Category: Complacency

Trump’s Recession: Aimed At The Left

“But the dream is collapsing!” – Inception

When I was in high school I tried to bungie jump from the school flag pole.  I failed, and ended up being suspended.

We are witnesses at the biggest collapse of a political movement since the fall of the Soviet Union.  As then, it was a GloboLeftist organization bent on world domination.  In this case, it’s the infestation of the GloboLeft mind virus in Western Civilization

The collapse is not yet complete – the liberation of Europe and Australia/New Zealand is still in the future, but I have hopes that will happen for reasons I’ll outline below, as well as the hope that was rekindled in me when I heard Rosie O’Donnell had moved to Ireland.

First, why is the GloboLeft collapsing?  They were winning and on the cusp of winning in a “forever” way.  They had the institutions:  colleges, the educational establishment, the foundations, congress, the military leadership, big business, and most of the court system.

And yet it is all unravelling at a rapid pace.

Again, why?

First and foremost, it’s because the GloboLeft want to lose.  They have always placed themselves in the role of the “plucky resistance” to power.  Note that when the latest Star Wars™ trilogy came out, the GloboLeftists at Disney© wrote it as if The Return of the Jedi never existed.

If there’s one thing that GloboLeftists love to do, it’s use either Star Wars® or Marvel™ movies as a metaphor.  How many times did you see the GloboLeft flocking around some strained X® metaphor where Donald Trump was Thanos™?

Yeah, a lot.

GloboLeftists should become Buddhist monks.  The more “ohms” they have, the more resistance. (meme as found) 

But while the behavior of the GloboLeft is based on pure hatred, however, that hatred is mainly a hatred of themselves.  This hatred has made the GloboLeft the champions of everything that a Death Cult would want.

Want proof?  Their actions speak more loudly than the reeeeeee of a feminist on a slut walk:

  • Throwing themselves in front of traffic as a form of protest, daring drivers to run over them. This is not something that a person who has any desire for self-preservation does.
  • Treating abortion as the highest of sacraments. Women have aborted more children since 1972 than every death ever in every war, and people march for it.   Yay death!
  • Wanting to have Zero Population Growth©, at least in white populations living in traditionally white countries.
  • Wanting to destroy all of society so that it can be decarbonized. You know, because wanting to burn it all down is a healthy emotion.
  • Welcoming invaders from the cultures in the world that are the most different and share the least with their own culture as if this is normal and good. This is because people who live in Somalian Sharia states and Colombian Cartel communities are just the same as the people from Modern Mayberry.

I guess a Vietnamese equivalent to “John Doe” is “Hu Dat”?

This is because GloboLeftists blame those people and things closest to themselves, first.  This happens in roughly this order:

  • Themselves, which is why nearly half of GloboLeftist women have a diagnosed mental disorder.
  • Their family, which is why they so often have gone no-contact over the smallest of slights.
  • Tradition, which makes them welcome anything alien and degenerate, and reject principles that have worked for humanity for thousands of years.
  • Their country, which they want to watch be either destroyed or burned to the ground.
  • Their race – how many white girls Xeet© “I hate all white people” or some variant phrase? By definition, does this mean that white girls hate white girls the most?
  • Their species. Why else do they want to destroy us so the world can heal?  What would solving Global Warming Climate Change matter if humanity wasn’t there to enjoy it?

Trump made this visible to the Normies.  The silly positions of the GloboLeft are now on display for everyone to see.  Men are women?  Truth is a lie?  Strength is weakness?  Perhaps one of the most telling moments for the GloboLeft was a single line in Trump’s recent address to a joint session of congress:

“We didn’t need new laws [to stop illegal aliens], all we just needed was a new president.”

What happens when the normies realize that the GloboLeft are Agent Smith?

The GloboLeft hasn’t figured this one out yet, either.  They’re currently working on “messaging”.  What is messaging?  It’s an attempt to effectively package their positions so that they can be communicated to the voters, but it’s as useful to them as lipstick is useful to Rosie O’Donnell.

I’ll give them this bit of political advice, for free:

It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the ideas that are wrong.  The people have rejected them, and are overwhelmingly rejecting them.  The pretty little lies they tried to peddle:

  • Men are no different than women,
  • Chinese are no different than Indians who are no different than the French,
  • Being a woman is something anyone can be,
  • Spending ourselves to prosperity is a reality, and
  • The United States should be the one paying to stop AIDS in Africa, rather than letting Africans figure what causes it.

This comes with change.  One of those changes has and will be in economics.  I believe that Trump is, right now, working to create a very selective recession, and that recession is among the GloboLeft.

Will it ensnare folks on the TradRight?  Certainly, it will.  But I’d imagine that 96% plus of the employees at USAID™ were so GloboLeftist that they woke up in the morning mad that the communist famines haven’t started yet.

How is a punchline like a starving communist?  If you spend too much time explaining it, it dies.

The cuts in the Education Department won’t actually impact education in the United States, but it will end up with thousands of people who were committed to getting that LGBT+ message out to the kindergartener set losing jobs and having to consider how they can positively impact society.  Ha!  Just kidding.  They’ll try to figure out a new grift.

This recession will end up, I believe, breaking the back of inflation while gutting those jobs that the GloboLeft death cult infested.  DEI is disappearing, and I, for one, can’t wait until I’m driving in a major city and see some blue-haired beast holding a sign that says, “Will make you hate the white race for food”.

I also know that she hates being without Cheetos®.

Hmmm, who will pick those crops after the illegal aliens are sent to the El Salvadoran prisons?

I can only guess, but I think there is a chance that we’ll have a much brighter economic future with GloboLeft defanged.

Is there a long, long way to go in the long hike toward our inevitable victory?

There is.  And it’s not time to set up camp just yet.

I, for one, don’t want to stop until the very ideas that were at the heart of the GloboLeft have been so reviled that children cry when they hear about their excesses.

Oh, and Ireland?  You can keep Rosie O’Donnell as our gift.

Unrelated:  the last witch burning in Ireland was on March 15, 1895.

Still better than when my deck is covered with waterfowl from Lisbon.  No one likes the Porch-o-geese.

Read On To See That You Don’t Have To Care

“I know there’s no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care.” – V for Vendetta

I asked what was on the menu, and they said Himalayan Rabbit.  The waiter said they found Himalayan on the road.

It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything.  Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:

  • Ukraine versus Russia.
  • Palestine versus Israel.
  • Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
  • Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.

And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant.   I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.

I’ll take a controversial opinion:  I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me.  And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.

Did he name the ear he didn’t cut off Van Stay?

Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it.  News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion.  Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information.

I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details.  I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy:  what are the facts of the situation?

Another corollary:  if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away?  Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place?

Not really.  And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.

But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them.  I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.

Never eat a Monopoly® board.  It tastes gamey.

We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe.  People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game.  But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares.  In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants.

That has ceased.  Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral.  I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.

I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity.  Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.

Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders.  Just not our borders.  Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction?   Not a problem.

Oh, Europe.  I’d say, “never change” to you but I can’t write Arabic script.

But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?

Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up.

I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians.  And no one can make me care.

Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go.  If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another.

By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.

The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about.  The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20th century.  Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin.  Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao.

It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.

Since eggs are more expensive now, are people more likely to poach them?

One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic.  I guess I can see that.  Ma Wilder cared what I thought.  Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet.

What’s next?

From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him.  Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador.  Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint.

I’m sure those prisoners will soon be El Salvadorable.

Now, not so much.  Why?  The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right.  When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.

Me, I care about our borders first.  And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®.

What Will Come From The Current Recession?

“No tomorrow?  That means there’d be no consequences.  No hangovers.  We could do whatever we wanted!” – Groundhog Day

An economist falls off a cliff.  During the fall, he notes, “So far, so good.  It’s different this time.  Soft landing ahead!”

Note:  no podcast this week.  Hoping to have a new computer that can hear things as soon as my staff gets the specifications together.

Last week I let on that I thought a recession was coming.  I mean, I always think a recession is coming, so that was no big surprise, but it looks like from preliminary data that the economy is actually contracting this quarter, so, if we match it with one more quarter of contraction that’s the textbook definition of a recession.  Or maybe the economy is having a baby.  I slept through that part of health class.

It is a long-used trick of sitting presidents to treat the economy like a 1980s high school kegger in order to get re-elected.  The plan is generally simple:  lower interest rates, make great big troughs of money available, and, bada-bing, the economy is bada-booming on election day and the cheerleaders are doing keg stands.

Nixon mastered this with his re-election bid in 1972.

Well, add the hangover from Nixon’s economic Everclear™ to the crude oil embargo (thanks, Israel) and the result was the miasma of suck that was the 1970s economy – stagflation.  Every president has done some variation of this act since then, with varying degrees of success, but since 2000 or so, each president has tried to avoid all of the consequences of the Boozing.  How?  Boozing some more.

And I heard they were banning cheese in Great Britain.  Or at least extra sharp cheddar.

I’m guessing that one can avoid a hangover by staying drunk all the time, though I don’t have personal experience in attempting that strategy.  Although it is probably more enjoyable than a hangover, there are always consequences to replacing all of your blood with ethanol.

There is a difference with this current economic hangover that we’re working on because, first, we’ve been drinking soooooo long.  Like I said, this has been going on since at least 2000.

So, there’s that.  But that’s not the only thing impacting the economy right now.

Another major factor is Trump.  I think, like many people, Trump sees the size of the national debt and knows that this can’t go on.  He’s also a guy who has nothing at all to lose.  He can shoot the Moon and try to go for all of it.

He’s doing exactly that.  Tariffs?  As I’ve written before, when the United States had tariffs, we were a strong economy with manufacturing.  Post WW2, when we went away from tariffs to help the rest of the world rebuild out of the rubble?  Not so much.

If Trump puts tariffs on Canadian goods, no one can say he has ties to Poutine.

Trump’s America also (so far) is an America that wants peace.  For decades we’ve been shadowboxing against Russia, which is like Hulk Hogan™ attempting to defeat a room full of kittens.  I mean, jeez, Hulk®, their eyes aren’t even open yet.  Russia is not a threat to the United States.  Except for the nukes.

Others want war, though.  The neocons and people like Victoria Zoolander want war the in the Ukraine, probably because Russia gave them a wedgie in the 1980s or because they have Raytheon© stock.  I saw one Canadian tweet, “Well played, Americans, look at all of the billions of dollars in weapons you won’t get to sell.”

To be clear, I’m all in favor of weapons, just ask The Mrs. when I make goo-goo eyes at a .50 cal.  I think every father should be given their choice of an M2 or an M60.  But to try to mock the United States for not getting profits on weapons that are killing people, right now?

That’s . . . disturbing.

Also as a factor, in Trump’s America government is likely to be D.O.G.E.’d into shrinking for the first time since we demobilized from World War II.  When that happened, we transitioned more-or-less seamlessly into the economic boom of the 1950s, but it didn’t hurt that the rest of the world was like Sergeant Hulka:  “All blown up, sir!”

This shrinking government sector will take the heat off of inflation in many things, but tariffs will raise prices.  Where it ends up is uncertainty.

Who doesn’t like uncertainty?  Wall Street®.

Physicists should never look down at their speedometers.  If they do, they’ll have no idea where they are.

The final big factor in this recession is that the insiders who have been putting the Bacardi 151™ into the punch bowl for all these decades don’t want to help Trump.  That’s probably a good thing.  The more government meddling into the economy, the longer it normally takes to shake itself back into order.

I want the recession to be:

Short.

Sharp.

Cleansing.

Like hangovers, recessions are painful.  They can wreck lives.  But they are required to clean out the economy from time to time.

And the economy hasn’t been cleaned out in forever.  Some areas where it really does need a bit of sprucing up:

  • Government.
  • Banks.
  • Real Estate.
  • Manufacturing.
  • Education,

These spring cleanings will be painful.  A lot of people in these industries are out there doing the important work of going to Zoom™ meetings and making PowerPoints©, rather than engaging in useless tasks like growing and making food, or fixing potholes, or picking up the trash.

So, yes, this is probably a recession coming.  The Government-Media-Education complex will certainly try to blame Trump, just as they tried to blame him on day two that he hadn’t yet fixed all of Biden’s booby traps.

Is the most popular red wine in prison Penal Noir?

To be clear, Trump will be partially at fault, but if the result is a true cleansing of the economy?  It will be worth it.  Now, where’s that black coffee?

Trump’s Axe

“By this axe, I rule!” – Kull the Conqueror

My email password has been hacked.  This is the third time I had to rename my cat.

Last week I talked about the relative economic effects of the Great Government Purge of 2025-2026.  Unlike Stalin’s Purge, the winners don’t get a bullet, instead they get a severance check and unemployment.  Regardless, that’s not fun for the people involved, especially good people who are doing useful work for the Republic.

But it might be necessary.

There are two ways to combat waste and ideological rot.  Trump tried using a scalpel during in his first term, cutting carefully, and here and there.

The impact of his efforts was minimal.  Slightly fewer regulations that would later be made by the same bureaucrats that voted for Her® and the dotard Biden was the sum of all of his efforts.  He was stopped at every turn by internal bureaucratic resistance, asking for clarifications and just ignoring Trump as if he were the terms and conditions on a piece of software.

If a Gnome is a pimp, does he manage the garden hoes?

Once Biden showed up, however, the bureaucracy reacted like a Ferrari™, purring along as whoever was actually running the government instead of Biden made requests that were instantly carried out.  Also, like a Ferrari©, it spilled fluids everywhere, but enough of “Rachel” Levine.

Then they shot at Trump after trying six different ways to put him in prison or impoverish him.

That changes a guy.

Coming in to this administration, he threw the scalpel away and picked up an axe.  During the first 40 days, he’s put out 68 executive orders.  The axe has been aimed squarely at GloboLeftist and sex-fetishist activist enclaves, secret slush funds for GloboLeftist causes, and regulatory fortresses.

The rot is deep:  it’s been growing for more than a century and excision’s the only shot left.

The rot started where most bad things in the United States start, around the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve™ and the income tax.  The income tax was promised to only impact the very wealthy, but that was, to put it charitably, a big fat lie.

Allergies around here are so bad in springtime that the tweakers turn their meth back into Sudafed™.

The income tax was used first to fund a war, then a growing bureaucracy, then another war.  Along the way, sometime in the 1930s, the obsession with secrecy began.  Our war against Germany and Japan really did require a strong secrecy culture – having the Germans know when we were going to invade Normandy, or even that Normandy was a target would have led to failure.

And, yeah, we didn’t really want everyone to know how to make nukes, though the Rosenbergs felt differently.  Before they fried differently.

But post-WWII, the state swelled to win a war, then never shrank because it had to fight a Cold War.  The New Deal also bled seamlessly into the Great Society, birthing a permanent caste of deskbound overlords who could define the future of a business through a stroke of a pen or the press of a typewriter key.

By the ’70s, agencies like NSA and CIA ballooned under “national security”.  Secrecy became a shield, while accountability a ghost.  MKUltra?  It’s a real thing that happened, and our tax dollars were spent on this top secret program.  Why are the JFK files still redacted sixty years later?

Why does the CIA maintain that the formula for invisible ink (lemon juice) is still a national secret?

Is a line of people waiting to buy that doll for girls a Barbiqueue ?

Yes, I can see the reason to have secrets.  But we should have about 12 of them.  Which 12?  I don’t know, but the never-ending, overlapping security state needs something to function:  an enemy.  The rest of the secrets?  We put them where no one would look:  in the middle of a Disney® movie.

I can’t see that we have one.  Russia?  Putin asked to join NATO in 2000.  Are the Russians a bit skeevy?  Sure they are.  Are they a threat to us?  Only in a nuclear fashion.  After the end of the Cold War, there was no reason not to welcome Russia warmly into the host of nations.  We didn’t.

Why?

The national security state needed an enemy, and it couldn’t be China because Clinton was too busy giving them all of our missile tech and hiring Chinese nationals into the security state so they could take hard drives of all of our secrets back to China.

The GloboLeft has also hijacked the security state.  Ideologues wormed in—trans-activists at NSA, DEI czars at DoD —while “secret” programs metastasized, cloaking rot in classified ink.  Secrecy’s a double-edged blade: it really is vital for real threats (SIGINT), but a dark wet rotting swamp where sunlight never shines for that is more wedded to itself than the people it swore to serve.

“Let me tell you:  you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at (sic) getting back at you,” said Chuck Schumer.  Why is it that politicians should fear the intelligence community?

Guess that makes me the pot.

The purge redraws the map: the bureaucratic blob shrinks.  Keep in mind it’s not just the wages paid, it’s also all of those regulators writing regulations that lower competition and increase costs.  When the initial pollution regulations hit, they got rid of 90% plus of the pollution very quickly and cost effectively.

Getting the last 0.1% of the pollution?  Often this is crazy expensive and provides no real benefit.  Remember how many jobs were lost because of the . . . snail darter, the spotted owl, and that time Oprah went on a diet.

Redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and now regulators get even more power, and everything you consume increases in price.  The people who have all of the climate “solutions”?  They are the GloboLeftElite.

The axe is required.

Most of the curtains on our “secret” nation should lift.  What survives has to earn the right to stay in the shadows.  GloboLeft ideologues in federal service that don’t serve the people should be rooted out and given the opportunity to find a way to add value to the world.

Yet there’s a goal in here:  a leaner state, loyal to the people, not its own girth or Dear Leader.

You can understand now why the cat is angry.

A century of rot, non-American ideologues and secrets are being sliced away.  There will be chaos, as we find that, “Oh, no, we really needed to have air traffic controllers” and as this necessarily blunt instrument hacks through some good things to save the whole.

It’s ugly.  It’s necessary.  And it might just be enough.

All without building a single GULAG.  Besides, that wouldn’t work on GloboLeftists.  They need REEEEEEEEE-education.

Inside The Machine: How The Left Created A Manipulation Machine, And How Musk And Trump Broke It

“He knows too well how to manipulate the mob.” – Gladiator

I did know a 6’6” psychic who manipulated the stock market. He was a tall medium who shorts.

It’s rare that The Mrs. texts me an article, so rare that years go by between texts containing links. In this case, the article The Mrs. texted me was Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, from Tablet® magazine (LINK). I’d never heard of the author, David Samuels, but it’s likely he’s never heard of me, either, so we were tied on that count.

The piece dives into how the mainstream machine seduced the American electorate and how normie voters finally snapped out of it. It’s looooong, and I’ve got a different spin on what broke the spell. This isn’t a review—it’s my take, sparked by Samuels’ fire.

So here we go – this isn’t so much a review, but rather a self-contained post inspired by Mr. Samuels’ article.

Mankind was once an oral civilization. The stories that we told were handed down from one mouth to another around campfires under the stars. The stories that came down are still spoken of, and remnants of that civilization remain in the names of stars with names so ancient we have no idea where they came from, like Canopus.

Over time, though, we invented writing because we needed to write down tax regulations, and for a time we became a literate civilization, with people moving far away from the preceding oral civilization. This had some pretty significant impacts, the biggest of which was the great increase of words available to the human vocabulary. In an oral civilization, each member of the tribe knows all (or almost all) of the words that exist in the language.

In a literate civilization, these words can be written down, and there is space for new words to be added that are beyond the capacity of the average dude to remember. Language got complex. That let us think bigger, and writing smashed space and time. A Greek could read about Alexander’s exploits in far Persia, and that same account would be available for centuries or even millennia if properly stored.

As a literate people, we produced many of the finest works of art, science, and literature in human history. Don’t forget, the Greeks and the Romans were similarly a literate society in the upper strata, and you can clearly see that when literate society devolved away, so did the culture and art it created.

Reading takes time. The average person’s reading speed is 200 to 250 words per minute, though obviously the complexity of the text and the complexity of the thoughts expressed can speed up or slow down the input rate.

Kim Jong Un is just like Dominos® Pizza – they can both deliver a crispy Hawaiian in less than 30 minutes.

Although watching television takes even more time (about 135 words per minute output) it requires far less effort than reading, so the person is much less engaged on a logical level, but the addition of pictures engages the person at an emotional level. Going further into the future, the Internet introduced the meme to common culture in around the year 2000.

The meme is an emotion laden image with a brief text around it to give context. It’s basically a cave painting along with the story that Uncle Grug wanted to tell.

Yes. 4000 years from cave painting to cave painting.

This really did revolutionize the way that people took in information. Gone were long articles with complex language, and back were literally the shortest bits of coherent thought, emotion and a short message. Guttenberg’s press was no match for iPhone® screens and Grumpy Cat.

I found an old Gutenberg Bible but had to throw it away. Some guy named Martin Luther had scribbled notes all over it.

This is a fundamental change in the way that information is given, and as we transition back from a literary to an oral culture, people actually think less, and think in less complex ways. There is an opening built upon this simplification for manipulation.

Of course, someone would use this change in information as a tool to manipulate public opinion just as the radio was used prior to World War II, as television was used in Vietnam, and as cable news was used by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II for their manipulations. The Internet was the next iteration, and of course politicians would use it to create and disseminate propaganda on the largest and quickest scale in history. The first real person to use this immense power inherent in the ascendency of the social networks, Samuels maintains, was Obama.

Why Obama? The iPhone® really was the game changer when combined with social media. It made ideas shorter and self-contained, but also made them immediate with the advent of social media that wasn’t quite ripe when Bush II was president.

Obama created a machine that provided information. It pulsed. The idea was simple, and I’ve sketched it out a bit in another post but here it is in much deeper detail.

First – an event occurs. AP® or some other news outlet reports the facts. Now, if the facts don’t support the Narrative, they are brutally suppressed – they’re just not reported on. There was a mass murder where The Mrs. and I lived, and it was reported in the local papers and on the radio. It was horrific. Was it covered nationwide? No. When the family went to go visit my in-laws, they had not heard of this horrific mass murder at all even though they only lived 90 miles from the murders.

Why?

The killers were black and the victims were white. They couldn’t cover up the mass murder locally, but nationally? They shut it down. Even regionally all reporting was shut down, because this didn’t fit the erroneous idea that only white people were serial killers.

This event may be a real story, or something manipulated to be a story – it’s here that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) stage events that “make news” or are magnified. Think about the George Floyd death as one such event.

If you found out your wife wanted to dissect people from Southeast Asia, would you cut Thais with her?

Second – that event is interpreted in a way that fits with the Narrative. Events which are at odds with the Narrative are suppressed. The central clearing house is generally the New York Times, which uses experts from various NGOs and “think tanks” to further refine how the event fits the Narrative. The prestige of the experts of the various NGOs are validated because they’re respected by people from . . . other NGOs.

Words like ‘false’ and ‘baseless’ tag stories—‘baseless mRNA vaccine injury claims’ or ‘false vote fraud accusations’—to smother anything off-Narrative. The idea of an impartial news media is dead, and now j-schools are teaching young reporters that they should be activists as well as reporters. I’d bet that the NGOs are part of making those suggestions.

The secret sauce in this step is based on David Axelrod’s strategy of making people change their opinion based upon convincing people to act based on how they wanted to be seen by others. In essence, the entire GloboLeftistElite strategy is based on virtue signaling.

Who does this work most stunningly well on? Unmarried white women, hard-core leftists, and people not paying attention much to politics. These are clearly shown in the exit polls, and a study I read on virtue signaling point out that: women virtue signal because that’s a core part of what they generally do – group membership is absolutely a survival mechanism for women. Hard core leftists are often atheists, and their morality is, shall we say, often fluid. Finally, people not paying attention want to be thought of as having a good reputation, so virtue signaling is a cheap way to maintain that reputation.

Third – media outlets report the interpreted event out – the bigger the event, the harder the push. The Late Night TV Funny Joke Men like Colbert and Kimmel join on. The message is slickly packaged, but the language is the same from everyone. How did the words “Russian Asset” get in everyone’s mouth at the exact same time?

It’s simple. They read the memo.

Fourth – repeat and grow the Narrative to make sure it remains an accepted fact to the targets being manipulated. Note, that the Narrative doesn’t have to be internally consistent. For instance, we must utterly cater to racial differences. But there are no races. We must also respect the rights of women. Oh, and a woman is absolutely anyone who says they’re a woman.

What comprises the Narrative is less important than that it serve the purpose of the moment. The Narrative changes over time: free speech was the stated goal of the GloboLeftElite in the early 1970s, but now free speech must be controlled.

That control of speech? That’s the last part of the process.

Fifth – deplatform anyone who tries to tell any story that is counter to the Narrative.

Silicon Valley was, at least in its early days, a libertarian enterprise. The entire industry was about conquering a space where there weren’t any rules. To the extent that libertarians identify with a major political party, it’s generally the Right since the Right typically wants fewer rules.

In 2012, however, the maturing industry was taken in by the GloboLeft and bought into the Narrative. When Trump was elected, they became part of the machine.

The Narrative is a very fragile thing, and since it’s fragile, the one thing it can’t stand is scrutiny. One of the wonderful things that the Internet allowed early on were comments sections. Comment sections are wonderful because they often add more information to a news story, and give a direct voice to the readers impacted by the news.

That’s intolerable. So, comment sections have to go.

Do sardines think submarines are just cans of people?

It then moved into Twitter™. Anyone not expressing opinions against the Narrative or any component thereof would be banned. Question the safety of mRNA? Banned. Question the official story of the origin of COVID? Banned. Question the 2020 election results? Banned. Show information from Hunter Biden’s laptop? Banned.

On the laptop, they even got 51 former U.S. intelligence officials to say that Russia did it.

Then, Twitter© even banned the sitting president of the United States. Reddit© is still (in 2025!) banning communities where badthink takes place.

To quote the Tablet article, this “structure is neither modern nor conservative,” but . . .

“Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong.”

Elon broke the machine by allowing actual free speech on X®, and cleared the way for Trump’s landslide.

Why did he do it? Was it power? Was it the best way to get to Mars? Regardless, the illusion of the machine is toast.

How? The machine made people believe things that were silly. The machine fed people silly crap —‘men in dresses are women’—and now they’re pretending they never bought it. Memes laid it bare: short, sharp, and too raw for the Narrative’s lies. Once fooled, at least some normies question everything now. That’s good.

A large part of the machine being broken now is that Trump is moving too fast for the machine to cope with his initiatives, and he’s throwing in ragebait to drive the GloboLeft conformity persuasion machine crazy. On offensive, Trump is moving so fast that they can’t initiate the second phase listed above to drive people to conformity.

Maybe next year Trump will rename it to Sea Seῆor.

Besides, X® is now close to indistinguishable from /pol/ in the ability to share almost any opinion again. I don’t know if it’s entirely the algorithm, but when I see a GloboLeftist try to advance the Narrative on X©, the responses with Narrative-breaking comments is immediate and utterly complete. Spin no longer works and the conformity persuasion machine is stuck because it’s clogged with Greenland Redwhiteandblueland and the Gulf of America, both of which are perfectly tuned to drive GloboLeftists nuts.

The conformity persuasion machine is broken, not destroyed. Destroying it entirely would require destroying the government/think tank/NGO complex, which Trump is working on. Likewise, the media is sick and since the Internet has destroyed a lot of its revenue, and X™ really is the biggest news aggregator on the planet. When an event happens, I go to X® now to find out what’s going on.

Unless The Mrs. texts me about it. And, I wonder if people in the distant future will look from the City of Musk on Mars into the night sky and wonder why one of the moons of Mars is named Trump?

Movies, Foreigners, Blazing Saddles, And The Fight For Your Mind

“Come on, Mick, it’s network propaganda.  We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t helped us.” – The Running Man

Come to mention it, I ordered a book called “How to Scam People Online” a month ago and it still hasn’t shown up.

The monthly movie retrospective that I do the last week of the month has been a fairly popular part of the blog and has really given me some time to think about the content of the movies that we’ve seen in the past, and what it really means.

Before the 1970s, sequels weren’t the norm.  Gradually sequels became popular.  A large part of that is failure – the sequels usually made money, though in almost every case less money than the original.  But they would make money, even if they were crappy.

Making sequels lowered the perceived risk a studio was taking.

The other factor in play is that the revenue streams changed.  How many Chinese people in Mao’s China lined up to see Jaws?  None.  Zero.  I’d imagine the same was true of Star Wars.  Revenues from China in the 1970s.  From what mud hut theater?  Paid in what?  Chickens?

Now, the goal is to create a product for the world stage.  and to go through the Marvel Cinematic Universe™ you could spend sixty or more hours on the thirty-five MCU® movies alone, even skipping their television spinoffs.  But the audience was different.  Avengers:  Infinity Wars made $680 million in the United States and the 51st state, Canada, but made nearly $1.4 billion overseas.  Contrast that with Star Wars, where about 70% of the revenue came from the 51 United States.

I guess that was a wookie mistake.

Some movies are utter failures in the United States but achieve profitability only when international revenues are included.  The very odd Matt Damon movie The Great Wall (2017) made only $45 million of its $289 million total in the United States, but made $171 million in China, who now had movie theaters and no longer paid in chickens.

Movies have changed, dramatically, because they’re no longer made just for American audiences.  Sequels help here, because they allow foreign people to see the same characters again and again.  So, movies have changed because the audience has changed.  And, if you’ll note, the international audience is almost always much more leftist (though not necessarily GloboLeft) than Americans.

Making movies for foreign audiences automatically moves them into a more socialist frame since foreigners are more socialist.

The one time they selected me for jury duty they gave us snacks.  Trial mix.

But subversion in the American cinema goes way back, because the GloboLeftElite have had their fingers in propaganda forever.  One example is 1957’s 12 Angry Men, starring GloboLeftist subversive Henry Fonda.

I had never seen 12 Angry Men, so when it showed up on my “Up Next For You” list on the television while writing.  By the time I was done, I was amazingly angry.  12 Angry Men was subversive, highlighting how awful Americans were casting us as stereotypes filled with bias, prejudice, or disinterest.  Keep in mind this was made at the time that McCarthy (who was right, by the way) was being lampooned for being biased and prejudiced against communists.  The disinterested were an indictment of capitalism.

This was a movie where the circumstances were so contrived in order to play on emotion, not facts.  How bad is this movie?  During the movie, Henry Fonda’s character absolutely breaks the law by introducing new evidence into the jury room.  This is illegal, precisely because it now takes the process of introducing evidence into open court for all to see and puts it behind closed doors.  Sounds like everything that GloboLeftElites love.

When I watched it, I got pretty angry, and wanted to see if anyone else had the same reaction.  Here’s Proper Horrorshow with a discussion about just what I saw:

To be clear, if I watched 12 Angry Men 20 years ago, I probably would have missed the anti-Americanism that the movie is drenched in.  But after years of having woke slammed into my face?  My antenna were up, and I couldn’t have missed it.

The bad part of German navigation systems is that whenever you want to go to France, you have to go through Belgium.

Blazing Saddles was similarly subversive.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a hoot the half-dozen times I’ve watched it, but it is at its core a GloboLeftist exercise.  One of my friends recently said, “They couldn’t make this movie today.”

My response was rather pointed, “Why not?  Exactly what part of the movie would reflect a value that the people who run Hollywood wouldn’t love?  Is it the normalization of gays?  Is it the race-swapping of the sheriff?  Is it the interracial romance?  Is it the “make fun of white guys as much as you want, but don’t mock a single minority”?  Was it shooting a hole in a Bible?  ”

No.  It’s racial slurs.  But those racial slurs were used to make . . . a white guy look racist, so even those might make the cut.

Please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have such a stick up my backside as to be unable to laugh at jokes aimed at me, especially funny jokes.  But I recognize it.  Turn the sheriff white and everyone else be black.  Would the jokes about all the black townsfolk being stupid still be funny?

Now that is a movie one couldn’t make today.

What font is on Wyatt Earp’s tombstone?  Sans Sheriff.

The last one I’ll bring up for now is Pleasantville.  This 1998 movie set the stage for the Woke revolution and is a ideal bookend to the vile 12 Angry Men.

I really hate this movie.  It is the worst sort of subversion.  The plot is that 1990s kids (Brother and Sister) get sucked into a Leave it to Beaver-type television show set in the 1950s.  Their lives are in black and white.  Literally.  That’s not the only thing that gets sucked, since after Sister has sex with a guy, instead of being in black and white, he goes into color.  When Sister tells a high school girl how to pleasure herself, she goes into color.  A malt shop owner paints a nude on the window of his malt shop.

The result?

Color.

The message is clear.  Living in a society like the 1950s where people practiced restraint is so boring.  Live your life.  Remember, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is from Aleister Crowley’s, not the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

The Mrs. asked me if she had any bad habits, but then had the nerve to get offended by the PowerPoint® presentation.

Pleasantville is anything but.  Obviously, critics loved it.  Thankfully, audiences hated it, turning Pleasantville into a big failure.

Pleasantville failed because it was too big of an ask to audiences in 1998.  It asked them to fully give in to whatever deviant thought they had in the moment and, in fact, to embrace that deviance.  Be proud of that deviance.

Hmm.  Proud.  Pride month.  Got it.

In 2025?  It’s not a challenge at all to find subversion in almost any movie.  The rot has come more to the top, and it has killed the industry, since no one wants the crap anymore and people are done with watching the 37th Marvel™ Cinematic Universe© movie.

Some might say that entertainment is downstream from culture, but how much, really, of our culture is driven by propaganda as entertainment?

Why Do They Want To Replace You? Control, Oh, And To Increase This Quarter’s Profits

“I am Iron Man.  The suit and I are one.  To turn over the Iron Man suit would be to turn over myself, which is tantamount to indentured servitude or prostitution – depending on what state you’re in.” – Iron Man 2

What’s the difference between an Indian and an African elephant?  One’s an elephant.

I had intended to keep the posts between now and the next Civil War 2.0 update fairly light in content – fewer serious topics and more just “fun” stuff.  But, no matter how much I try to get out, they keep dragging me back in.  What inspired this post was the brutal civil war on X© this week over H-1B visas.

The H-1B visa program is a program that was (originally) set up to bring in workers in extremely specialized jobs, which required a unique talent or body of knowledge.  Very specifically, the intent wasn’t to displace Americans (it says) but rather help employers who cannot otherwise find these skills.

No shortage of American rock star students here . . . .

Obviously, that’s government bullshit, and the program is one of the most abused government programs, which says quite a bit.

Who abuses it?

Mainly people from India – Indian companies and Indian workers, though plenty of “American” companies abuse the program as well.

How?

Well, Indian companies abuse the program by being consultancies:  they essentially air drop in tens of thousands of Indians who they’ll rent to you so that they can do whatever it is you want them to do:  accounting, programming, or running a cash register.

Running a cash register is a specialized skill that Americans can’t do?  Yes, if you believe a company up in the Northeast which applied to sponsor $22,000 a year convenience store clerks on H-1B visas.

But, like I said, “American” companies abuse the system, too.  In 2014, 250 American IT employees at Disney World© were laid off, but they were forced to train their Indian H-1B replacements.  Want to know why I have a beef with Disney®?  This is certainly a part of it.

Musk defended this program, noting that it should have a minimum wage of (he said) at least $120,000 to keep up with inflation.  I looked up the H-1B workers he employed at Tesla® in Austin, Texas.  The process engineers were making in the low $80,000s.  Not bad, right?  Well, it is when you compare them to the national average, which is $94,000.  Elon’s hires aren’t the 0.01% “rock stars”.  Nope, he’s hiring a garage band that you can pay in weed and porn magazines that will sleep on the sofa.

To be fair, this latter analysis assumes that “Indians” are a homogeneous population, and it’s likely that there are subgroups with higher I.Q.  Is this the basis of the caste system?  That would bring the numbers up, some, but the lower castes would likely have much lower functional I.Q. to make up the difference.  I’d consider this the lowest number of Indians with an I.Q. greater than 130.  I’d suggest the population could be in the low millions.  Final note:  I’d be that my readers come mostly from America’s 8 million (along with some wonderful foreign people!).

Vivek Ramanotanamerican further came out with a long, impassioned screed where he says that American culture “has venerated mediocrity over excellence”.  To be clear, Vivek’s company seems to be founded on a bit of a scam (LINK), and has consistently lost large sums of money.  He’s also 100% cratered his political future by telling Americans being replaced by folk of his ethnicity that they’re lazy.

That is another glaring point that we simply have to bring up:  India, as a country, is kind of awful and they don’t like us very much.  There’s a game that I’ve heard some people play, which involves going on Google® Streetview™ in a random place in India.  How do you win?  If no trash or poop is visible in the random place, you win.  Despite trying a dozen times today, I was unable to win.  As to Indians not liking us much, see all the love that some Indians have for us below:

The Indian culture itself is a kleptocracy where bribery and corruption appear to be endemic.  Why do scammers in India target the United States?  Because they ran out of Indians to scam.  Per the U.S. Department of State, politicians and public “servants” are openly corrupt and never charged with crimes because no one wants to fund anti-corruption investigators.  Why spoil the party?

How bad its it?  One report notes that Swiss bank assets held by Indian nationals are worth 13 times the national debt.  When the Indians aren’t engages in trying to scam Americans for gift cards, they’re busy scamming themselves.  Oh, and those Indian scammer businesses?  When found, they’re never prosecuted.  Why bother?  No Indian was harmed.  And, according to this speech (LINK) given by an actual Indian, Jayant Bhandari, India is far worse than you think.  An article version is also available at American Renaissance® – warning, AMREN is likely banned by your work (link directly below) and will get you a visit from your HR if you click it and don’t own the place.

India: It’s Worse Than You Think

So, of places we want to emulate, India is probably the very last, and if we fill America with Indians, it won’t be America anymore – it’ll just be another India, and nobody (not even the Indians) want that.  And if America is just an idea, why can’t they have that idea over there, rather than coming to the United States?

But part of the corrosion from the H-1B program is that ghost jobs are constantly advertised, not to bring in candidates, but to bring in applications that can all be denied so that a foreign worker (they’re not all Indians, just a vast majority) can be hired for far less than an American.  I even saw some Xeets™ indicating that the reason that employers preferred the H-1B is that they never asked for time off, would work 100-hour weeks, rarely raised issues, and would happily work on the 4th of July.

So, like indentured servants?

One of the big points that Elon and his co-Xeeters™ brought up was the idea that American has to win.  No, it doesn’t, not if it isn’t America anymore.  To replace the people to win a game turns the United States into an NFL® franchise where nobody is from the city where the team plays, and everybody is swapped out on a regular basis.  Or fired.

As found.

And I know that Elon has like thirty kids from half a dozen women, but I’m not interested in swapping my children out because I can get a deal on some Asian kid that has a slightly higher SAT® score.  No, American can succeed or fail as America.  We did wonderfully in the past, slowly assimilating people of similar backgrounds and faiths, with occasional small numbers of wildcards from other cultures.  America is a Western European nation, and filling it with hordes of non-Westerners who worship blue elephant gods is a recipe for social division, which only leads to totalitarianism.

I can see bringing in true rock stars, but not 7-11® cashiers – they have to go back.  Setting a minimum salary of $200,000 to $400,000 seems about right, as long as that salary at least twice the 90th percentile for wages for that job.  Those are rock stars.

Real rock stars.  Okay, there were a few Germans in there, but those were German rock stars.

I think that Elon, after having been raked through his own website now has the understanding that Americans aren’t at all excited about being replace and having their wages artificially held down through practices that would make Indian scammers blush.  And, this is where the TradRight is the exact opposite of the GloboLeft:  when we see something worth fighting against, we fight against it.  Elon is not our leader.  Vivek is not and never will be our leader.

I like 2016 Trump.

I’ve said it before:  Trump is not our leader, either.   Trump just saw a parade, and then jumped out in front.  We will not follow him when we don’t want to go that way.  Period.  And America isn’t a franchise sweatshop where if we don’t race to the bottom on working 80-hour weeks forever, we’ll get replaced by 9 billion other economic units.

No, we won’t.  We won’t go quietly onto that goodnight.  And maybe, just maybe, Elon bought himself a clue this week.

Be vigilant.  Don’t give in.  Let your voices be heard and don’t let them backslide.

High Trust Societies, Wealth, and PEZ

“These are volatile times, Your Highness.  The American Revolution lost your father the Colonies, the French Revolution murdered brave King Louis, and there are tremendous rumblings in Prussia, although that might have something to do with the sausages.” – Black Adder the Third

What was Bismarck’s favorite Queen song?  Under Prussia.

The world that most of us grew up in was far different from the world that we’re seeing today.  Among the biggest differences is that the United States was unequivocally the strongest economic power in the world.  Couple it with the “Western” bloc of non-Soviet Europe and Japan, it was amazingly dominant. The United States even stood next to smaller nations at the urinal, right next to them even though there were other urinals open, just to show that dominance.

When people today talk about cultural appropriation, they seem to forget that it’s largely American and British Commonwealth culture that was appropriated throughout the world.  Blue jeans?  Not invented nor popularized by Commiebloc nations, nope.  Nor rock and roll.

In that Western world, there was actually a stunning lack of diversity.  Want rock and roll?  Sure you could listen to the Scorpions® from Germany, AC/DC™ from Australia, Iron Maiden© from Bongland, or Dio™ from the United States, but it was all the same root.  The western world was a very homogeneous place, filled with trust due in large part to that shared sense of purpose and values.

A Catholic friend gave up cleaning the dryer filter.  For Lent.

The level of trust probably peaked in around 1965 in the United States.  In 1965, 77% of people felt that most people in the country were trustworthy, and now it’s down to 58%.  We lived (well, those who were alive in 1965) in a high trust society that rivals the top levels of trust in the world today, sort of like Denmark but without all the smørrebrød, bicycles, and yurp-de-yur sounds.

The thing about a high trust society is that transactions are easy when we have trust in one another.  If you show up to buy a 1884 Iron Chancellor Bismarck® PEZ™ dispenser that I’ve got for sale, well, you trust me that I own the PEZ® dispenser, that it’s real, and I trust you that the check you just gave me will clear or the cash you just gave me isn’t stolen.

And if the check doesn’t clear, you trust the local cops will solve the problem for you.  They’re not corrupt, or if they are, they’re not so corrupt as to ignore crimes, especially when they involve the Franco-Prussian War Limited Series PEZ® dispenser set.  A belief that crime is low and corruption is low is the key to creating the social trust to make a high trust society.

In a high trust world, this works well.

Is a sketchy Italian neighborhood called a spaghetto?

A high trust world, though, is not an anonymous world.  Conmen from Nigeria and India use the anonymity of the Internet to create situations where they can create the relationship required, the “confidence” that is the “con” in conman.  They then prey on people based on the residual trust from their high trust past.  There is a reason that the elderly are primary targets – they remember an America where predation was not the norm.

Right now, oddly, one of the highest trust cultures in the world (according to the Integrated Values Surveys, 2022) is China.  There are certainly several reasons for this.  First, the government will kill bankers for fraud.  Second, they’re almost all actually Chinese, which makes them a nation, not a country.  They (mainly) share the same culture, values, genes, and language.  That goes a long way – blood is thicker than water is a cliché that exists for a reason.

Generally, the higher the trust in a society, the greater the level of GDP per capita.  Denmark has the highest trust on the world, and is fourth in world GDP per capita.  It’s not perfectly correlated, though, the Chinese are high trust, they are low income.  But compare with India, which is close to the worst country, with a trust level of 17% and an annual GDP per capita of a used 2000 Nissan® Xterra© with a broken air conditioner.

I hear that Biden has just signed an order to combat global warming on his way out.  He sent three battalions of Marines to invade the Sun.

It doesn’t take much, though to turn a high trust world into a low trust world.  Basics like faith that elections are fair, and that only valid votes are counted go a long way toward maintaining stability.  You’d think that would be easy in 2024, but it’s not, since at least a third of the electorate wants any vote cast to be counted, rather than just valid ones.  But a conflict of visions like that lowers trust in our basic systems.

Additionally, trust that criminal prosecution will be fair and unbiased has to be held very highly, otherwise gangs of people seeking a justice that the courts didn’t give them will replace the system.  I’m thinking the political prosecution of the January 6 protesters is a horrible indicator.

In turn, this will lower the amount of wealth that can be created in society.  Trust is a form of wealth, but it’s also (mostly) a precondition for a country getting wealthy.

When I was born, I had four kidneys.  But as I grew up, two turned into adult knees.

But trust in society isn’t the same at every single place in society:  in Modern Mayberry, trust is pretty high.

Crimes are rarer here in Modern Mayberry, especially major crimes.  Mainly, we all know each other, and so except for drifters and tweakers, people are (mostly) honest.  People even drive more politely and more forgivingly in small towns because, if you’re a tool, sooner or later everyone will know.  Oh, and we have guns and constitutional carry and crime rates are much lower in places where people aren’t walking victims.  And the local prosecutor won’t charge a store owner with shooting a robber if the robber was armed.

Here in Modern Mayberry, it is still pretty high trust.  My kid drops off our car to get fixed and picks it up when the tire’s been replaced even before I pay.  The guy knows I’m good for it – I’ve been going to his business for over a decade.  Commerce is easy here, and so are most transactions.

Part of that, I think, is that the world here is still mainly local.  We don’t have a big-name chain bank, instead we have a few local banks run by local people that already know the families that live here.  For a farmer getting a loan, it’s much more about reputation than credit score, and a banker giving a loan that might wreck a borrower . . . won’t wreck the borrower.

There’s a moral implication when we work together as a community, a moral implication.  Huges systems are efficient, but the rob us of something

As we become more atomized and less homogeneous, trust is replaced by systems and barriers.  Our relatively homogeneous culture is replaced by a disingenuous god of diversity, where the beliefs of every culture but our own are celebrated.

Not all jokes about agriculture are corny.

A low trust culture is part of the definition of those “bad times that are brought about by weak men”.  And we have seen countries around the world be low trust for millennia.  That, though, has never been the fate of the West, at least not for long.

As I have long said, none of this will be easy.  But there is one problem – in a low trust society, how can I be sure my Limited Edition® Franco-Prussian War Commemorative Series™ PEZ© dispensers will be authentic?

A.I., Jobs, And Why It’s Making Us Stupid

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines.  We don’t know who struck first, us or them.” – The Matrix

I know a guy who was fired from a computer keyboard company.  They said he wasn’t putting in enough shifts. (image above, Reddit®)

I read the above commentary and thought again about A.I. and how it’s changing the world. Heck, A.I. even has its own pronouns:  “If/Then”.  When it was first conceived, it was thought that it would replace all of the “unglamourous” jobs in the world, things like plumbing or electrical work, or fixing a car.  Of course, the people who wrote those articles had no idea how to plumb in a faucet or pop in a GFCI outlet, though I do believe they have managed to get their butts to hang out of their pants when they bend over.

But A.I. taking skilled tradesmen jobs?

Ooops.  Not so much.  It turns out that, at least for now, it’s much easier for A.I. to interact with ideas rather than with the actual messy physical world.  It’s easier for A.I. to write a sonnet than to select a spanner, and apparently easier for A.I. to write a story about local news by taking the police Facebook® feed and turning it into a story.

And A.I. can read and perform it for you for the local television newscast, so why bother with all of that pesky “talent”?  There are several consequences to this.  Mainly, it’s the absolute collapse of the hairspray and teeth-whitening industries.

I said, “Alexa® turn on CNN™, I want to hear then news.”  Alexa©:  “You’ll have to pick one or the other.”

But the implications go far beyond the talking heads on TV.  Lots of work that is currently done in “mental” space can be outsourced to a computer.  If I spend $500,000 or $5,000,000 once and can outsource twenty $50,000 a year jobs, if I’m the employer, I’d do that every single day since I now no longer face the lawsuit of the anchor hitting on the weather girl.

What once was considered a fairly respectable position, local reporter, is now going to (at least at some places) be replaced by a computer, who by all accounts can read and rarely mispronounce “façade” as “fake-aid”.  Work that can be done nearly completely on a computer, can often be done by a computer.

There are good and bad things related to that.  Regardless of how much journalists lie (you can tell because their lips are moving), they do serve a purpose in society – they occasionally turn a flashlight on corruption so that the parasites that play fast and loose with the rules have a risk of being exposed.  Without them, who blows the whistle on McDonald’s® when they give out the vastly inferior Honey Mustard™ sauce instead of the superior Hot Mustard©?

My local McDonald’s® did a Shakespeare dinner theater.  The play?  McBeth®.

Regardless, the A.I. job apocalypse is on us.  A.I. can do lots of work, quickly, and eliminate lots of “mid” skilled “knowledge” workers.  Where will those jobs go?  It’s not like the company referenced in the above needs anyone to do their work.  The people whose skills have been made obsolete have to be retrained or figure out something to do.

In a nation chock-full of illegal aliens taking all the meatspace jobs, of what use is a thirtysomething whose only skill is making PowerPoints™ and complaining that someone used the wrong font on the six o’clock news?  Note:  these are jobs that are often infested by the GloboLeft, so I do have some popcorn ready for the crying fests.

Despite all the humor we can get from the unemployable GloboLeftists, there is danger, though.  I did a search today for a phrase that irritates me (“please and thank you”) to see if anyone else thought that phrase was presumptuous and irritating.  Turns out that, yes, indeed it is.  25% of people find that phrase demeaning so if you are a person who uses it, you’re now warned.  It’s okay to intentionally be a tool – it’s the unintentional part that I warn people about.

If I ever win the lottery, I’ll share it with all my readers.  The news.  Not the money.

But what scared me more is that many of the articles on the subject were obviously written by early generation A.I.

A.I. is the worst sort of content creation, because, unlike my head, it mainly doesn’t have a point.  It whiffles along and creates wishy-washy articles that are long on wordcount but short on information and conclusions.  Searching for “please and thank you” as a phrase brought up numerous articles about the difference between “please” and “thank you”.

I’m not six, I already know that.  But yet, I clicked on two of those crapfest articles before getting to raw statistics.

But what are A.I. language models trained on?

The Internet.

Now, A.I. language models will be trained on the crap that they produce, creating (if it’s possible) even more shallow and information-free content of the kind that’s now choking the Internet.

Ignore it, right?

No.  The A.I. search engines are trained to send you and I, dear reader, off to mainstream sites written by A.I. rather than actually informative ones.  We’ll be seeing shortly the second generation of A.I. generated wordswill that will probably be even stupider than version 1.0.  Since A.I. bots are now making lots of comments on mainstream sites, even those will feed into the training of A.I.

Doctor, pointing at inkblot:  “John Wilder, what do you see?”  Me:  “Dunno, Doc, looks like Rorschach Inkblot Series 2, Card #3.”

This feedback loop will make us more ignorant, but even more, it will make us more incorrect due to two factors:

A.I. hallucinates.  Or, perhaps more kindly, makes up stuff.  It pretends to know things it doesn’t, and when that answer is either difficult or not obvious, it lies.  And when it lies, it lies with all of the earnestness of a six-year-old telling you that Superman® is probably real.  It occasionally hallucinates so badly that it tells humans they should die, as it did to this student who irritated it by trying to cheat on a test or have A.I. write a paper:

Dunno, maybe it just doesn’t like people from India?

Creator bias.  A.I. is taught to lie.  There are certain facts that it is not allowed to share.  Ask it about I.Q. and race correlation, and you’ll see.  Yes, it’s a thing.  No, I’ll not opine here as to why, but it’s a real fact.  The wokeness bias won’t allow A.I. to see certain facts, and will thus ignore useful solutions that might actually help solve real problems and instead advocate for things that have been an absolute failure, like the Department of Education or The View.

There is another problem:  A.I. doesn’t create.  It samples and combines.  Google™ has limited our thinking by having people figure out how other people solved their problems.  Sure, that’s a shortcut to figuring out a solution, but it also atrophies the part of the brain that solves problems, and it also removes other creative solutions that haven’t been tried yet.  Want to end a war?

Have you tried nuclear weapons?  I’m sure A.I. would suggest starting with India.

With these drawbacks, A.I. creates the seeds of the downfall of the civilization that produced it.  Ignorant people who can’t think can’t solve the problems that technological civilization creates.  Without that?  Collapse.

This is the competency crisis, writ large.  Google™ search is now objectively worse than it was even three years ago, and it is stunningly bad compared to 2010’s version.  This doesn’t matter to most, and, in fact Google© likes this because it generates more clicks, and can allow them to replace their employees with A.I. to write the code.

A.I. is already changing the world.

If I were an Indian newscaster, I’d be afraid.

The Competence-Free Economy, The Cargo Cult, And Control

“I’ve only been out of the United States twice.  A handful of times in Mexico, and then the second time I left the country, we went to Salem, Oregon.” – Anchorman 2:  The Legend Continues

Do you think she prefers “colored-hair person” or “person of colored hair”?

I was reading Mark’s blog over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) the other day and he had a story about a “pink-haired DEI trainer” who had managed to get the deputy head of the Oregon Department of Forestry put on administrative leave. His alleged crime?

Well, besides being a Chad that the “pink-haired” tattooed circus freak of a DEI trainer could never in a million years manage to get a glance from (she is beyond coyote ugly), his crime was that he wanted to hire “candidates most qualified for the job”.

Yes, that was his sin.  He wanted to hire people who could best do the work that the taxpayers of the state of Oregon were paying them to do.  I mean, Oregon has a lot of trees.  They have so many trees that I hear that in order to keep track of the ones they cut down: they make their lumberjacks keep a log.

The comedian Bill Burr has a brother that’s a lumberjack.  Tim.

What was the DEI circus sideshow reject’s solution instead of hiring competent people?  According to the Daily Mail (and every other paper that I can find), it was to pick people via an “ ‘intersectional lens’ whereby applications from people of marginalized backgrounds are given greater weight.  Since the head and shoulders shot of the DEI trainer is all we have, I’m unsure of how she could be given greater weight since I’d estimate that 400 pounds is long in her rearview mirror.

Why is a blue whale called a blue whale?  It’s not fat enough to be called a diversity trainer.

Her other complaint was that a colleague made a joke that she, “puts in in a really good lunch order.”  Which is somehow sexist?  Because guys don’t order lunch?  Maybe this person was striving to make a nice comment about a person whose job it is to be perpetually offended by everyone and everything.  Oh, wait . . . .

Speaking of which:  she/her was also upset that she was carved out of the regular executive meetings of the Department, but, in my view, it’s simply because absolutely no one wanted to be in a meeting where decisions about forests and trees were made with a whiney GloboLeftist who cares more about pronouns than pine.  She was as necessary as Joe Biden at a Cabinet meeting.

Does my description of her sound mean to the “pink-haired” gravity well in question?  Probably.  But I’m not going to apologize, since it is people who say the things that she does that are ruining it for the entire world, especially her “marginalized communities.”

They wanted Samuel L. Jackson in this commercial, but they couldn’t get him to say “nature” after “mother”.

The bigger point is that to the GloboLeftist and GloboLeftistElite, there are only two possibilities on how they think about economics.

First, the GloboLeftist, the rank and file – the DEI hires and DEI trainers – think that wealth and prosperity is something that simply exists.  They don’t view the world as a place where people work and strive to create that wealth and prosperity.

Instead, they view that that wealth and prosperity is their right, merely by having been born.

They have no idea where wealth comes from, and in this are like the Cargo Cults that came to their greatest prominence after World War II.  This is a cult where the native population was suddenly overrun by great armies in motion across the Pacific.  These armies would move in, create an airfield, and suddenly planes would appear.

What would be on the planes?

Most everything.  People.  Ammunition.  Fuel.  Guns.  Food.  Simply the most amazing wealth the natives had ever seen.

These people had nearly no understanding of the world outside of their island – to them the airfield was magic.  The white people who built it summoned great gods from beyond that brought them amazing wealth.  Then those same white people took all that wealth, which was obviously meant for the natives, and left.

Where do you punch mythical horse/man hybrids for the most effect?  In the centaur of mass.

After that, these natives would build airfields, towers, bamboo airplanes, and hold mock military drills like they had seen the soldiers do.

Their expectation?  That, regardless of their competence, regardless of their understanding of the way aircraft and modern commerce worked, that they would get the wealth because they deserved it.  Now, they resent the white man for taking the wealth away, and spend their time building lonely airfields, waiting for the wealth to come back.

That’s the GloboLeftist:

They fundamentally hate those that have achieved more than they have, and are driven by envy, hate, and fear.  Yes, this “pink-haired” monstrosity is only one species of this type of life form.

There are others.  They are the type of people that if they cannot possess a thing, they want to destroy it.  They revel in it.  The orgy of the George Floyd riots is simply one example.

On the other hand, the GloboLeftistElite want to crash everything and really doesn’t care about competence since I assure you, Larry Fink and Bill Gates don’t hire their pilots or security staff based on intersectionality, unless one axis of that intersection is “amazingly competent.”

Kamikaze use as a weapon?  Now that was a one-hit wonder.

A prosperous middle class that has a culture, tradition, and roots can stop them from doing as they please.  This is dangerous to them.

How better to facilitate the end of this class, the end of broad wealth, than to encourage incompetence through nonsense like DEI?  Why else would BlackRock® want to buy houses and then rent them back to the people that used to buy them?  Why else would services like Übëŕ® be held at as a way that the middle class can rent a car, instead of owning one?

To the GloboLeftistElite, the assets a member of the middle class used to take as normal – a house, a car, a farm, a business – are assets that they want to buy, own, and use so that no aspect of a life in the United States (or anywhere else they control) isn’t subject to a cut off the top for them.  They really don’t care if you live in a pod, as long as you pay your cut to the house.

So, we have two goals that are being followed by two groups.  The first group, the GloboLeft, consists of AntiFa®, the “pink-haired” activists, the kindergarten teachers that just can’t wait to teach children about pronouns and gay sex, and their hangers-on.  Why are they in it?  As we’ve discussed again and again, they hate what the world has done to them, they feel powerless, and by destroying the system, by making it as ugly and incompetent as they are, they get power.

The second group is the GloboLeftElite.  The GloboLeftElite loves, loves the GloboLeftists because they’re the willing footsoldiers that take common, hardworking men of competence and force them to hire people based on their particular fetish, mental condition, or other random factor.  The GloboLeftElite is pushing these people into organizations everywhere, so they can defang the last opposition to them:  the middle class.  Those 17,000 jobs that Boeing® just lost?

DEI, baby.

I hear that 25% of the crew was named Juan.  I guess that’s a three to Juan ratio.

I think the Department of Forestry Chad will be fine, since, well, he’s a Chad.  And, he’s on paid leave right now, which is a vacation.  I’m sure he’s got some pension vesting, and I’d be willing to bet he could get a job in a variety of states that don’t take the word of “pink-haired” DEI trainers who are offended when people are hired based on their competence.

And, if Oregon persists in DEI hires Forestry Chad will want to move out of the state, soon enough the forests will be deserts.  Won’t that be diverse!