into fancy parties and offered media access.  But still, many people reject petty oppression, and are willing to stand up against it.  New Mexico’s recent utter rejection of a wine-aunt governor blatantly violating all the Constitutions she said she’d uphold made me smile.

I have a guess that at least part of the desire to import the unending hordes of illegal aliens at a breakneck pace is related to the desire to have a much more compliant people – people who come here for the give-me-that’s and whose idea of America has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with a parasitical relationship where they benefit.  They’re used to oppression and okay with it, they just want to be comfortable.

What’s ET short for?  So he can fit in the spaceship.

  1. The most effective censorship is first legal, then social, then internal.

Legal censorship is difficult in the United States, though the government has several cases against Trump that rely on him having opinions they find “problematic”.  Social censorship means that certain ideas can’t really be expressed.  Ever wonder why the comment section of the online newspapers mostly disappeared?  The last thing they want is people realizing they’re not alone.  This causes social censorship to fail.  At least among people who can read.

Lastly is internal censorship, when the Truth is so obvious that everyone sees it, yet everyone is afraid to say anything.  Not that I’d mention an election or anything . . . .

  1. A repressive system makes selfish behavior rational.

Look at the looting that is pervasive across Leftist cities.  Why?  Because laws are only to be enforced against people on the Right.  Therefore?  Free Air Jordans™.

I heard he was going to take another stab at marriage.

  1. Ruining 1 person who threatens the regime sends a message that will be heard by 10,000.

People broke stuff on January 6, and some used violence.  But the vast majority were just dudes walking around the Capitol Building.  Yet the harshest penalties are being used against them, including inhumane conditions in prison.

Why?  See point 4. above.

  1. If you can limit the words people use, you can limit the thoughts they think.

Why do you think they demand that calling someone an illegal alien be banned?  Why do you think they want to call a baby a fetus?  Why do you think they want to call anything “gender affirming” care?

They want to change the dialogue, and that means making the words you use socially unacceptable.  This is never ending, and will continue until the word “bad” is replaced by “double-plus-ungood”.

What is the most macho musical instrument?  The MANdolin.

  1. Even decent people will choose to be blind if seeing injustice would hurt their interests.

Why do most cops go-along to get-along?  Yeah, this, but it’s not just cops – any location where people close ranks to avoid scrutiny is suspect.  What happens when the entire country looks that way because there are people you can’t criticize?

  1. If the government lies, many will still accept it as true because of the authority of the office.

This is becoming less true in the United States – look at the pushback on COVID.  I think the trust level has dropped.  Yet, still, 20%-40% of the citizens of the country will believe whatever they’re told by Joe Biden and Stephen Colbert.

  1. Destroying a people’s cultural & religious identity, severing them from their history, punishing their defenders, and making them ashamed of who they are, is a brutally effective way to annihilate a threat.

When Thomas Jefferson’s statue is removed by New York City, and they’re thinking of bringing down all of the George Washington statues and the people who founded the United States are being vilified?  Yeah.  It’s already in full swing

  1. The goal of an unfree system is to protect itself by transferring your distrust of the state to fellow citizens.

According to the Left, Catholics and “White Supremacist” groups are the greatest threats to the United States, despite being responsible for fewer deaths than a Chicago Labor Day weekend.

If only they would have played the national anthem, everyone at the BLM® riots would have sat down.

  1. In an unfree society, the wealth and privileges amassed by politicians become state secrets.

Elizabeth Warren makes $174,000 a year, but her total earnings were $1.36 million last year.  Bill Clinton was broke in 2000, but has at least $90 million today, excluding his Foundation.  Why don’t people know this or care?

  1. If the government shows it has your interest at heart, many are happy to trade freedoms for it.

I’m sure everyone can give plenty of examples.  One lesson I learned is that when people want to give you something, that’s generally because they want something in return.  To be clear, this doesn’t always have to be manipulative, since if after I feed Pugsley, I typically want him to take the trash out after I remind him three times to do it.  I think the three times is just because he wants me to feel like I’m part of the process.

When the government gives, it wants control.

  1. Corruption corrupts everything.

If 10% for the Big Guy is the norm, why shouldn’t everyone take a cut?  Corruption corrupts, and it takes time and relentless effort to root it out.

  1. Even politicians who fight like dogs will protect one another against the people.

The Clintons and Obamas sure look cozy with the Bush family.

My doctor told me I had a healthy prostate.  I was deeply touched.

  1. History must continually be rewritten to serve the purposes of the present.

I’ve touched on this on countless posts and touched on this above.  The history has to be changed from the glorious story of a proud people taming a continent.  The truth has to be replaced with a cursed and infected lie so that the political needs of the Left can be met.  It has to be universal – on television, movies, the Internet, YouTube®, and anywhere people go.

Orwell saw many of these and they’re in his books, 1984 and Animal Farm.  Carlson, I’m sure, has read these and also experienced them.

Just like we are beginning to experience them now.

I could have written much more, but I think I’ll leave it up to you to add in comments about Mr. Carlson’s points.  The good news is you don’t have to be a gymnast to appreciate it.  Besides, I’ve heard that the Eastern Europeans are now into Olympic® boating events.  I guess they’re in row-mania.

The Invisible Recession

“1000 points of light . . . recession bad, recovery good . . . I think I’ve got that.” – The Naked Gun 2 ½:  The Smell of Fear

If Dodge® makes an electric car, will they sell Dodge© Chargers™?

Inflation has really started to bite here in Modern Mayberry.  I’m not sure about the Big Cities, but I’ve begun to notice it around here.  Today at lunch I made a trip to McDonald’s®.  It’s rare, most of the time (if I eat lunch at all) I eat at home.  It’s more convenient, and I really, really hate lines, but this was a late lunch and I could drive straight to the window.  But hey, for me, it’s the McChicken®.

The prices at McDonald’s® have gotten silly.  Whereas there used to be enough value in a Big Mac™ to make one of them (occasionally) worth it, it’s just not the case nowadays.  I didn’t spend too much time pondering the price on any of the burgers, since I could get nearly a pound of steak for the price of the average burger-fries-drink combos.  But again, for me, it’s the McChicken™.

What a fun, cool, happening place, if you can get 3-for-free!

Why are people not going out?

The prices are silly.

I think (and I might be wrong) that our local McDonald’s™ just has to match the prices that are (more or less) nationally set by some sweaty accountant in Chicago wearing a Grimace™ costume and questioning the life choices that led him to have to report every day to Stacy, who is forced to wear a Hamburgler© costume.  I can’t see the labor around Modern Mayberry costing nearly as much as in a bigger city.  The food, I would imagine, costs exactly the same as in the bigger cities.

The result?  I’ve noticed that the lines are much shorter at the local fast-food restaurants, even at peak hours.  One of the regional chains hasn’t raised their prices, since all of their restaurants are just scattered around Upper Lower Midwestia and they don’t have to worry about the price of a Quarter Pounder™ in Manhattan.  Their lines are the longest in town, so I follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “Nobody goes there anymore, that place is too crowded.”

Since COVID, my favorite local restaurant has closed.  It was a bona fide restaurant, great service, great food.  Supply chain issues coupled with labor oddities and lower business slowly torpedoed them.  They liquidated before they lost a lot of money – they saw what was coming and wanted to go out on their terms.

I’ve been told that McDonald’s™ was sued once for bugs in their food.  They won the case – no one on the jury believed they used any natural ingredients.

And our world got a little bit smaller, so we now have dinner somewhere else.  It’s cheaper, but I notice that both of the places that we normally go aren’t very busy anymore.  And the waitresses that work there aren’t changing jobs anymore – the good ones are keeping their jobs now.  Something tells me they’re a little harder to get now.

So, if you’re counting restaurants and the people who work there (and those that used to own them) Modern Mayberry definitely has fewer restaurants.  The revenue in the town might be the same, but there are (my guess) 20% fewer customers.

This is the invisible recession.

I always carry some McDonald’s® fries when I walk the dogs in winter.  Fries go great with chilly dogs.

It’s invisible because I’d imagine that, even though McDonald’s® is (visually) selling less McFood©, they’re charging more.  So, higher prices times lower volume is probably about even.  But the value created to the consumer is far, far less even though revenues might be neutral.  Unless you count eating healthier food than McDonald’s™ makes as value.  Heck, Ronald has killed more people than Pennywise.

I suspect this is going on everywhere.  Wages are certainly not keeping up with daily expenses, and those who are less fortunate haven’t had raises that have kept up with inflation.  And why should employers pay more?  In a recent month, a net 1.2 million jobs were “created” but 600,000 Americans lost their jobs.  They were replaced by immigrants (illegal or legal).

Thankfully, corporate profits were saved!

It’s better than when he ran the farm using Artificial Intelligence and had to reboot it all before the power outage – AI, AI, Oh.

Interest rates are up, and I expect they will continue to go up because there is no semblance of any fiscal adulthood in Washington, D.C. on either side of the ball.  The Democrat mantra of “spend more” is always followed by the Republican response of, “Well, okay, but not quite that much” as the dance of the destruction of the currency continues.

I hope I’m wrong, but this is based on the bet that politicians will continue to be weak and craven, and that 2024 is an election year.  What do politicians like during an election year?  A good economy with low inflation.  Failing that, politicians like distractions and spreading money out like AOC on a Saturday night.  If you can’t make a good economy, fake one.

More money floating around means . . . more inflation.  But if wages aren’t going up because there’s a massive influx of illegals?

Just more misery, especially for those at the lower end of the pay scale.  All of the typical Leftist voting blocks will be rewarded, of course.  The standard Leftie professor at the average Leftie college (but I mostly repeat myself) will get raises because the Left takes care of itself and funds itself.  The Left believes in the state and uses it as a propaganda and funding arm.  Why do drama programs get special federal funds?

Because they vote Left.

I guess the finale was shot before a live audience.

But real Americans that aren’t tied into the ecosystem of government gimmes are seeing their difficulties multiply.  Me?  I’ll still mainly skip McDonald’s© and save a few bucks and have more steaks and fewer fries.  But the invisible recession is already here, at least in Modern Mayberry.

But, hey, for me?  It’s the McChicken™.

Mechanisms of Control: Information

“He who controls information controls the world.” – Babylon 5

I was trying to finish a puzzle.  I asked The Mrs., “Can you help me finish this one?  It’s supposed to be a bird.”  The Mrs.:  “Put the Froot Loops back in the box, John.”

Last Wednesday I wanted to write about the mechanisms of financial control.  Of course, there’s always more to write – that post was less than 2,000 words, but if I took the time I could probably write another 20,000 or 80,000 words.

It’s the same with this post.  Even beyond propaganda, a big part of the game is information control.  What information do we get, and where does it come from?

For quite a long time (I haven’t put any effort into going back in time, but it’s been here a while) the control of information has been used to actually create the news that Mainstream Media® uses.  Sure, an earthquake is true and fair news.  But 90% of the news that we are presented with in any given day isn’t news.  Just like “processed cheese spread” or “buttery sauce” don’t contain anything resembling actual cheese or butter, most of the news we have is “manufactured news product” and doesn’t contain much news at all.

Have you heard of Karl’s sister, Onya?  She invented the starter pistol.

A perfect example is George Floyd.  He was a felon and junkie who died of an overdose.  He wasn’t choked.  George Floyd died because he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill Ecuador.  The “news” created by his death was used and amplified for a purpose.  In a normal world, Floyd’s death would have been ignored because “junkie dies of overdose” is another name for “Tuesday”.

Likewise, any sort of violence perpetrated by a white guy against (generally) black people is amplified, often to a national level.  But the reverse?  It’s suppressed and ignored to the point where black people think (really!) that they are the ones who are the victims, despite the fact that in 2021, 87% of violent crimes between black and whites were committed by blacks on whites.

But if black people watch TV or read the media, they’d be shocked and think that white people were the ones hurting blacks, and not the other way around.  Why?  The story that they’re selling is that white people are awful, and they’re willing to bend the language on a whim to make it so.

I bet they ADL® really hates pandas.  They’re black, white, and Asian.

Racism used to mean that someone felt a race was superior.  Now?  According to the (rapidly disintegrating) ADL® it’s an explanation of why white people are bad and can never be not-bad no matter what they do.

My thought is that the Floyd death was amplified to put out a trap for Trump.  Trump’s media coverage was uniquely and pervasively negative for a president.  Remember when it was national news that Trump got an extra scoop of ice cream?  Pepperidge Farms® remembers.  And I do, too.  Anything, and I mean anything Trump did became the big complaint of the media.

The Mainstream Media® always has an agenda.  But who feeds them news?  The Left.  The organizations on the Left are the primary news sources.  Like scriptwriters on Disney® movies, they create news stories that meet what they need for their organization’s goals regardless of reality.  Also, like scriptwriters, people doing the news don’t really have any need for the Truth if it gets in the way of what they want you to think.

Other things are not very truthful, either.  Global Warming® is one of the stories I just can’t escape when I watch the news.  But how have they twisted the truth in . . . the weather?  Here’s an example:

I enjoyed all four seasons of that weather show on Netflix®.

I’ve seen others.  In the span of only ten years, those that want to sell fear to bring viewers have taken the same temperatures and cloaked them in a dangerous red color.  Is it hot in summer?  Yes!  And that’s why the stories about Global Warming Climate Change™ all show up then.  And they will every summer, even if it gets colder.

So, news is created by Leftist organizations, which include:

  • The Media (including entertainment),
  • Most of the Fortune® 500,
  • Most Schools,
  • The ADL®,
  • The SPLC,
  • Most Colleges,
  • Military General Officer Corps,
  • Most Religions, and
  • Almost Every Government Agency.

These organizations pump out press releases daily which feed the news cycle.  Who fact checks them?  Why, a compliant media!  Snopes® is run by Leftists, and expecting the Washington Post® to correctly fact check Joe Biden?  You’d have better luck pulling out your teeth and leaving them under your pillow for the ADL® to bring you a shiny new quarter.

I’m a racist.  I just hate the 440-yard dash.  Too long for a sprint, too short for distance.  And turning it into the 400 meters didn’t help.

This news is then pumped into the heads of Leftists, nonstop.  Places like Google® and Facebook™ and YouTube© where alternative viewpoints aren’t allowed.  Think that the Vaxx® was a big mistake?  YouTube™ is still censoring that one.

Leftists, for the most part, I’m not concerned with.  If they ever stumble upon these posts, they won’t be able to read them.  They may be smelly virgins without a hope of ever having babies, but they’re not illiterate.  If I say the sky is blue, they’ll immediately ask for a source because the Right to them is worse than Satan.

When no one laughed at Neil Armstrong’s Moon landing jokes, he’d just say, “Well, I guess you had to be there.”

They don’t want to think, in fact can’t think, about some of the concepts that I write about here because their amygdala will stop them from listening.  Literally, a Leftist can’t read one of my typical posts without getting so angry that they can’t read it.

No, I write for the Right, and I write for the middle.  The Right is self-explanatory, since I’m on the Right.  The Middle have been the people the Left is targeting.  I’m sure that they believe that they can convince the Middle if they deprive them of any other viewpoint.

The Left is excellent at that.  They want to tighten down Twitter, er, X®, Facebook™, Instasnap©, MySpace©, and any other place that the Right can disagree with the Leftist narrative.  Wonder why the newspapers eliminated the comments sections?  The Right was (and is!) amazing at getting points out that countered the information goals of the Left.

Quite simply, from their standpoint, that had to be stopped.

AOC had to write an essay in college about genocides.  Took her a long time to decide if she was for or against them.

Again, remember that the “news” you get from the Mainstream Media™ is simply not news, but a product, like “buttery spread”.  It isn’t news.  Have some fun with it – count the number of stories in a day that you come across, and see how the Left is trying to manipulate you.

When you see it, you’re free to make your own opinions.  And free to wake others up.

We Already Know The Solutions

“Watch your top knot.” – Jeremiah Johnson

Bill Clinton thought Hillary would be a good president:  “There’s no chance she’ll blow it.”

Alexander the Great is said to have solved the riddle of the Gordian Knot in 333 B.C.  Whoever solved the Knot, the legend said, would rule all of Asia.  Alexander took one look at the large and complex knot, pulled out his sword and cut right through it.  I think Alexander was certain that he’d be successful and that no one would challenge his solution since he had, you know, an army with him.  I guess you could say he was so confident that he was knot sure.

One of the things that I’ve seen fairly consistently in my life is that, like Alexander, I generally know the answer right when I see the problem.  Some of them, like calculus problems, it took a lot of work to get the answer, admittedly, but there was no place when I said, “Well, if only the Federal government had a Federal Bureau of Solving Calculus problems, I’d be set.”  No.  I knew the only answer was for me to sit down and hack through that calculus problem until I had it solved.

Most problems in life are just that simple.  Too hot in the living room?  Get a fan.  Turn the air conditioning down.  Experiment to see how many cold beers it takes to make me feel cold.  But I never think to act on that until I’m uncomfortable.  When I’m slightly warm, I don’t go running for the fan, I just deal with it.  But when I start to sweat?

Time to take action.

What does a hipster say to create peer pressure?  “C’mon, man, no one is doing it!”

I think most people are like this, not just me.  Sure, there are things I do when I anticipate a problem coming down the road to save myself the trouble.  But like that room temperature slowly rising, at some point I look at the situation and note, “This must be dealt with.”  But I always knew the solution.

The solution itself isn’t the issue.  Most solutions are mind-numbingly clear.  The level of frustration or fear or whatever motivating me just has to be high enough that I’m willing to take the action necessary to solve the problem. To be clear, I also have to believe that my action might work – if I think the air conditioner is broken, for instance, I won’t bother to go over to turn it on and will stick with the whole “drink a lot of really cold beer” idea.

The above paragraph contains all three of dead economist Ludwig Von Mises’ causes of Human Action.  Von Mises said for anyone to take conscious action, for any action three things needed to be present:

  • A Vision of a Better State
  • A Path to That Better State
  • Belief That Following the Path Will Take Us to That Better State.

While I’m focusing on today is when we already know what we want, I’ll just noted that it doesn’t have to come in that order.

It turns out my chemistry teacher was right – alcohol is a solution.

On a personal level, I have to be uncomfortable enough from where I am and where I could be to initiate action.  The Vision has to be sufficiently far from where I am for me to care.  But, again, I generally know the solution, it just requires enough discomfort to create action.  If my air conditioner isn’t working in December, that’s not a big deal.  If it has failed in July, that’s where I’m willing to pay extra to see the repair folks show up on a Sunday afternoon because the liquor stores are closed then.

Other examples – I don’t paint my house when it’s a little faded, I might need to see some bare spots.  I wait until the trashcan is maybe slightly more than full to take it out.  But in each case the action isn’t in question.  I always know the solution.  It’s not a mystery.

It’s similar as a society.  In a society, we all have the ability to act as individuals, but there is some minimum number of people that are required to take action.  One group, the 3%ers, took their name from the idea that only 3% of the American Colonial population fought and won against the British.  I’m not sure that 3% is correct; that’s irrelevant to the post.

Why did the chicken cross the playground?  To get to the other slide.

Certainly, that’s a minimization, because if there hadn’t been broad support for the American Revolution anyway, it wouldn’t have happened.  Rather, I am certain that group of fighters represented the symptom of a greater dissatisfaction.

Everyone on the side of the Revolution knew what had to be done.  If you take a few minutes to re-read the Declaration of Independence, it certainly spells out the vision, and also spells out the reasons why it was important to take the action.

Of the signers, at least John Hancock had belief that the actions would work, since he signed his name so boldly and largely.  And John Hancock never told a knock-knock joke.  Why?  Freedom rings, baby.

For each of the societal ills we see, the solution isn’t complex, it’s simple.  We just haven’t had the guts to implement it.  If mobs are ruling the streets of San Francisco or Chicago or Malmo, the solution isn’t to study the problem with a commission.  The solution is to make crime much more uncomfortable than the reward for committing the crime.

I’m glad Godzilla® wasn’t Korean.  That would have been Seoul destroying.

That solution to stopping crime will involve dead criminals.  Oddly, it takes less to keep criminals in line than to stop criminality, but the solution almost always involves Rooftop Koreans and bar owners with very short shotguns and prosecutors that don’t prosecute good and honest people stopping crime.

If the problem is illegals flooding the southern border, the only actual solution is to make living in the United States a living hell for illegals.  I assure you, if sufficient pressure was applied, the illegals would deport themselves in weeks.

Have an anchor baby?  Fine.  It goes into an orphanage or with foster parents.  Illegals have to leave.  Something tells me the parents will pack up the kids as they head out.

Brought here as a young child and the United States is the only country they’ve ever known?  Not my problem.  They have to go back.

Drugs?  Simple solution.  I’ll leave that one to you.

Illegitimate kids?  Remove spousal support and child support and welfare.  Illegitimate kids will cease in a year and the baby-daddy with 20 different baby-mommas will disappear while those baby-mommas cease to have sex randomly.  Or, if they do?  They have to suffer the consequences.

What about the kids?  Yeah, heard it.  Don’t care.  It’s that sort of forced compassion that destroys nations, turns them into countries, and eventually leads to Balkanization.

I fell into the reupholstery machine at the furniture factory.  I’m completely recovered now.

I’m right and every person reading this knows it.

The wonderful part is that these solutions will take place.  Sadly, because the room is getting warmer, these solutions will take place only when the discomfort is so high that it will be unpleasant for all concerned.

And then, once again, the Gordian Knot will be solved.

Electric Cars and Rainbow Unicorns

“It’s logical to assume that something within this zone absorbs all forms of energy whether mechanically or biologically produced. Whatever it is, it would seem to be the same thing which drew all the energy out of an entire solar system and the Intrepid.” – Star Trek, TOS

Electric cars owners should never go down a dead end street – there’s no outlet.

As I have written time and time again, the future of energy is the future of humanity.  Cheap, safe, limitless energy is the dream, and that energy is one component of a future that is not nasty, brutish, and short, like George Soros.  Because the Leftists have tried to propagandize the subject, they’ve done a great job at muddling the thoughts on what in the end is actually the engineering question that drives the economic engines of the world.

Let’s remove the confusion on the term “energy source”.  Electricity, for instance, isn’t an energy source, since it has to be created in some fashion, such as by windmill or coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plant, or tiny faeries hooked up to electrodes while being chained to beds in the basement of Disney® . . . oh, I’ve said too much.

I heard a fairy tale about politics once.  It was Grimm.

Electric cars, then, are dependent upon getting their electricity from somewhere upstream.  Electricity is an energy carrier, not a source.

On the other hand, crude oil is an energy source.  The refining process doesn’t take up too much energy, and the sweet, sweet hydrocarbon molecules in a gallon of gasoline were there (mostly, some have been rearranged a tiny bit) in the refining process.

So, let’s define energy sources as energy, in crude, raw, or potential form that can be manipulated for use and that we get more energy out than we put into it.  So, crude oil is definitely an energy source in most conventional and fracking situations, producing up to (depending on how you count it) sixteen times as much energy as used to get it out of the ground and turn it into 89 octane.  I will say if we converted the entire economy to biofuels emissions would go down and we could starve at the same time!

Biofuels are entirely questionable, and most of them are poor when compared to gasoline as an alternative, returning just a little bit over break even for both biodiesel and corn ethanol.  These products exist as fuels primarily because Lefties like ruining the economy and the RINOs know that farmers vote.  Thus, there are tax incentives in place to force the use of biofuels.

“But we could make houses out of it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “But we could make furniture out of it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “But we could heat houses with it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “I’m beginning to think you don’t like people.”

The dream of the Left (at least this version, Arthur Sido has another one here: LINK), then is to get rid of all of the cars to replace them with “clean” electric vehicles.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) wants to get electric cars and trucks (EVs) to 45% of the vehicles on the road by 2050 according to their Net Zero Scenario.  45%!  The insanity doesn’t stop there – the IEA expects that alternative vehicles will reduce gas and diesel use by 30% by 2030 – seven years into the future.

That’s a stunning number, because the average age of a car in the United States is 12.2 years.  I guess I’m pretty close to average, because the average Wilder fleet ages is 11.5 years.  That means that the 30% of the car and stock in existence today needs to be replaced by 2030 with electric and hydrogen vehicles.  I have no idea where the IEA is getting its dope, but they must get really good stuff.

>Be forest.
>Exist.  Die.  Kill mankind by raising temperature 0.0001
°F.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 100,000,000 years ago.

That would mean, though, that conventional vehicles that run on sweet, sweet oil and diesel will have to be phased out starting very soon.  Further, the remainder of the vehicles the IEA are hydrogen-powered.  Now the Hindenburg wasn’t hydrogen powered . . . .

Now, checking back to energy sources versus energy carriers, hydrogen is just an energy carrier.  It has to be generated somewhere.

One of the first problems is that EVs are wickedly expensive compared to actual cars since they require massive amounts of material to replace the empty gasoline tank of an internal combustion car.  The question is, where do those materials come from?  If, all of a sudden, millions of EVs need to be made, the prices for the materials that go into them will go up, too.

>Be forest.
>Burn.  Kill mankind by melting 200 gallons of ice.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 200,000 years ago.

According to the IEA itself, demand for lithium alone will be 4,000% greater in 2050 than it is today.  Cobalt increases would be 2,000%.  The increase in availability alone is questionable.  Resources show up in clumps – I can’t go in my front yard and look for gold, it is where it is.  And when Leftists dream of this wonderful economy that they’re creating, they ignore the environmental costs waste of mining all this stuff – how much will that create in greenhouse gasses plant food?

It’s clear, once again, that these plans aren’t serious.  China is producing a stunning 30% of greenhouse gasesCO2, while the United States produces about 15% of human made CO2.  Why do we fixate on the United States?

First, Leftists have to pretend, really hard, that global warming climate change has replaced what real humans call weather.

Second?  The Chinese are already communist, so let them do whatever.  The people who have to have their economy ruined while they chase unicorns and rainbows rather than actual engineering solutions to actual engineering problems will have their economy destroyed.

Or maybe they’ll just buy beachfront property at a discount?

Or was that the plan all along?

At the beginning of this, I said the future of energy is the future of humanity.  That’s just a bit inaccurate – the future of energy is the future of free humans and our economy.  Me?  I have my own plans.

Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All

“This man has the gift of death.” – Zardoz

Whoops, sorry!  Just a regular old death cult after all.

This is the second post about Leftist self-hatred this week.  This particular Leftist self-hatred is one that uniquely hurts the economy and even the prospects of the survival of humanity, so it’s par for the course for the most malignant philosophy ever to exist, outside of Taco Tuesday.

What spurred this was a note from a friend that suggested a post.  I knew where I wanted to go with it, since I had seen a graphic (from Nature Communications® which is a part of Nature™ the magazine, LINK) that surprised me.  I mean, knowing what I know about Leftists, it really shouldn’t have, but what got my attention is how starkly it shows the divide in the philosophies of Right and Left.  It’s presented pretty weirdly, so I’ll help out a bit on the interpretation since I’m a trained professional.

The graph is shown as a bullseye.  Why?  I think the researchers might have been drunk and had a bullseye graph generator, so they decided between shots of tequila that they’d use the damn thing since the University had paid for it anyway.  They then got the grad students to enter the data for free, and, boom, paper complete.

I remember watching a PBS® show on how fish swim.  They shocked a fish by putting an electrode up its behind so they could photograph it.  Who put the electrodes up the fish butts?  Grad students.

The concentric circles in the graph are pretty simple, though, and the innermost are the things closest to an individual. The rings get rather more distant as they go outwards until they get rather silly:

  1. All of your immediate family.
  2. All of your extended family.
  3. All of your closest friends.
  4. All of your friends (including distant).
  5. All of your acquaintances.
  6. All people you have ever met.
  7. All people in your country.
  8. All people on your continent.
  9. All people on all continents (apparently, screw those guys on islands, they suck anyway).
  10. All mammals (finally got the people on the islands and astronauts covered).
  11. All amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds.
  12. All animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae.
  13. All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
  14. All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
  15. All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.
  16. All things in existence.

So, that’s the scale – what things are the most important to you?  For me, this is an easy answer.  I like the things that closer to me better, and I could see my feelings about this covered very well under the title listed for “Conservatives”.

Is it just me, or does this graph look very, umm, happy?

In general, I like the people that are close to me more.  Yes, I care about Americans more than I care about people in Tannu Tuva, or people in Tanganyika, or even those pitiful island people.  I generally care more about my kids than yours, and I generally like all people better than rocks, though there are some exceptions that I make for ex-spouses and members of Antifa®.  Heck the entire meme below is encapsulated in the graph above:

Now if that isn’t what’s on his headstone, it sure should be.

Okay, that explains the Right, and how we generally feel according to statistics.  What about the Left?

Why did they pick 45°? 

Whoa, that’s amazingly different!  Lefties are really focused over to the end, with only a minor preference for humans and a lesser preference for people closer to them.  The perception of the granola-eating surrender chimp as the model for Leftism is once again validated.  They like these things best:

  1. All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
  2. All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
  3. All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.

Rocks are more important to them than their parents.  And if their parents are as disappointed in them as I’m guessing they are, I can see why.  They hate themselves, so they hate the things that are closest to them.  You can see it when they throw themselves in front of cars when they protest, they have never won anything in life, so the only way they can win, they feel, is to have transferred virtue from their death.  “See, I told you I was a good person, but you never believed me!”  Thus, the victim Olympics where they compete based on victim status.  “Well, Bob, he stuck the victim status, but he wobbled on the virtue signal, and the blind gay judge with AIDs from Ethiopia gave him a 7.3.”

I wonder how many upvotes they got on Reddit®?

To be clear, I’m not sure I would like alien lifeforms at all unless they grilled well, and I think I would be just fine if an entire planet of intelligent, bloodthirsty cannibal lizard-people was wiped out, even in a slow and agonizing way, just to make sure that my family had slightly more comfortable air conditioning.  But enough about the people who are related to George Soros.

I’m not kidding.  I can come up with entire species that I’d love to see wiped from existence, and I’d start with mosquitos, gnats, wasps, and vegans.  Vegans especially, because they eat what my food eats, and that’s just selfish.

To be clear, I love the environment.  I love hiking, I love nature, I love hunting, I love trees.  The reason I love them is simple:  they exist to by enjoyed by Man.  If Man doesn’t exist?  None of these mean anything to me.  There are millions of cows alive on Earth right now.  Because we want to make cows happy?  No, because cows make us happy, especially when done medium rare with a nice crust.  To be clear, I think “nature” has no intrinsic value outside of what it can provide to Man.  But I love nature, because it’s awesome to man.

The Moon?  Just rock without people.  And Soviet Russian ships that landed.  A crash is a landing, right?

Oddly, because of these heat maps, people on the Right go out to work to care for the people they know and their country.  Why was the Right the primary source of military recruits?  Because we like our nation more than we like other nations, and since we are focused on those around us, we’re fiercely individualistic, and focused on family and friends.  Why?  We like our families and friends, and if they’re loyal to us, we’re more than loyal to them.

When the chips were down and you needed help, would you rather have a friend on the Right, or one on the Left?

Thought so.

People on the Left, though, end up in the traditional Leftist positions, in academia, or, in government.  I’ll perhaps discuss in some future post a bit more on Leftism and academia if there’s interest.  For today, let’s focus on government.

The idea of government, at least as outlined in the Constitution, is simple, “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”.  Note, even in the Constitution it talks about “ourselves and our posterity” and doesn’t mention the slave-pirate amoebas from the planet Melkor-7 or trees.

Wait, tell me about the slave girls again?

The people who gravitated to government over time, however, like control.  And that control includes enforcing their morals (which rate rocks above people).  And in 2023, those are the folks in charge of policy.  They like people who live elsewhere more than they like citizens of their own country, and the like clinging vines more than they like their second cousin.  Depending on the second cousin, I might agree, but the point remains:  they hate humanity.

Rather than environmental policy being about how to best work and preserve the environment for people, environmental policy is now viewed as either one of state control, or the idea that we’ll preserve a beetle that isn’t that much different than millions of other beetles rather than try to provide a future habitat for our grandchildren, or Keith Richards, whichever lives longer.  None of these policies have humans in mind.

Right now, I drive a huge pickup truck.  I might have bought a smaller pickup, but they can’t be sold because of fuel-efficiency standards – only my massive, hulking pickup with an interior bigger than my first apartment can be sold legally because huge pickups don’t have to meet car standards, but little ones do.  That’s also why sedans and station wagons disappeared and massive “sport utility vehicles” replaced them – a consequence of bad environmental policy.  I like using less gasoline, but .gov says I have to use more.

Hmmm.

Mussolini was lucky.  On his last day he got to hang out with his friends.

Other examples of this are things like nuclear power.  The Left has always hated nuclear power because it was something only First World societies could afford, and the thing the Left hates more than themselves is a winner.  How can we drag them back down?  Oh, yeah, we can make power so expensive and unreliable that no one can afford it.

The biggest question facing humanity in 2023 is energy.  Is an energy crisis coming?  It certainly is.  Will the regulations that the Leftists who like rocks better than their parents put into place make sense for people?  Unlikely, since the civilization of humans isn’t on their radar.

To be fair, since we’ve already demonstrated the self-hatred of humanity, it’s pretty simple to note that these consequences that put all of humanity at risk, might not be unintentional at all.

Is Leftism a death cult?

Not if you’re a rock.  Otherwise, yeah.

You Are The Rebellion

“This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi, it will soon see the end of the Rebellion.” – Star Wars:  Episode IV, A New Hope

What’s red and smells?  Rudolf’s nose.

I still regret going to the Star Wars™ movie that came out in 2015.  It was bad enough I had to look up the name – The Force Awakens.  I did wonder about one thing – it was clear after the first trilogy that the rebels won.  The Empire® was defeated, the Emperor© was dead, and people were partying on all the planets that the tyranny had been defeated, even if they had way better uniforms.

No, according to this movie, clearly the rebels had spiked the ball in the end zone at the buzzer and . . . lost.  In The Force Awakens, the Empire™ was in fine order, except run by a teenager with mommy issues who ran a galactic empire despite the fact that he was an observable and miserable moron.  The movie was awful.  The only thing that could have been worse is if the Rebellion® had been made up of Han Solo clones because someone said “Many Hans make light work.”

Why did James Dean cross the road?  Because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.

But Leftists seemed to love this awful movie.  Why?

Because they have the pathological need to be the victim, like the Rebellion in the original Star Wars©.  And who is more the victim that the righteous rebel, working against a monolithic government composed of evil people?

That’s still what Leftists think in 2023 when they have already consolidated power over:

  • Electoral College voting rules,
  • Most federal bureaucracies,
  • The FBI,
  • The CIA,
  • Academia,
  • The general officers of the military,
  • Most Fortune® 500 companies (Disney™ isn’t an exception), and
  • The executive branch.

If the voting irregularities from 2020 are repeated in 2024 (and there’s no reason to expect they won’t be) then the presidency will, forever, be owned by the Left and they could put a rutabaga named Timmy into the Oval Office.  If they can get a crook with fake hair, fake teeth, and no idea what day it is “elected”, then the Left owns the presidency.

I will admit, most Democrat candidates look like they could use a hand.

And justice?  Anyone from the Left who faced federal charges for the George Floyd riots had their charges dropped, yet some people who went into the Capitol building, our Capitol building, are facing thirty years in the federal slammer while murderers regularly get off with a dozen years or less.  That’s justice in 2023.

Yet the Left still wants to be thought as the rebels.

Why?

Deep inside the mind of a Leftist is someone who hates success.  They hate people who have achieved, and they hate anything that is good, anything that is strong.  Even the Leftists in America hate America and want, at their core, to bring it all down, to watch it burn.  They say they love science, but that’s a lie – they like certain small numbers of group-think “science” when it aligns with their ideology – Climate Change® for example, and less so when it involves utterly obvious things like biological sex.

Do they hate sexism?  No.  They revel in it as long as it comes from a culture that’s weak, like the Islamic world.  Do they hate violence?  No, they love it when it happens in some third-world hellhole.  I could go on and on, but one of the things that they really hate is success, which is why they reacted so strongly to Trump’s “s**thole country” comment – they idolize failure as if it were a sacrament.

It’s nice being in Antifa – their people never have to take time off of work to protest.

I could try to psychoanalyze this victim mindset further, but, why?  Leftists are weak, and worship weakness.  There’s a reason for that:

They hate themselves, and are miserable.  Why do they lay down on the road during protests?  They want people to run them over.

The people who manipulate the Leftists aren’t the same as the Leftists – they really don’t hate themselves.  Nope, instead they just love power.  Think the Clintons believed in anything they said?  The same people who, when leaving the White House, stole the drapes?  They believed in one and only one thing – power.  And, apparently, nice drapery.

The reason that the Leftists are so easy to manipulate into being followers is that, for them, their victimhood forms the replacement for what would otherwise be their religion.  In Leftists, the game is to be the farthest Left.  This is the reason that, like a flock of birds that have been startled, they keep saying “True Communism™ has never been tried”.  Why hasn’t True Communism® ever been tried?  Because it wasn’t far Left enough.

You know what never gets old?  Russian and Ukrainian tank crews.

I recall reading as a much younger Wilder that the Soviets had a plan for when they took over the United States.  All of the True Believer® Leftists would be the first up against the wall.  The people on the Right?  They could deal with them because they weren’t hopeless traitors like the people on the Left.  I have no idea if this is true, since I read this when I was just a pup, but, really, it makes sense.  Would you ever trust a Leftist if the Soviets didn’t trust them?

So, that’s the Left.  They want to be seen as the rebels because they want to be seen as weak.  They even compete for victim points with a pronoun and disability Olympics®.  How many more points does a lesbian in a wheelchair score versus a black Moslem man with turbo-AIDs?

One thing most people missed about the Right is there is a significant difference.  Trump was popular because he talked about the things that we believe in.  Illegal aliens?  The wall just got 10 feet taller.

That line got cheers.

But this line?

“But I recommend taking the vaccines.  I did it.  It’s good.  Take the vaccines.”

It got booed by those faithful enough to attend a Trump rally.  Never forget this – for the Left, the Current Narrative is gospel.  For the Right, the idea is that their values matter first.

And that leads us here.

In this weird twist, the Left, who thinks they’re some sort of tough rebel group, isn’t, unless the definition of rebel is “supported by virtually all government entities and major corporations”.  The Leftist band Rage Against the Machine should really change their name to Rage Against Those Against the Machine.  Yeah, not very catchy, I know, but true.

How much cocaine did Charlie do?  Enough to kill two and a half men.

So, who are we?

We’re what the Leftists always wanted to be, the real rebels.  We stand our ground in a world that says that our values are out of date, our principles are unpopular, and that real human freedom comes from something other than a dedicated group making it so.

Something tells me the Left is going to be jealous, since we’re the real rebellion.  Oh, wait, they are already jealous; that’s why they hate us.

I must admit, it does feel good to be a rebel.  Because I know we’re going to win, if for no other reason than we are so very, very pretty.

Global Warming Is For Losers

“I’m a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.” – The Red Green Show

Remember to always ask yourself what you can do to make Leonardo DiCaprio’s life better.

I remember one Twitter® exchange I had way back in the past.  It was with a Leftist, and I made the statement, “Don’t you see, the only ethical path is to be against illegal immigration, and immigration of any sort.  Since Americans emit nine times the greenhouse gases of countries like Mexico or Guatemala, the only thing we can do to protect the climate is to keep them there or send them back.”

There was a pause on the response.  “Not sure if you’re really concerned about the environment or just don’t like illegal immigrants.”

That was one of my favorite trolls, since they had to think about conflicting narratives in their programming.  In many cases, the Left ignores this, but my major message is never to the Left, since they are not on a rational mission, but on a religious one since Leftism isn’t a political system at heart, it is a religious one.  Look at it when a Leftist talks about Trump – it’s like someone on the Right being forced to think of Satan in the Oval Office – it’s religious, not ideological.

The Sun never went to college because it has thousands of degrees.

One of the sacraments of this religion is abortion.  The other?  Global Warming, er, Climate Change.

This summer has been hotter than the last few here in Upper Lower Midwestia.  I’ve seen stories where it was hot in lots of other places, mostly places that you’d expect, like Phoenix.  Some of the hottest places this year are the places where people are only there because there’s oil there, like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the place they make French fries at McDonald’s®.

But that’s why we always see Global Warming, er, Climate Change stories trotted out in the summer and never when it’s -20°F (-273.16°C in metric units) in winter.  How bad is it?  The propaganda of the sacrament of Global Warming, er, Climate Change is trotted out on weather forecasts to nail down the idea that things are getting worse when in reality, they’re not a whole lot different.  Want an example?  Here’s Sweden:

Are illegals in Sweden known as “artificial Swedeners”?

Yup, 36 years later, the biggest change has been that they changed the color of the map to a scary color.  Why?  To celebrate the sacrament of Global Warming, er, Climate Change.

How bad is it?  I’ve pointed out again and again how the people in charge of defending our country are fundamentally not serious people.  They want, well, I’ll let them tell you:

If she succeeds, everyone will know how to stop an American tank:  shoot the soldiers pushing it.

It has even become a death cult, of sorts.  The doom that has hit country after country across the world has been staggering.  The big part is propaganda – starting at the schools where teachers, predominantly taught Left-leaning curriculum by Left-leaning professors at Left-leaning colleges are the ones in charge of the indoctrination.  What does that lead to?  Students that don’t want to have children because they believe that they’re part of some sort of Original Sin just by breathing.  Notice that China is utterly ignoring the nonsense.

Looks like the Germans and the French are finally equal at something.

The other part of this equation is that people are ignoring the elephant in the room:  a volcano last year put an additional 13% water vapor into the Earth’s atmosphere.  13%.  And water is a very, very potent greenhouse gas.  That’s huge, but I don’t see Greta wanting to sacrifice virgins to the volcano god to stop those from going off, or Joe Biden wanting to make water illegal.

Soon enough the water will drop out of the atmosphere, but Joe Biden will still have to live with being Hunter Biden’s dad.

And I will say, again and again, that this has nothing to do with Global Warming, er, Climate Change.  It has everything to do with Leftist ideology and nothing to do with the temperature or the weather or any sort of solution.  Again, listen to them when they talk:

What’s the scariest word in nuclear physics?  Oops.

The Left is adamantly against nuclear power, because, properly implemented it solves a whatever Global Warming, er, Climate Change problems there are.  To be fair, the plants need to be idiot proof, because idiots have a really great track record of screwing everything up, and hiring anyone but actually competent people to design and run the things is an absolute must.

Never let a cat run your nuclear power plant.

Nuclear power is clearly a part of the plan, but keep in mind that the plan is created by people whose idea of nature is a strip of lawn in a park a half a mile from their house.  The people crafting the plans to create the “new world” have no more real appreciation of nature than Mark Zuckerbot.

Remember, these are people that get scared when they’re more than 20’ from asphalt.

I think we need to move away from fossil fuels, and quickly.  Not at all because I hate them, no, but because we need to save them for the really useful things they do.  It will take decades and trillions of dollars of investment to move the world to a new power source.  And we only have so much time to do it before that opportunity expires.

Leftists oppose it:

“Environmentalists” don’t understand it:

But true Chads know that’s where we’re going:

And if we ignore it, the actual aliens (not the illegal ones) will never stop giving us crap:

Memes And Your Mind

“No, for God’s sake! You’ve got it all backwards! AIDS, the Ebola virus?  On an evolutionary scale they are newborns. This virus walked the planet long before the dinosaurs.” – The X Files Movie (‘98)

Greta has made a real difference in electrical usage – every time she’s on the TV, I turn it off.

One of the more interesting ideas that I ran across was when I was first exposed to the idea of a meme.  It’s really short for mimeme, which means “imitated thing”.  Richard Dawkins described it as the idea that ideas would be faced with the same sort of pressures that biological entities face in the world – they either reproduce, or they die.

Regardless of how I feel about Dawkins’ other ideas, this one has always intrigued me, because it’s about the fundamental relationship between people and information and ideas.  It’s the place where ideas propagate and are passed on.

Or not.  An idea that’s passed on, lives.  One that isn’t passed on, dies.

The doctor said I had Peekaboo virus.  He said that sends most people to ICU.

Now, that really may not have any relationship with the truth of an idea.  Let’s take a meme that has been artificially boosted to the point where it’s known by virtually everyone:

“Diversity is our strength.”

Well, not so much.  It turns out that diversity is our diversity, but probably not our strength in that when you have a bunch of people living together that don’t share a common ethnicity, “social trust” drops.  It turns out that if you want to live in a society with high trust, it’s probably more reasonable to say, “Diversity is our weakness”.

What about another great meme, this one from our Founding Fathers, “All men are created equal”.

My hairline would beg to differ.

Now if the meme had been, “All men have the same rights” I would have been right on board, and I think that was the original intent.  But people are decidedly unequal.  Some are short, some are tall.  Some are smart, and some are Leftists.  All men may have the same rights, but all men aren’t the same.

Why are all the corporations hiring female Equality Officers?  They’re cheaper.

How about this one:  “majority rules”?

That’s one I remember having been well drilled into the brains of fourth grade kids when I was one, typically when I lost the vote on the movie to watch in class.  Why wouldn’t a bunch of fourth grade kids not want to watch Tommy?

But “majority rules” is a horrible way to run a society.  Doubt me?  Look around.  The idea that has been the most stable (outside of Kim’s Best Korea Solution) has been a constitutional republic, not a democracy.  But, hey, who needs a constitution when people might have bad thoughts?  Majority rules is mob rule, and that defines the worst of us, a place where the passion of the moment takes over from the rights of all of us.

The ideas here are simple, and the phrases have an amazing lifespan even when they are observably false.  There is a place for Truth, and it isn’t in a meme.  Just as a virus doesn’t have to be virtuous, neither are ideas that are spread by memes.  What they are though, is excellent persuasion material.

Oh, Garfield!  And here I thought you just wanted to be Nermal.

But just like all people aren’t created equal, all memes aren’t created equal, either.  One could make the argument that Trump’s victorious election in 2016 was partially due to fun memes.  I’m sure that you saw some of them.  Remember The Deplorables meme?

I’m sure Hillary would like to forget it.

Memes are often effective persuasion material, and effective propaganda, true or not.  Advertising, for instance, is entirely made to try to create memes and pump them directly into the heads of consumers.  How many ad jingles can you think of in the next sixty seconds?  I’m lovin’ it®, and I’d be happy to give you Helping Hands™ to Bring Good Things To Life©.

It’s not a mistake that these are memorable.

The Internet has not made this better.  In many ways, the websites (especially social media) are created to be addiction pumps by manipulating your emotions – and brain chemicals.

The good news is that we aren’t simply blank slates for corporations, government, and universities to imprint on, we have free will, and most importantly we get to choose what goes into our heads, what information we watch, and what thoughts we consume.

As Garfield® taught us, we aren’t immune to propaganda.

But realizing it’s there is the first step to understanding it, to taking a step back, and to evaluate what I think.

I asked my librarian if they had a book by Shakespeare.  “Yes,” she replied.  “Which one?” I asked.  “William.”

Is that my thought?  Did I put it there?  Is it consistent with what I know?  Is it consistent with the truth?

Is it consistent with the Truth?

When I think about just what a meme might be imitating, I keep coming around to the same idea:  the Truth.  And what is propaganda, but an idea imitating the Truth?