Competence – Page 14 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive

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

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

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

You either got him or you didn’t.

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

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

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

Datapoint:

Crowdstrike™

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

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

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

Datapoint:

Boeing’s© Starliner™

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

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

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

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

Datapoint:

NASA

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

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

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

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

Datapoint:

COVID-19

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

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

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

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

Datapoint:

The Titan Submersible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, not really.

What’s Gump’s password? 1Forest1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe . . . too nice?

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

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

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

World hunger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s Joever. What next?

“And after your glorious coup, what then?” – Gladiator

I hadn’t planned on tackling the Fall of the House of Biden today, but, hey, an opportunity is an opportunity. As it is, I think that the world has provided a rich set of memetic information that will more than cover the situation. All of these are “as found”.

First, do you think Joe knew he’d be stepping down today? Here’s the foreshadowing:

That brings us up to the end of the campaign. How did that go?

The results seemed to catch even those close to Biden by surprise:

Lots of folks seem to think the nomination is a done deal for Kamala. Obama, pointedly, did not endorse her.

Why did Obama not endorse Kamala? Well, reasons, probably including that she is likely the stupidest person to ever run for Washington, with more baggage than the Lusitania, all combined with all of the charisma of ¡Jeb!:

I think she thinks the quote above is profound, because she keeps repeating it.

The pain . . . !

But what are the other complications?

Not gonna lie, it would be funny to start this program:

What if Joe doesn’t remember?

And what if Darth Clinton returns? I’d say never get involved in a land war in Asia or play a game against a Clinton when power is on the line. That does leave me with one question:

How Big Corporations Ruin The Economy, One Town At A Time

“I still say genetics are stronger than will, and blood is thicker than altruism.” – Andromeda

Should we rejoin Great Britain? It’s not like we mind taxation without representation anymore.

At the turn of the century, in 1900, that is, 25% of the people who worked had jobs for “larger” companies, think “something someone would say a robber baron owned”. These were things like railroads and steel mills and PEZ™ factories.

Most people worked for themselves or for smaller businesses. People farmed, which was a very big deal, taking up around 40% of the country’s labor force. The remainder worked for themselves or for small businesses, being a lawyer, working for the butcher, or delivering home-grown artisanal PEZ©.

The result was that the majority of the profits stayed local. The owner of the bank that loaned for the mortgage for Farmer McWilder didn’t ship the interest payments back to New York: those profits stayed in the community. People were more independent: the local optometrist didn’t work for Opti-Co™, a Ramtron© company, which is a division of GloboChunk®.

Introverts hate being optometrists. They have to make eye contacts.

When BigDrugStore® moved into Modern Mayberry, what did they do?

They bought the local pharmacies from the local pharmacists. They hired (then fired after a year or so) the local guys. Now, profits that used to go to funding the local little league team are funneled to investors in New York where they buy part of a bathroom renovation in the Hamptons.

Likewise, the local manufacturers have dried up, too. There used to be at least seven little widget factories that made various doo-dads and thingamajigs that now are produced either in People’s Liberation Army Factory #323 or in Whamco’s™ huge factory in Pakistan.

I guess that’s an everlasting jobstopper.

Big businesses have two impacts: they suck profits out of communities, and they make everyone less independent. There are several factors that have led to this:

Allowing corporations to live forever and do anything.
Having combined huge corporations making huge purchases so that the combined purchasing power of all of the (for instance) Wal-Marts® can be used to put the pressure on suppliers to lower every cost, including labor,
Burden small companies with exactly the same regulations as large companies, giving large companies the incentive to seek out stronger regulation to keep competition down, and,
Realizing that every dollar pulled out of the community is an extra dollar of New York profit for putting in that new pool house.

This did reduce prices, at least enough to put small businesses out of business, but it has hurt America by taking profits that were local and nationalizing them to the existing GloboLeftistElite. Yes, there were benefits, but each of these communities is now (over time) poorer for having these larger businesses in them.

DNA is like Taco Bell® – same four ingredients, nearly infinite results.

An aside: this process has funneled huge amounts of money to the GloboLeftistElite. Who are they? They’re the people who run and own the largest corporations, yet are Marxists. Don’t believe me? Look at all of the class struggle propaganda that shows up from their typical GloboLeftist company in a year. Trotsky would blush, I mean, if he hadn’t been killed with an icepick.

This has hurt rural America, which was built on individuals working and creating wealth locally. I look at small towns across the United States at their aspirational city halls and libraries, and think, “Could any of them afford to build those structures now?”

No, they couldn’t.

Why not?

Because the locally created wealth has been siphoned off.

In the end, what can be done? Here’s a modest proposal:

Restrict corporations to a limited life span, at which time they have to divest.
Restrict corporations to a specific line of business.
Require corporations to be chartered as separate entities in each operating state.
Require a percentage (greater than 50%?) of local (think, people living in the state) ownership in each corporation.
Ease regulatory burdens on smaller companies, making it easier to form and grow them.
Sharply restrict lending by out of state institutions.
Tiered sales tax based on company size: the bigger, the higher, which reflects the value these companies are taking out of state.

I could probably think of more changes that would actually return more capitalism to the country. Yes, Apple™ isn’t fond of competition or capitalism or even the United States. GloboLeftBigCorp© companies that have done their best to concentrate capital and economic power while at the same time being overtly Leftist.

You should respect people like me who wear glasses. I paid money to see you.

Feel free to attack any individual points above, but the constant concentration and combination of economic power has to be stopped – inherently, it is anti-capitalist and anti-freedom, which leads to the failed ideology of group altruism. Besides, those were the result of five minutes of thinking and I avoided thinking about creative uses for lamp posts.

Why is group altruism bad? When .gov takes your money and gives it to another person it likes better than you, no one gets to feel the inherent power of helping people. Helping people is great on an individual level, because it reinforces the idea of humans helping humans. Helping people voluntarily is virtuous, especially if the help changes the path the person is on so in the future they don’t need the help. Those that help go from anonymous people who are tax farmed to people who have actual skin in the game in helping people succeed.

On the other hand, group altruism creates a situation those who are most in need become the most despised because they are seen as the irredeemable bit of society. Group (.gov) altruism doesn’t want to make people independent, because dependent people are dependable voters for more .gov and more regulations and money transfer, and .gov loves a divided people. Also, since people pay taxes, many of them feel no obligation whatsoever to help anyone. They’ve farmed out their virtue.

I read that a big company helped blind kids. But they meant the verb, not the adjective.

Want to know why Reparations for slavery from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves is popular? It’s the GloboLeftElite’s mechanism for creating a feeling of entitlement that will never go away. How much is enough Reparation? There is no answer, because the GloboLeftElite has said that there will never be enough Reparation. Never. That’s the result of group altruism.

Do I want people to not starve and also stay in Africa, or India, or (insert country name here)? I do. That doesn’t mean that individual organizations can’t help them, but to do so should be voluntary, and not the power of the government to take wealth and allocate it around the world or, through action or inaction, bring an unending supply of immigrants to our shore.

The solution in the future is to create a society where commerce is human scale, is focused on maintaining and encouraging the family (which is the atom of the nation) and is based on the nation, not on every person on the planet.

Anyone else ready to party like it’s 1899?

The Best And Funniest Fourth Of July Post You’ll Read Today

“What do you do when you’re not buying stereos, Nick? Finance revolutions?” – Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

I guess the taxes were too steep.

In honor of the holiday, here are some facts that I made up about the Declaration of Independence:

John Adams felt that July 2 would be the national holiday, but just to spite him because he was a tool, it was changed to July 4.
The Continental Congress could not afford air conditioning, so Thomas Jefferson used his sweat as the liquid in the ink.
The original Declaration of Independence was stored at the Pearl Harbor naval base until 1941 in a rusty footlocker, but was moved back to Washington, D.C., because John Wayne told “that pinko” FDR to bring it back.

They were going to name a street after John Wayne, but then realized that no one could cross John Wayne and live.

Thomas Jefferson was originally going to have the Declaration printed, but because his HP™ printer kept flashing “replace black ink cartridge” and because Office Depot™ would not exist for another 200 years, he wrote the whole thing out by hand.
The Declaration has a secret message written on the back, that, when translated said, “D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E. No one knows what that means.
Disney® tried to buy the rights to the Declaration in order to make a cartoon, and then a live action version of the document, replacing Thomas Jefferson with Jada Pinkett Smith.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day, and their bodies regenerated in a secret lab of Benjamin Franklin’s where they were combined with parts from a cotton gin to become MechaAdamson who took the lead in opening trade relations with Japan, and whose portrait is on the $1500 bill.

Okay, on to the more serious bit.

It has been 248 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed. Obviously, it was written the night before, because Jefferson was cramming for the final. We often think of the Founding Fathers as Old Dead Guys, because they are, but let’s go back in time to 1776:

Thomas Jefferson was 33. In 2024, that would mean that in 2024 he would still be saving for a downpayment on a house, but when he was 13, he inherited nearly eight square miles of productive farmland.

Jefferson wasn’t very old, but I think he did the job of writing this amazingly subversive document very, very well. John Adams, who was 40 at the time, convinced the committee (yes, the Declaration was the result of a committee) that Jefferson should write it because everyone liked Jefferson, and everyone thought that Adams was a tool. Adams said that.

“The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished. – Benjamin Franklin”

So, if a Jefferson would be alive today to write up a new Declaration, he’d have been born in 1991 and would be younger than Teen Spirit.

Jefferson was a genius, but how big a bag did they have to pick from to find him? 2.5 million people were the total number of citizens in the colonies. Today, all but fourteen states each have more people than the colonies did, and yet they produced a Franklin, a Jefferson, a couple of Adams boys, and a Washington.

The point I’m trying to convey is that even though we look back at the bravery and genius and learning of the Founding Fathers, we sometimes overlook the fact that they were ordinary men in an extraordinary time. I would bet that in any population of 2.5 million Americans of similar stock in the United States today that you’d find men of Washington’s bravery and ability; Franklin’s learning, cunning and sense of humor; Adam’s stoic stubbornness; and Jefferson’s erratic brilliance.

What was Thomas Jefferson’s father’s name? Thomas Jefferdad.

Keep in mind, too, that the whole proposition of “standing up to the world’s biggest empire” was pretty risky. War had been ongoing sporadically with Great Britain for the better part of a year, but up until the Declaration, the idea and hope was for a reconciliation with the Mother Country, although one built upon respect for the Colonies.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. Once the committee tasked with drafting the Declaration was done, Congress itself edited the document, word by word, and sentence by sentence. This chopped a bunch out, and Jefferson was miffed. Regardless of Jefferson’s butthurt, on July 2, the Declaration was adopted on a 12-0-1 vote, with New York being in a dither, as usual that finally changed its vote due to peer pressure from the cool kids, eventually making it 13-0.

When it was time to check out of the empire, they all checked out.

I have said before that the United States of our forefathers, even the United States of my youth is dead – heck, one wag even said, “we all die in a foreign country”. But I have also said, and I will stand by that, although we may not live to see it, we stand ready for the seeds of a new, and hopefully more glorious Republic in the future.

It will require the burial of nearly 200,000 pages of federal regulations. There will certainly be depravation, and likely more than one horrific battle. It took decades to get the United States into this mess, and digging out will be the task of generations: keep in mind that from 1775 (the real start of the Revolutionary War) to the first presidential election was 13 years, and that we’re not even to 1775 yet – I peg us at somewhere between 1765 and 1773, and I think the Revolutionary War will look easy in comparison.

I accidently signed up for the company 401k – I don’t think I can run that far.

Along the way, a new form of government will be born, hopefully with an eye to the freedoms we have lost and with sure prohibitions (I can think of another dozen amendments today of what government should never be allowed to do) to keep government in check and make it take at least another 200 years before the rotten edifice of regulation and emanations and penumbras can be reconstituted. Maybe we’ll add a third house of Congress that can repeal any legislation with a 33% vote, I mean, if 33% of the country hate a law, why keep it?

America is dead, but also waiting to be born. Come with me.

Let us go and find her.

The Best And Funniest Debate Post You’ll Read Today: Read It For The Salty Tears

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Whelp! All memes from X, and I didn’t even have to scroll more than three times. This is an implosion.

I had very different plans today for this post. During the debate, I had no fewer than 1200 words worth of notes, and had penciled in no fewer than nine really funny jokes on the first pass. It would have been hilarious. I guess that’s just me, pining for the humor of the situation.

But as the debate ended, I realized that wasn’t the post I was going to write. It couldn’t be.

I have predicted that Joe Biden would not be the DNC candidate for the 2024 election on these pages months ago. When the debate happened so very early, I began to wonder: why?

Someone on Team Joe® convinced him (which doesn’t appear to be hard right now) that he needed to debate Trump in June. Why? The conventions hadn’t occurred, and Joe wasn’t even the official nominee, merely the presumptive one.

Now I understand. Having these debates in October would have assured a Trump landslide. Even the deepest blue GloboLeftist couldn’t even salvage this monstrosity in a real manner after an October showing like today. It would not be possible.

So, Team Brandon© (yes, Trump really called him Brandon and Joe didn’t react) decided to get him out early.

To expose him.

Joe is done. He’s finished. His political career is finished, and his candidacy is in shambles. Reports are that his team are in tears, and “25^th Amendment” (the one that allows for the removal of incompetent folks as president) are trending on X.

I had predicted that either Gavin Newsom (whose wife allegedly willing banged Harvey Weinstein) or Big Mike Obama would be the candidate months ago. I’m pretty sure I predicted it in the blog, but certainly did so in conversations and it’s too late to check – Ricky might help me here! – that Joe would not be the candidate.

That is now certain. There is another, like they said in Star Wars™: Hillary. I don’t think she’s physically up to the task, but she’s still in the running.

It won’t be Joe. So, here’s my take on the night, along with a few memes. I’ll respond to previous post comments tomorrow (like I said, it’s late). Python, Monty® predicted this years ago. Note, I hope that Joe Biden lives a long and pleasant life, this is in reference to his chances on being elected in November:

A voter watches a debate.

Voter: ‘Ello, I wish to register a complaint.

(The DNC does not respond.)

Voter: ‘Ello, Miss?

DNC: What do you mean “miss”? Are you assumin’ me gender?

Voter: (pause)I’m sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!

DNC: We’re closin’ for the Juneteenth Pride Festival.

Voter: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Candidacy what I decided to vote for not half a year ago from this very DNC.

DNC: Oh yes, the, uh, the Scranton Joe…What’s,uh…What’s wrong with it?

Voter: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. This Candidacy is dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

DNC: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…he’s resting. He has COVID.

Voter: Look, matey, I know a dead Candidacy when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

DNC: No no this Candidacy’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable Candidacy, the Scranton Joe, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

Voter: The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

DNC: Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!

Voter: All right then, if he’s restin’, I’ll wake him up! (shouting at the Candidacy) ‘Ello, Mister Dark Brandon! I’ve got a lovely fresh 10% for the Big Guy for you if you show…

(DNC hits the cage)

DNC: There, he moved!

Voter: No, he didn’t, that was you hitting the cage!

DNC: I never!!

Voter: Yes, you did!

DNC: I never, never did anything…

Voter: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) ‘ELLO JOE!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o’clock alarm call!

(Takes Candidacy out of the cage and thumps its head on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)

Voter: Now that’s what I call a dead Candidacy.

DNC: No, no…..No, ‘e’s got COVID!

Voter: COVID?!?

DNC: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin’ up! Scranton Joe stuns easily, major.

Voter: Um…now look…now look, mate, I’ve definitely ‘ad enough of this. That Candidacy is definitely deceased, and when I decided to vote for it not ‘alf a year ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged ice cream.

DNC: Well, he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for Corn Pop.

Voter: PININ’ for Corn Pop?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got ‘im home?

DNC: Scranton Joe prefers keepin’ on it’s back! Remarkable Candidacy, id’nit, squire? Lovely hair plugs and replacement teeth!

Voter: Look, I took the liberty of examining that Candidacy when I watched the debate, and I discovered the only reason that it had been standing by the podium in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

DNC: Well, o’course it was nailed there! If I hadn’t nailed that Candidacy down, it would have nuzzled up to that podium, bent it apart with its strong arm, and VOOM! It would have talked about String Theory in six languages!

Voter: “VOOM”?!? Mate, this Candidacy wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts and a gallon of Adderall® through it! It’s bleedin’ demised!

DNC: No no! ‘E’s pining!

Voter: It’s not pinin’! It’s passed on! This Candidacy is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed it to the podium it’d be pushing up the daisies! It’s metabolic processes are now ‘istory! It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, It’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-CANDIDACY!!

(pause)

DNC: Well, I’d better replace it, then. (he takes a quick peek behind the counter) Sorry squire, I’ve had a look ’round the back of the shop, and uh, we’re right out of Candidacy, except for Big Mike, Hillary, and Gavin.

Voter: I see. I see, I get the picture.

DNC: (pause) I got a Kamala.

(pause)

Voter: Pray, does it talk?

DNC: Nnnnot really. Slurs quite a bit like it’s drunk.

Voter: WELL IT’S HARDLY A BLOODY REPLACEMENT, IS IT?!!???!!?

DNC: N-no, I guess not. (gets ashamed, looks at his feet)

Voter: Well.

(pause)

DNC: (quietly) D’you…. d’you want to come back to my place?

Voter: (looks around) Yeah, all right, sure, it is the Juneteenth Pride Festival.

DNC: (to the audience) Well! I never wanted to do this in the first place. I wanted to be… a lumberjack!

Gamer Gate 2.0: Ugly Women Edition

“Report here safely, stop. Do not play video games.” – John Wick

Proof once again you’re an un-person if you remember the 1990s, intact families, and Christmas. (as found)

Pop culture exists, and I often write about it. The reason is that it is pervasive, surrounds us, and can absolutely be used to manipulate human feelings and behavior, so, in a sense it is a form of programming about who and what we are. In essence, it can be a myth that evolves with us, sort of like intestinal parasites.

Pop culture has always been around, but it has transformed over the millennia of human existence. It likely started with Grug talking around the communal fire, telling stories of the clan, their origin, and the evils they defeated, and how he had to walk uphill both ways to get back to the cave when he was a child and that they didn’t have any of those new-fangled flint arrowheads when Grug was small.

Through this mechanism, the ideas that the clan had, its virtues, its norms, and even its fears were transmitted from one group to another. It told the story of the group. Their story. That narrative bound them together as one – they knew the deeds of their fathers and sang songs about the virtues of their fathers.

My eye got infected with COVID. I had Corona-Iris.

Control of that story, then, is very, very powerful, and Grug probably (rightfully) skipped the part where he pooped his wolfskin jockstrap the first time he had to fight someone from the Wilder clan. Grug’s stories and pop culture thus both provide and define the Overton Window – those ideas that are safe to speak about in a polite society.

An example:

The idea that JFK was assassinated by literally anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald acting totally alone was not acceptable to The Powers That Be®. What did they do? They invented an entire new term to disparage any idea that varied from the Warren Commission report – “Conspiracy Theory”.

Oddly, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations looked into the JFK Lone Gunman theory in the late 1970s, they decided that, no, it couldn’t have been Lee Harvey Oswald acting by himself. The results of the Committee were mostly ignored. The smear of anyone with a different opinion continued, and if it weren’t for the Zapruder film, I imagine they’d probably try to convince everyone JFK killed himself because he hated Dallas.

I promise, I don’t know any dirt on the Clintons.

The cast of people who benefited from Kennedy’s death was huge: The CIA, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Mafia, LBJ, Israel’s nuclear program, the gun control agenda, and the Boy Scouts™ all benefited. Okay, maybe not the Boy Scouts©, but you get the picture. The only person I’m sure wasn’t involved was me, and that’s because I wasn’t born yet.

Beat that alibi.

But crafting that public opinion isn’t just for the CIA or whatever thinktank meme’d the phrase “Conspiracy Theory” into existence. Nope. Pop culture is largely put out by Hollywood™ and, increasingly game companies.

Hollywood™ (if I include television, which I should) was the biggest influence when I was a kid. Everyone in my grade was watching the same movies at the same time on the same station. If a James Bond® movie was on, you were watching that, because cable came to the vicinity of Wilder’s Mountain about the time I was finishing high school and you had three choices (no one watched PBS™) and James Bond™ was always going to be better than whatever else was on.

I’ve never played Warhammer®, so I’m really hoping that it doesn’t have a “Shoe” or I’ll feel more stupid than usual.

We watched the same television shows, too. And, I’ve related before, I remember wondering in middle school if there was a reason that the TradRight couldn’t be funny, since even in seventh grade I recognized that every comedy and drama on television was written from a GloboLeftElite perspective. Even in middle school I recognized that Hollywood™ was a Leftist enclave.

Television (and movies!) was a pipeline that was well in place as owned turf of the GloboLeftElite by the end of the 1970s. But a new medium was emerging, and the old monolith of the big three networks was fracturing.

The new medium was gaming.

I hear she wears Fruit of the Tomb™ underwear.

Gaming was, especially at the early parts, unabashedly libertarian, as was much of the infant Silicon Valley at the time. Games like Pac-Man™, Pong©, and that one with the plumber were big, and largely free of politics, which is to say skewed towards the TradRight in the opinion of the GloboLeft.

Games rose under Atari™, sank, then rose again, this time higher and higher with Nintendo™ and then Sony™ and Sega™ and finally the X-Box™. Each iteration brought more story and visual complexity to the games, but the consumer was mainly the same: young white dudes. Sure, women have always played games, but the biggest gamers have always been boys. Oh, and the Prussians. They invented wargaming when it wasn’t convenient to duel or kill someone just to pass the time (seriously, look it up).

And what do boys like? Girls. Thus, Lara Croft™ and the Tomb Raider© series came into existence, complete with her huge . . . eyes. And shapely . . . hair. Lara Croft® was about as realistic as He-Man® was, but that was okay. She was an idealized version (through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy) of what a hot woman looked like.

But the GloboLeftElite have started a war against hot women. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s because that women feel threatened by hot women. I will note that not a single feminist ever jumped out and said that Superman™ was an unrealistic body model, or has tried to get Brad Pitt out of movies and replace him with that guy that plays Paul Blart.

No. They want to uglify women characters in video games. I think so that ugly feminist women feel better.

The latest? Jean Grey™, that buxom fiery-haired psychic that, ahem, inspired so many young men, has been redone. Yup, here it is.

Yes, hot Jean Grey™ has been turned into a plank of wood that looks like Melinda Gates. And who was responsible? Not sure, but Sweet Baby, Inc. (links below) have allegedly been busy as they can be with Jean Grey, gumming up the works to make sure that all of the GloboLeftElite talking points and propaganda is included in the game and that the women in the games are as ugly as the Sweet Baby, Inc. women feel that they are inside. And outside, I guess.

When I play a video game, I’d rather play a cool strong character rather than Archie Bunker. Do women want to play as a hot chick, or do they want to play as a woman with a body best described as “tubular and featureless”?

Gamer Gate 2.0: Woke On Patrol

Gamer Gate 2.0 Update: Disproportionate Response Edition

It’s not just video games. Dungeons & Dragons™ has said that they’ll be happy when white guys stop playing their games.

Okay, done. (meme as found)

Disney’s© latest Star Wars™ flop, The Acolyte, has lesbian witches creating a baby without needing no man via the Force™. The producer also said that if we didn’t like it, don’t watch it, and then when we didn’t watch it, blamed us for not being the audience she (yes, you guessed it) deserved. I guess that in Star Wars©, they don’t need no man to have a baby.

You can do what you want, but I’ll be skipping this round. I like Grug’s stories better, anyway.

Bad Economics Destroys Wealth

“Hey, there’s no airbag. I can fly out through the windshield?” – Rocketman

Toyota® introduced their new Nagasaki airbag – they say “you won’t feel the impact”.

Annually, about 2800 lives are saved by airbags. Hurray!

Annually, 13.6 million new cars are sold. That probably doesn’t rate a hurray, I mean, not ever fact is exciting.

I’m guessing (numbers are sketchy) that it costs approximately $2000 per car to add airbags. This number may be a bit high, but replacing a single airbag can cost $2000, and many new cars have so many airbags that some cars can legally be sold as bubble wrap.

By federal law, all passenger autos sold must include airbags.

That pencils out to an annual cost of $27.2 billion dollars in additional consumer spending.

For airbags.

So, we have all of the math ready for us: how much does it cost to save a human life.

(drumroll)

About $10 million dollars per life saved.

Every Monday evening, Superman® researches bitcoin. That’s his crypto-night.

That’s insane. I mean, I know the goal is a good one, but why is the federal government mandating that Americans spend an average of $10 million dollars per person to save them? Heck, I don’t like most people even $50,000 worth. But $10 million?

This number, and, indeed the federal mandate that airbags be installed on everything on the highway is a product of the “safety at all costs” culture. Their motto is, “If only one human life is saved . . .” which is meant as a rallying cry for whatever uneconomic idea that they want to put forward. An actual economist, Thomas Sowell, made the argument that if you wanted people to drive safely you’d replace the airbag with a big Bowie knife. I tried to verify that quote, but the link that I came up with was . . . my site.

So, I couldn’t verify it, except by myself. I’m not sure I’m a reliable source, but, hey.

It would also decrease emergency room visits. Save him? No, then how would he learn anything?

Hit the brakes too hard?

Sorry about that – there are consequences to the driver.

Imagine how polite drivers would be then? If not, think of the lowered hospital visits!

The news is simple: no one makes it out of here alive. No one. We cannot escape the one inevitable consequence of living, which is death. The GloboLeftSafetyPatrol thinks that if we spend billions of dollars, we can make Death go away. No, at least in 2024, the only thing that we can do is shoo Death away from our doorstep for a little while by using better diet and exercise and maybe renting an 18-year-old to use as a blood donor to live off of them like a vampire. I heard them called “blood boys” once.

If I brought the concept that actions have consequences up with a GloboLeftist, it would break their mind. They live in a world where money is what other people provide to satisfy all the wants of the world. In my experience, most people want a lot more than the world can afford, so we have to make choices. Not everyone can afford a blood boy.

Asian fathers are disappointed if their son has a B+ blood type.

That’s the basis of economics, making the least-bad choice given the information you know at the time.

The second thing that drives the GloboLeftistSafetyPatrol nuts is the idea that people might have a choice. It drives them nuts. What if I wanted to buy a car that didn’t have airbags?

I’m the bad guy.

Why? Well, for that to be the case, the GloboLeftSafetyPatrol has decided that they own me.

To be clear, I do believe that there are obligations that an individual has with society, and that a society has for an individual. Pure libertarianism in the absence of an infinite expanding frontier is simply not workable, though it has been tried and certainly worked better than communism and with a much smaller body count.

A similar bad choice is involved with the decision to import the swarming masses of parasite carrying (link below) illegals to replace actual citizens. All of the job growth post-COVID has been by immigrants, either of the legal (or, since there are millions and millions of them) more likely illegal aliens.

Could It All Be Worms Making The Decisions For The Left?

When illegals do a home invasion is it a house swarming party?

In one way this is a multiple hit to the economy. First, these aliens, on average consume a lot more resources than are offset by the tax revenue they produce and work that they do.

For every illegal crossing the border, the economy has that much more sand poured in the gears in terms of unpaid for medical cost, schooling costs, infrastructure costs, and benefits cost. The average illegal costs far more than the average veteran, and much more than the average veterinarian. Heck, they even cost more than the average vegan, though they’re not so smug.

Second, for every illegal that consumes additional housing, often in conditions of squalor with much higher occupancy than an American family, the housing stock is consumed, raising prices. I read one story about a Canadian apartment where the inhabitants were living in every room in the house, including having a bed in the kitchen where two people lived.

Lastly, the illegals keep wages low. Literally if we import the third world, we become the third world because our wages will eventually drop to third world levels – the same goes for free trade.

Importing illegals (and, let’s face it, many legal) aliens actually makes the economy get worse, and it’s faster the more we import. With lowered demand for housing, prices would go down. With lowered amounts of workers, wages would tend to go up. Take these to the extreme, and California becomes Mumbai, but with fewer cobras.

If Chuck Norris didn’t have arms, what would his catchphrase be? “You’re about to meet de feet!”

The GloboLeft loves illegals, because of their compassion – but studies have consistently shown that their compassion is just that, a feeling, and that people on the TradRight are generally those that actually fund and charities that help people. To the GloboLeftists, that’s simply not their problem – government (meaning you and I) should take care of it.

We can’t afford airbags anymore because we’ve used that wealth on . . . airbags. And illegals. And any one of a thousand things that you or I could think of where the government either mandates waste or pursues policies that are directly detrimental to the voters. I mean, even Sweden is waking up to the concept that importing rapefugees might not be the best policy since there are no-go zones (Malmo) where actual Swedish people aren’t allowed.

But what bothers me the most is, if the government keeps wasting the wealth of the country in this fashion and at this rate, I’ll never be able to afford a blood boy.

What Is It All About? Humiliation.

“You throw away your biggest opportunity, over a dog! And then you humiliate me by stealing my boss’s car!” – Kingsman, The Secret Service

I think, I hope, the base image is A.I. generated.

I had originally started writing a post about Trump, but I thought it would fit better in the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report. That’s where it fits, anyway. Instead, I thought I’d write indirectly about it for today. I’ll start with the words of Theodore Dalrymple:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious likes, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is . . . in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

The GloboLeftElite does not care about being right, it cares about control. Dalrymple references political correctness, which is a way to control thought by controlling the language that can be used about a subject. What followed? Microaggressions, a manner in which any sort of normal patterns of speech can be considered inspired by the deepest hate. Soon enough we’ll have to stop calling them black holes and call them “BiPOC gravitational anomalies”.

They do this to break you down like a person might break a horse.

It then jumps into things like hiring. “Hiring the best person for the job” is considered a microaggression according the GloboLeft. Why? Some bafflegarb about history. The explanation didn’t make sense, but that’s part of the process – people are supposed to buy this nonsense.

YouTube™ even enforces it with a set of rules that are never shared that can be unknowingly violated and then the creator is silenced, often forever. Why? They won’t give a list. You’re guilty when they say you’re guilty, and the rules change over time so previously accepted speech is now verboten.

Vox Day wrote about the general process that they use to ostracize people in his Social Justice Warrior books. It is:

Locate or Create a Violation of the Narrative.
2. Point and Shriek.
3. Isolate and Swarm.
4. Reject and Transform.
5. Press for Surrender.
6. Appeal to Amenable Authority.
7. Show Trial.
8. Victory Parade.

The point is only partially to humiliate the victim of the process. The most important part of the process is to scare other people who might take similar actions. There doesn’t have to be a formal recruitment to the GloboLeft, giving in is all that it takes.

I was a bit confused when I saw the GloboLeftElite attack Graham Hancock. If you’re not familiar, Hancock has a theory that there was a civilization older than what is currently accepted. Okay, he’s either right or he’s wrong. Instead of arguing about Hancock’s ideas, it was an attack on anyone who would give him a platform.

Hancock didn’t back down. But anyone who has any belief that is contrary to the narrative must be shut down – I was reminded of that today when I tried to find a story on Bing™ and Google© but was forced to use Yandex™. Why? It had to do with an alternative theory about an aspect of COVID. Even as these alternative theories are proven, they are suppressed. Why?

Because to the GloboLeftElite, these Narrative violations, no matter how small, leave deviation for thoughts. The frightening part is now the GloboLeft NPC foot soldiers are so easy to steer into a mob with pitchforks and torches, screaming words like “disinformation” or “dangerous to our democracy”. Hancock was even accused of racism, which is the word that seems to have lost a lot of impact when they define down “hiring the best person for the job” as racist.

This humiliation ritual is on full display – drag queen story hour and three-year-old “transgender” children are nothing more nor less than that, and “living in the pods and eating the bug” is more of the same. The reason that these exist is to humiliate society. They want it because they know you don’t want it, and want you to feel you can’t stop them, so that they can humiliate you.

Who supports those? Those who are weak and don’t think for themselves: the GloboLeft NPC. They’re programmed because they simply must follow the popular opinion. I don’t know how much of a proportion of society they are, but it’s not as much as the GloboLeftElite would like: Bud Light™ is an example of a brand killed by those who simply refused to be a part of the humiliation ritual.

Don’t think that the January 6 and Trump trials and convictions are anything less than this – they’re a humiliation ritual for Trump and the people put into prison for January 6, but they’re also meant to show everyone what punishments wait for them if they go against The Narrative.

However, the GloboLeftElite has not won, and won’t win. The Zoomers and Generation Alpha see what’s going on, and want none of it, swinging wider right with every poll.

And that’s a good thought to start the week with.

Notes: I had more memes, but thought I’d just let this one stand. Also, watching The Prisoner (a reader suggestion, which also explains Iron Maiden’s© song Back in the Village).

France, Spain, And The Fate Of The United States

“If we bail out we can hide out in a French girl’s hayloft.” – Memphis Belle

My cat’s a commie. Keeps wanting free food and only talks about Mao.

Over a decade ago, I was reading a post by John Michael Greer (here’s a (LINK) to his current blog). In that post, he talked about time compression and our tendency to not think about historical events in the timeframe that people actually lived them. His example was that of a young girl, born at the time of the French Revolution.

In my mind, the French Revolution turned to the Napoleonic era and the defeat at Waterloo in a fairly short time. I mean, I knew it took longer than the two days we spent on it in World History in high school, but that young girl, born when heads were rolling on the guillotine, would have been 25 or 26 and likely had her own children when Napoleon got waffled in Belgium.

And that poor French girl couldn’t even post about how tough her life was on TikTok®!

26 years. That’s a number that, back when I read Greer’s post, surprised me. From a distance of 230 some years, four years of Biden is an eyeblink.

Chuck Norris once stared into the abyss, and the abyss looked away.

The amazing amount of debt that’s been printed in the last four years along with the rampant inflation made me think back to that young French girl. I think that in 100 years, people will look back on our time and compress it, and I think that they’ll talk about it as the time when the United States sank to third world standards in what, to them, will be just a paragraph in a history book.

There’s plenty of precedent for it. Spain, after the colonization of the New World, brought back ship after ship filled with massive amounts of gold and silver for a period of about 100 years. This caused several related things to happen:

The inflation from the huge supply of gold and silver distorted the entire economy of Europe, causing an inflation that lasted at least 100 years.
The huge amount of wealth caused the Spanish to import labor (a lot of to do the work that Spaniards refused to do, you know, like sweeping or making the bed). The Spanish aristocracy also was allergic to work, since they considered it low class. Apparently, the exceptions were being a professor or a priest, but mainly they just sat around in fancy clothes sweating.
Spain then got caught in an endless web of pointless wars, probably because they were bored.
Oh, and when the gold and silver stopped flowing from the New World? Yeah, they didn’t stop spending, they just went bankrupt again and again.

This is not a good combination. In less than 100 years, Spain went from being THE world power and the largest economy in the world, by far, to being poor and irrelevant.

In California you can’t get a tattoo of flames on your biceps, unless you have a fire arms permit.

I imagine the world in Spain as it declined in decadence just slowly got crappier and more expensive every day, just like we’re seeing today, as we see a long, slow slide to becoming the third world. I wrote last week about the encrapification of the Internet, but other businesses are doing it, too. McDonald’s® has record profits, but I’ve seen Big Mac® meals advertised for $15 or so.

The Mrs. bought a McFish© sandwich the other day and put it in the fridge, perhaps as some sort of religious ritual since I have no evidence that humans actually eat them. I opened it up to give it a look, and was surprised to see a biscuit-sized sandwich.

I made some fish tacos the other night, but the ungrateful fish just swam away.

It’s been a while since I’ve even seen a Filet-O-Fish©, but the last time I ate one it wasn’t made out of a single goldfish. Heck, I think the last time I ordered one was sometime during the Bush Administration. Which one? Much like Bill Clinton, I can’t remember which Bush because there were too many. Back then it was a full-sized sandwich, but at some point, it became bite-sized.

I could come up with more examples from other companies, but that one will do. Keep this in mind: McDonald’s is now a luxury food. Are McDonald’s™ sales number up? Sure! Prices have doubled. But I haven’t been there in months (which is probably good for me) due to my inability to rationalize the idea that a Big Mac™ meal costs more than a pound of ribeye steak.

I can spell panda with just two letters: P and A.

What’s the outcome? Middle class people aren’t going to restaurants nearly as much, which is causing them to fail. Examples abound:

TGI Fridays® is closing 36 locations
Applebee’s™ closed up to 35 locations last year
Outback® has closed down 41 locations

Middle class people are now too poor to go to these restaurant chains. Period. Inflation has priced them out and wages, held down by continual streams of illegal aliens have not kept up.

This is part of the slow, creeping third worldism showing up in the United States.

Over the span of 26 years, where does this take us?

Why did Napoleon escape exile? He didn’t have enough Elba room.

My answer is that, just like France before the Revolution couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after Napoleon, and just like the Spanish who brought the great heaps of gold and silver back to Spain thought it was going to be totally awesome (el awesomo, I think is the Spanish translation), our first world wealth is rapidly slipping away.

The next twenty years will be, generally, poorer in the United States and in the West. The good news, however, is poorer equals poorer, not necessarily unhappier. Who knows, we might even be happier if we lose the Internet and can’t access TikTok© anymore.