Complacency – Page 18 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Don’t Ask Why People Are Poor. Ask Why They’re Wealthy.

“Some actually value wealth of knowledge over material wealth, Harper.” – Andromeda

My butler just quit his job here at my stately home. He said he refused to be ordered around in that manor.

I find it sort of hilarious that economists spend a lot of time fretting about what causes poverty. I love economics, but often think that they create pocket universes to study that have no real connection to the here and now. I think that’s called sniffing their own . . . uh . . . emissions.

But sometimes it’s not just economists who ask the wrong question. As bad as they are, the worst offenders are politicians. Let’s start with the dumbest question that has been asked in my lifetime (at least in the United States):

“What causes poverty?”

That’s letting Whoopi Goldberg loose in a chocolate factory stupid. It doesn’t help the chocolate and leaves Whoopi sticky and needing an insulin shot.

But why is that a stupid question?

Because poverty is the dominant condition of humanity everywhere since we didn’t have two rocks to fight over. People throughout history have been devastatingly, living in mud hut, sleeping in straw beds filled with more bedbugs than straw. Mary and Joseph had to walk uphill, both ways, to get to the manger.

That’s a joke that keeps you coming back for myrrh.

Only in rare times, and only for a small percentage of the population of the world have some humans felt prosperity. Fewer still have felt prosperity for most of their lives. Fewer still experienced enough wealth in their society for them to think that wealth was normal, and poverty was the exception. We call them Pampered Coastal Elite Leftists.

Why? Because every farmer in the Midwest, every rancher in the High Plains, and every shrimper in the Gulf (among many, many others) knows how close they are to failure, and how close poverty is, especially if a free-range Whoopi Goldberg is free to eat and trample their crops.

Ma Wilder was impacted by the Depression (she was a lot older than my biological Mom, I was adopted) to the point that, living up on Wilder Mountain she’d save aluminum foil and old pickle jars and have enough food for six months because, “You just never know when you’ll need it.” It was kinda cute until she made us re-use Q-Tips®.

The Wolf is always at the door.

I couldn’t find the wolf, which I guess makes it a where-wolf.

So, the question to ask isn’t “what makes people poor”. We can see that as all the systems around us break down like they are now when morons are at the helm.

We should ask the important question: “What makes us wealthy?”

That’s a much better question to ask, since LBJ’s War on Poverty has just subsidized being poor and created a permanent underclass of voters for Leftists to farm, dependent on the Left for a constant stream of handouts. If you were late to Leftist language class, that’s their word for “compassion”.

So, what makes us wealthy? I can only go from history in those places where the world has deviated from the “nasty, brutish, and short” version of life to that “shining city on the hill”. What matters?

The first thing that comes to mind is Liberty, tempered with Virtue.

When a kangaroo gets hurt, it requires a hop-eration.

Liberty is important, but Virtue tempers Liberty and creates a boundary, otherwise Opium and Fentanyl Den™ would be the new Waffle House®. Or is that the existing Waffle House© after 2am?

What Liberty does is provides options, for millions of people to make individual decisions on how to better serve fellow citizens. Virtue means that they shouldn’t destroy their fellow citizens in the process, since that’s generally bad for business. I guess that cigarette companies have found that it’s okay if you kill them slowly after decades.

Not only that, it’s regulation. Who loves regulation? Big companies. Regulations make it hard for small companies to start, make it hard for them to compete, but increases their profit margin. I mean, I would have loved to compete with Pfizer® with my “Super Saline Covid Injection” that didn’t cause myocarditis, but they would probably want to make sure mine was entirely WD-40® free.

Which would still likely have been better for people than the mRNA Vaxx. But who is counting? Not the CDC®.

What else?

I hear Senator Mitch McConnell stole my rabbit. Mitch better have my bunny.

Intelligence. If you ask ChatGPT® about the correlation between intelligence and national prosperity it blows a fuse. Bing™ chimes right in: “There is a correlation between IQ and economic prosperity. A one point increase in IQ is associate with a 4% increase in welfare for the average country. High IQ is associated with high per-capita GDP and fast economic growth, as well as more equal income distribution.”

Ouch! That’ a truth bomb that most folks don’t want to hear. IQ is not really something that anyone can change for the better. Sure, I can drink a few shots of Jim Beam® and take mine down, but what I’ve got, is what I’ve got, from birth.

But smart people in an economy can keep a more stable economy, and can better grow a complex economy than a group of people who don’t know what vowels are. Sure, I’d like to think that groups of dumb people could get together and solve the nuclear fusion problem, but I’ve met dumb people – they can’t figure out how to split a restaurant tab without a knife fight then a follow-up sacrifice of a live chicken to Gorto the Destructor god.

Or I could have just said, “Imagine Haiti” and everyone would know what I meant.

Why is Haiti spelled without an “e”? Simple. They hate e.

Again, I’m not blaming Haitians for making Haiti, well, Haiti, but if you want to cry, go look over the difference in income between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I’ll save you the time – the Dominican Republic has nine times the per capita income, despite being on the same exact island. The data I found (on the ‘net, mind you) has the Dominican Republic has an average IQ of 80. Haiti has an average IQ of 67.

Haiti has an average intellectual capacity (if this data is correct) at the level where Social Security would consider them disabled (on average).

Having great resources? That doesn’t appear to help. It’s the System. It’s the People. If Hong Kong and Singapore can create wealth out of zero resources in a location that almost anyone in the United States would consider so crowded they’d have to make an appointment to change their mind, it’s not space, it’s not stuff.

We can change our laws to allow more Liberty and increase Virtue and reverse the trends away from the nonsense of the last fifty years that encourage large corporate growth at the expense of the People.

But if we change out our People?

Who are we? Will we see the continuation of turning our cities into Haiti on the half shell?

Studies of the genetics of dead Romans (LINK) showed that “intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era (Z= -0.77) to the Iron Age (Z= 0.86), declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period (Z= -0.27).”

Why did Rome fall? Many reasons. It lost Liberty, it lost Virtue, and it replaced Romans with people who weren’t Romans.

Wonder if we’ll learn this time around?

The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

Biden was in three states today – confusion, unconsciousness, and disorientation.

I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.

Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson.

His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.

There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch.

Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?”

When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.

The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.

It’s silly that people have been turning plants into burgers. Cows have been doing that forever.

I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow.

The material that you start with determines the end results.

In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.

It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Someone told me I should stop drinking, but then realized I shouldn’t listen to some drunk who talks to himself.

The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage.

An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant past.

Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?

None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around every since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.

I started growing herbs because I heard that thyme is money.

As the article notes, for a long time in the 20^th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.

That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on . . . other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.

Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.

We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?

Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress.

Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.

Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there?

That’s Idiocracy in action.

Tucker Carlson And The Corrupt Biden Banana Republic

“Wow. Anybody watching must’ve thought this was a negative reality inversion.” – The Young Ones

Jenner might join the Marvel® movie universe – I hear they’re casting for ex-men.

I lost a job once, not because I didn’t do what my boss asked me to do, but because I wouldn’t tell him I thought just like he did.

When he asked me to do something that wasn’t illegal or immoral or fattening or didn’t violate my principles, I’d do it since that’s the definition of “boss”. But no. He wanted me to admit that my opinion was wrong. I refused.

My opinion is mine. I’ll do (mostly) what the boss says at work, but there is nothing that will make me give up my soul. And telling him I agreed with him when I didn’t was a gulf I couldn’t cross, because my virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.

Why did Tucker Carlson get sidelined by Fox®? I think it’s a business model. I cut the cable some time ago, and hadn’t watched Fox News™ for quite a while, mainly because they seemed to be, like Sean Hannity, just a spear carrier for whatever the message is that he was supposed to carry that particular day – he never had an original idea, and his commentary was so between the lines that he was being the television equivalent of a Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy or a bucket of warm spit.

But since they fired Tucker? Wow. Maybe I just missed his evolution, but since he’s been at Tucker on Twitter™ he’s thrown out bomb after bomb, right on target with some of the most cogent and, dare I say, dangerous analysis of anyone with a major media voice.

I think Tucker is singlehandedly killing cable news, the MSNBCNN® model of cable news was long on the verge of death, and Tucker now has more views on a single Twitcast® than all of cable news, plus probably most television shows. Combined. That’s the power of the Truth.

What’s the difference between the FBI and the CIA? Acronyms. Plus, one killed JFK and the other killed MLK.

I had long talked about inversion. It wasn’t me who coined that term, and it’s been long enough that I can’t remember where I first saw it – probably Vox Day was the one that brought it to my attention using the idea of Satanic Inversion – take a virtue, invert it, and glorify it.

It really defines a lot of what we see today. My parents taught me that humility was a virtue. The inversion? Pride. What is June? Oh . . . an inversion. My parents taught me that chastity was a virtue (to be fair, I did my best to actively not be chaste when I was in high school because drive-in movies were still a thing) but now the virtue is indulgence. If it feels good, it must be right.

Certainly, there are no trails of childless women who pursued meaningless hookups in their 20s and then found that, their youth and innocence spent, that they were incapable of finding a decent man.

Oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened.

If those women did find a decent man, they were so addled by the mindless sex that they’d had that they were incapable of bonding into a proper relationship. They found themselves doomed to single motherhood or the life of a lonely, bitter spinster or in a relationship where they might become bored in an afternoon and blow it up for the dream of a man that had dominated them when they were 22.

I wonder what the bikini waxer will say to her when she’s sixty?

Virtues are virtues for a reason. They matter, and when we toy with them, we toy with the very foundations of civilization itself.

When it comes to economics, the virtue was to save and be frugal and build. Now? The virtue is to be like BlackRock® and, well, say things like, “It’s not who the president is – it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president,” and “You’ve got $10,000? You can buy a senator,” and, “War is real f*****g good for business.” Don’t’ believe me? Here it is in the words of someone who works for Blackrock™.

To be clear, BlackRock® has $9,000,000,000,000 in assets that they manage. So, they can crush anyone they want to like a bug. Don’t like something someone says? With spare pocket change they can buy the company that person works at, and have them fired.

Which might explain Tucker’s recent free time. In Tucker’s latest video, he talks about “inversion” of morality. I have zero hubris to think he’s reading me, but the fact that the concept has made it to a person that can get 100,000,000 views a video means we’re winning.

And BlackRock® will loose a few hundred million on Fox™. I think they have that in their couch cushions.

It also explains the reason that Tucker got sidelined. Blackrock® owns 15.1% of Fox Corp.®, the parent of Fox News©. If you want to buy a president, it makes sense to own the news. They also own 12% of CNN™. And 13% of Comcast™ which owns MSNBC®, NBC™, CNBC©, and Sky®.

BlackRock™ wants to own the media. I mean, with $9 trillion they can control the media, own what Tucker says (if he works for them) and get all the war they want, because, in the words of their own employee, “War is real f*****g good for business.”

That? That sounds exactly like an inversion of values to me. Getting rid of Tucker had nothing to do with anything but this: he was against war, which as probably really f*****g bad for business at parasite companies like BlackRock©, who produce nothing but profit from every misery on Earth while cloaking it in the preening moral finery of people who worship at the Leftist inversion values of “Environmental (Live in the pod, eat the bugs!), Social (Illegals are good for business!) and Governance (I get to choose the incompetent people on the board who never would have gotten a board seat without me).

We are faced with a world where the inversion of values is celebrated, and actual, real values and virtue are hated.

Case in point? Hunter Biden. Real people who are caught on camera with handguns doing crack do time – hard time in federal prisons. Income tax issues? Ditto – the one thing Uncle doesn’t like is shorting him on his part of the take, yet Hunter gets a pass.

He seems happy. I wonder if he got childrens’ hair to sniff for Fathers’ Day?

But Hunter? Hunter will keep selling his fake art for hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who allegedly want favors from his father after selling exactly zero alleged expertise to Ukrainians and Chinese for allegedly tens of millions of dollars that he allegedly funneled to “the big guy”. Allegedly.

Thankfully, the media is all over this.

What? They’re all owned by BlackRock™ who thinks “War is real f*****g good for business”? And the media is silent about what is likely the biggest corruption scandal in the very history of the country?

Inversion.

The very wonderful thing about this is that it won’t stand. It can’t stand. Not because we’re powerful, but because the inversion of virtue brings, ultimately, the inversion of prosperity and success.

The way to prosper financially in this environment is to give over to the inversion and engage in all of the inverted virtues that firms like BlackRock™ take as their sacrament and holy scripture.

The success, though, is fleeting. The cost is high. Think Joe Biden looks at the perverted wasteland of his family and feels any pride? Well, bad example, since Joe traded his metaphorical (and maybe literal) soul long ago and probably the strongest emotion he feels in 2023 is the desire to have his tapioca pudding at exactly 11:45AM.

Joe must be so proud.

But if I ascended the highest halls of power, and saw my progeny was as decadent and useless as Hunter, I would know that I had failed at my most fundamental duty as a father. And if I looked at the country and saw the destruction I had created, I would know that I was a failure as a leader. Despite all of my power, I would know that it would have profited me little to have gained the whole world, having lost my soul.

Looks like Tucker understands that, too. He’s playing a game on the big stage, and naming those who are inverting everything of value, everything that has brought harmony and goodness to the country. He could just sit in his basement with tens of millions of dollars, which is just what BlackRock© wants him to do, because that would be real f*****g good for business.

I guess Tucker decided he wouldn’t give up his soul.

So, Tucker decided he would fight. Because virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.

Dispatches From The Culture War

“Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.” – Star Trek: TNG

My body is like a Greek temple as I age. In ruins.

There is so much going on any given news cycle in the last few months that it’s now difficult to be amazed about anything. Credible sourcing that Joe Biden took bribes? When asked about it, he said, “Then where’s the money?”

That’s not the way that innocent people act, rather, that’s a taunt that’s similar to a mobster saying, “You got nothin’ on me, copper.” Biden did it, might even remember he did it, and is now telling the world that he’s above it all and doesn’t fear anything. Of course, he’s a thousand years old now, so he’s probably pretty deep in “old guy DNGAF” mode.

Certainly, Biden (or whoever has the remote control that makes Biden say thinks like a big flesh robot) gave the nod before Trump was indicted. This was intentional. There is something about Trump that the Left and Official Washington and Big Money despises that caused them to set up a propaganda campaign among their followers like few before it. They even got high on their own supply, believing that the echo chamber that they had created was a reflection of reality, rather than just their own words played back to them on an infinite-repeat loop, like I play The Accountant, or Big Trouble in Little China.

Regardless, the split is deep, and, although I don’t think Pew® has updated their Left/Right split data, I think that the split has become ever deeper. The Los Angeles Dodgers® can’t even fathom why Catholics would protest the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBT+ group that openly mocks Christian faith. They can’t understand why most Americans don’t want to go to war due to two oppressive Eastern European countries fighting each other over land that’s been fought over so many times that I think they’re on the Juneteenth Battle of Kharkov.

Is the smartest nun called Nun the Wiser?

Trump embraced the LGBT+ agenda explicitly, so it’s not that. His performance on illegals, while much better than Biden’s, looked more like Obama than Eisenhower. So, it must be the war thing, since Democrats and the Neo-Con branch of the RINO party have been all-in on Ukraine for decades.

Remember when Russia wanted to join NATO? Sigh.

Whatever was the common core of America is no longer common. Using Michael Savage’s mantra of borders, language, and culture to define a country (not a nation, that’s different) is a bleak exercise.

Borders: The Right would like some. The Left thinks that borders are fundamentally racist and that everyone is a citizen of the United States, they just haven’t gotten here to vote for them. Biden still thinks that Borders® is a bookstore.
Language: The Right would like just one, English. The Left celebrates multiplicity of mutually unintelligible people. A few years ago, I listened to an NPR® station that had a late night talk program that focused on the idea that it was racist if you couldn’t understand what some dude who just crossed the river or got off the boat said, regardless of how heavy and thick his accent is. I mean, at least fish have an excuse for having a Finnish accent.

Archeologists never get married. They’re only interested in dating.

Border and Language are in absolutely horrible shape. Culture, of course, is the worst off.

One of the constant cries of the Left is that the United States has no culture. This is patently a lie – fish don’t know about water because they’re surrounded by it, all the time. So are Leftists, but they hate it. But I said it was a lie. Leftists do see the culture, and want to destroy it and rebuild it to fit their ideology because the last thing they want is to see happy people. Here are just a few segments of culture, and what the Left is doing to try to destroy it.

A huge target for the Left has been the effort to dismantle the history of the West. Slavery? Even though it was far from a Western invention, and even though the United States fought a war to end it, and even though Great Britain used their navy to end the trade, it has been painted as only a sin of the West. The effort is also in full swing to distort and demean every single historical figure that generations of schoolchildren idolized. Why did the Left start tearing out statues? Any previous hero must be destroyed so that the Leftists can choose new, acceptable heroes.

I kept making a statue of St. Peter and the city kept tearing it down. Then they gave me a ticket – they said I was a re-Pete offender.

The customs and traditions are being erased. Examples are everywhere, but just look toward the military of the United States for some particularly egregious examples. I’m fairly certain the Marines will soon be issued Nerf® guns so they don’t hurt themselves. Etiquette is also falling apart, where Americans are told that they have to conform to the etiquette of foreigners and Leftists. Previously, it was accepted that aliens would have to adopt American customs and traditions. In 2023, that is racist, of course.

The arts and literature of the nation are being changed. Movies, which morphed from the pro-American fare of the Disney® era now is actively anti-American. Thankfully, many of the ideologically driven writers, directors, and executives that are now in charge make horrible movies, but it’s clear that the last decade has brought fewer good movies than the year 1986 did by itself. Literature now consists of horrible screeds against racism, but they’re not content with that – publishers are now actively editing works from the past to make them conform to Leftist principles. Electronic media is all subject to that so books and DVDs might be the only way in the future to see the real deal.

Education is a cornerstone for any culture. Vladimir Lenin said, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” The commies have always focused on this, and they’ve done a really good job on the education centers of the world. But it doesn’t happen all at once. First, they grabbed the colleges. Then, bit by bit, they grabbed each teacher that they could coming through the system and indoctrinating them into Leftism. When I was in school, the real first wave of hardcore Leftists were hitting the schools, but it was just one or two. Now? Videos I’ve seen in big cities show they’re Lefty, through and through. Even in Modern Mayberry are they attempting to take over. Thankfully our school board is pretty good at keeping those zealots out.

And Joe is smart enough to figure out how to make a train go across the Indian and Pacific oceans!

I started writing this post on Fathers’ Day, and was amused because it’s not really Fathers’ Day anymore, it’s “I’m a single mom so I am both father and mother and this is about me” Day. The destruction of the traditional and nuclear family structure is the first thing Leftists have attacked, from the French Revolution to the Soviet Revolution to the communist version of Spain that Franco destroyed. It’s a shame Franco didn’t have helicopters. The social organization of a country is the what regenerates it. Family structures and gender roles reinforce the culture. Every wonder why those are marked for change?

Finally, the values and beliefs of a culture help define it. It used to be that prostitution was a dirty little secret. Now? Leftists argue that “sex work is real work” and Moms spend time making money on Only Fans®. Was there hypocrisy in old America? Sure. But shame and ostracism were powerful motivators to keep the rot down.

I did hear that Hunter was sad because he wasn’t getting a new laptop for Christmas.

This list could go on and on – I have over 10 more categories where I could go through the same exercise, but the answer wouldn’t change and this post would then be 4,000 words and I’d get no sleep at all tonight. The Mrs. keeps reminding me that sleep is no substitute for caffeine, and I’ll have plenty of time to rest after I’ve died.

As I’ve recently been saying, the idea isn’t to conserve our culture, since it has been turned into a smoking crater by Leftists appealing to the vanity and pride of susceptible folks. This will end as it has always ended, since the reason American culture was successful will cease to exist as American culture ceases to exist. From there, there will be tears.

And then? Our job is to rebuild and restore. And most of the people that formerly fell into the Leftist trap of dismantling the success and wholesomeness of the culture will welcome that restoration, after having seen what their depravity has created.

Rebuilding a culture takes time. It won ‘t be done in my lifetime, but probably will be in the lifetime of my children. And that’s good enough for me. Our job is to keep the fire lit, and to not let the Left get away with the lie and call the destruction they’ve created to be simply called “bad luck”.

Oh, and I almost forgot! Don’t forget to celebrate Juneteenth!

Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

“Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.” – Flash Gordon (1980)

How many horses could you fit in a pyramid? A pharaoh mount.

Way back in the before time, say 2015, a scientific paper by one Tabetha Boyajian hit the news. Oh, boy, did it hit the news. What Boyajian had discovered was a particular little F class star that dimmed. And not dimmed like Joe Biden in the afternoon when the meds wear off and Jill has to put him in the special dark room.

The dimming was unusual. It wasn’t a planet. It wasn’t a comet. It wasn’t like anything anyone had ever really seen. Because of that, she got a star that’s now known by several names, the most common of which is Tabby’s Star.

Kinda cool, right? Some also call it Boyajian’s Star, and other sticks in the mud call it KIC 8462852 (A), but I think all of the people who like to call it KIC 8462852 (A) work at the Interstellar DMV and have to share the same soul on alternating weekends.

The reason for all of that excitement is because Tabby’s Star can’t be explained by any sort of physical processes we yet know of. If it were the usual “stuff” we’d expect to see the light from the star absorbed in the physical material and re-radiated outward as heat, likely because the kids won’t turn the damn thermostat down in winter.

I kid. It’s all physics. This is what happens when light from the Sun hits my driveway. The energy from the light warms the driveway, and the energy from the light ends up going away by radiation and convection (because there’s an atmosphere). It’s also what happens when a picture of an attractive girl in a bikini is taken: it’s sheer thermodynamics that makes her hot.

Entropy: it isn’t what it used to be.

We’d expect that any matter that got hit by the light from Tabby’s star to warm up, and we’d see infrared energy like from a driveway or a supermodel. Seriously, if you want the actual math, you came to the wrong place, though I will say I was the first person to calculate how much PEZ® and anti-PEZ™ it would take to cross the Milky Way, and the very first person to ever use the term “anti-PEZ©” (LINK).

There is one model that says the particles around Tabby’s have to be small, perhaps microscopic. Like nanobots. But, regardless, eight years after Tabby’s paper was published, there is no physical process that has been found that would explain what’s going on.

None. However, I thought (based on my prior reading) that around 2019 they called it solved.

Nope. Not solved. I found this out by listening to a YouTube® vidya from The Angry Astronaut. I’ve only recently found him, and have enjoyed the videos I’ve seen so far. Here’s how he describes himself from his Patreon® page:

“I create unique educational videos which focus on Spaceflight, Space Policy and Space Science. My approach is unconventional, and sometimes controversial. The future of our species depends on an aggressive effort to explore and colonize the Solar System…something that we have woefully neglected for too long. It is time to stop being polite and start getting ANGRY!”

To be clear, I like the cut of his jib, as my constant criticism of NASA might indicate. An example is here (LINK).

I hear there are flat-Earth people all across the globe.

In the video I watched, The Angry Astronaut noted something I was unaware of – not only was the problem of Tabby’s Star completely not solved, but an astrophysicist from the University of Nebraska, Dr. Edward G. Schmidt, had found more stars that acted like this. The Angry Astronaut was kind enough to point me in the right direction for Dr. Schmidt’s paper. Hats off, sir!

More stars! Excellent! That means that, whatever is causing the issue is probably natural.

Then I read the paper. You can read it here (LINK). You can watch The Angry Astronaut talk about it below (don’t forget to like and subscribe!).

Dr. Schmidt found this dipping in several stars, and those he found were all in F and G type stars. For reference, my favorite star, the Sun, is a G-type star. F-type stars are a little bigger and a little brighter. Together, they make up about 6% of the stars in the Milky Way, my favorite galaxy. They are long-lived, and are probably in the sweet spot to have habitable planets since 100% of the planets we have found life on exist around a similar sized star.

So, Schmidt looks at stars. Finds more that periodically dim in just this same exact weird way that no one can explain, but only around very specific kinds of stars nearly exactly like ours.

Is every mattress he sleeps on queen-sized?

The great news is that they’re randomly distributed all over the place, so it’s probably natural, and the whole thing is common. Oops.

No. Not really common at all. They looked at over 1,337,101 stars in the study areas. They came up that these stars showing the dimming were very rare, with between 11.2 and 4.9 candidate dimming stars per million depending on the region reviewed.

Not common.

But randomly distributed, right?

No. Look at the graph below. The circle with the dot in it is my favorite Sun and my favorite planet. The star is Tabby’s Star. The filled-in dots represent stars that dim like Tabby’s Star in a specific region. The open ones are stars that have the dimming outside of that region.

Why two graphs? Because I can’t send you a three-dimensional post, and I snagged it from Dr. Schmidt’s paper. Pretend one is looking at the stars from the top, and one is looking at the stars from the side. Yup. They’re all in a bunch.

(from the Schmidt paper linked above)

So, we have this really rare phenomenon, and it happens only in stars of approximately the same size, and is concentrated in this one particular area.

I mean, if a civilization were harvesting the energy from specific types of stars and spreading out to make a galactic empire, what would it look like?

It would look exactly like this. I should know, because I watched the 1980 film Flash Gordon and I’m pretty sure that this is exactly what Ming the Merciless™ did before James Bond helped the blonde dude save every one of us and then end up with more hot chicks in bikinis.

Okay, not a bikini. But it was Alien.

I’m spitballing from the data, but I’m thinking that the closest one of these stars is about 750 lightyears (3 liters) from Earth, which is generally farther than I like to do on a daily commute. Heck, I’m not sure my odometer even goes up that far!

What is it? We don’t know. It might be the stars in question keep forgetting to pay the power bill and keep getting disconnected. It might be that billions of clones of Lizzo are in orbit around some of these stars, because I don’t think anyone has yet tested that hypothesis.

Or it could be . . . aliens?

Survival Economics, 2023

“Kent Brockman here reporting on a crisis so serious it has its own name and theme music.” – The Simpsons Movie

I tried farming rabbits, but I found it a hare-raising experience. All memes this post, as found.

Perhaps the single biggest concern I have is that we’re spending our time as a species worried about trivial stuff. What “trivial stuff”? How about Ukraine? I think that’s what Kamala and Brandon would want us to focus on, but they’re stuck on vodka and sniffing children.

Ukraine? I don’t have a side in that conflict, and steadfastly refuse to have one. Both governments are at about the same level of totalitarianism (this isn’t me talking, this is from those organizations who measure this stuff). I’m not going to get into it, but I can back my ambivalence up that, yeah, both sides are crap. If Trump had a second term? This conflict wouldn’t exist. We still wouldn’t have a wall, but this conflict wouldn’t exist.

But Ukraine is trivial compared to the subjects everyone is avoiding:

Food, and Energy. I originally had a third, Immigration to add to this list, but the post got too long on just the first two. Of course, I’ll get to immigration. Sometime. Just like the US Border Patrol.

Let’s start with Food.

The Earth does have a finite food supply – I can prove this because sometimes the shake machine doesn’t work at McDonald’s®. There is only so much food that can be created. It’s large – world hunger is a solved problem at the current population level of the Earth. We have more people than ever, and we have food to feed absolutely everyone on Earth as long as everyone doesn’t want the Stuffed Crust® pizza. Sure, not everyone is getting filet mignon at every meal, but we have, on an absolute basis, enough calories to make sure that no one on Earth right now needs to starve.

Amy Schumer is proof of that, though I’ve heard she’s happy there’s a ban on harpooning whales.

That’s a big deal. This is the first era in the history of life on the planet that we can say that no person on Earth needs to be hungry. The biggest basketcase has generally been Africa, primarily because they tend to kill each other by the bucketload because it’s Tuesday and don’t have mountains and winter.

What?

Yeah, mountains and winter. I can’t stop Tuesday from showing up.

Mountains catch snow, and snow, melting as the summer hits, keeps the rivers flowing. The reservoirs across the United States are, in effect, artificial mountains that keep the rivers flowing when the snow isn’t there. This also keeps a minimum amount of water flowing when the rivers would otherwise run dry so I can skip stones.

While this increases the transport opportunities available due to rivers that makes transportation cheap, it also has the most important benefit of making agriculture predictable. This makes sure that although there are good years and bad years, those are the exceptions everywhere but Africa. In Africa, the lack of mountains makes a good year and a bad year a random and unpredictable event. In a world without Western Civilization this is a famine event. In a world with the evil Western Colonialists, it means that there’s food available and nobody has to die, unless the UN has a voice.

When you average it out over the globe, however, there’s more than enough food in 2023 and the problem for most farmers in the West is that food is too cheap and too plentiful. The only thing that stops distribution is kleptocracy – I read that European farmers can make milk, turn it to powder, and ship that powdered milk to Africa cheaper than Africans can produce milk. This never gives the locals the ability to create a viable farm industry. Except if Bill Gates gets involved:

In 2023, the problem isn’t too little food, it’s too much.

Yet the impulse from the Left is to:

Destroy Western farming because of muh climate change,
Implant the idea that we must eat bugs because (rolls dice) communism and muh climate change, and
Make all of this subject to the most stringent regulation, because that makes the Left sexually stimulated.

Even rice isn’t immune from the rage of the Left.

Just letting everyone know, she’s over 18, so perhaps someone can throw themselves on this grenade and wife her up, which might shut her up.

What people seem to miss is that this oasis in time where everything is going well. We have

the technology to maximize crop yields,
the oil to power the machines to plant the crops,
the natural gas to create the fertilizer to nourish the crops, and
the land with the topsoil to produce the crops.

It’s clear that, despite The Mrs. being able to make a few strawberries a week from a flower pot, we can’t feed the world from one. There is a finite limit to the production of food, and it’s very tight.

And, like every other thing on the list, we’re not serious about it. California had a plan in the 1970s to create a series of reservoirs to give them water in amounts required to avoid droughts. They ignored it, and now California is like a teenager, “It’s too wet. It’s too dry. I want to live in a mall.” They weren’t serious about it.

And food? One side, the Left, wants to reconfigure man and have them live in pods and eat bugs. The other side, the Right, wants people to be free and many of them eat steak. I’m not having trouble picking a side here, though the Leftist mind control has convinced the Zoomers that they can live via osmosis, or something:

The point is, no adults are looking at this problem, and the deluded Leftists that are looking at it fall to the same sad solution they have for every problem: Live in the Pods, Eat the Bugs. People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

Energy is not much better.

Just like reservoirs are artificial mountains, huge piles of lithium and batteries and infrastructure and expensive cars that sometimes let all of their electrical energy turn kinetic after a fender bender isn’t the answer. It’s because the Leftists aren’t serious.

Let’s take a big picture look:

Oil is awesome. It powers everything from jet fighter planes to rockets to that mysterious fire that burned down . . . oh, I’ve said too much. It has been the primary fuel of the Western world since 1930 or so.

And it’s cool, mainly because oil is just concentrated solar power, and all of the work in making it is based on solar power. I mean, solar in the sense that the Sun shined millions of years ago, and we’re using concentrated Sunlight from when the dinosaurs were making frozen gelato and rubbing sunscreen on their nipples in their spare time.

(Yes, I know that dinosaurs didn’t have nipples, but I rarely use nipples, and want to be known as the man who popularized dinosaur nipples. Sue me.)

Oil is a gift. But, like the ability of Aerosmith® to make good songs, it’s limited. Oh, sure, it can produce billions of gallons of gasoline, but eventually it’s going to give you a Janie’s Got a Gun and then everyone will be disappointed and then everyone will notice that Stephen Tyler looks like their lesbian aunt.

I love oil. But it is finite, and by the time this century ends, it will be the fuel of the past. Sadly, we don’t have a replacement in sight at this point other than nuclear power or Leftism’s failures.

One way to produce nuclear power.

Windmills won’t work because the wind is fickle and electricity hard to store. The Sun is perfect, if we have millions of years to store its wonderful energy in sweet, sweet hydrocarbons, but solar panels installed in 2000 are already starting to fill up California’s landfills. We could count on Kamala’s stupidity, but eventually the vodka will run out and potatoes run on solar power.

All of my research shows that the “science” of “climate change” means the same solution is the same as food: People are bad, so we need more communism and control.

No. We need the free market. But we also need a plan. Sure, I hate government plans, but the signals of the market are silly – if the price of oil rises, there will be more.

No. We cannot conjure oil out of a free market if it isn’t there. We do have to plan for a future after oil, not for the sake of climate, but for the sake of humanity. And, though I am certain of few things, I am certain that Kamala and Brandon are not up for this task.

The solution to this problem is different than most, since it must take place before the problems that will doom billions. Or it won’t. And billions will be doomed, and mankind’s dream of going to the stars will be turned into mankind’s dream of dinner at Taco Bell®.

Pretty sure this is a parody. But in 2023, who can tell?

Beer, Bad Movies, and Bathing Suits – Ending Woke One Dollar At A Time

“Why have you disturbed our sleep; awakened us from our ancient slumber?” – The Evil Dead

Yesterday I had a nightmare that my Facebook® account was deleted. When I woke up, for just a second, I was really scared that I had a Facebook™ account.

It’s happening.

Despite the Left fully holding the levers of most of the power in the country, the one thing they didn’t seem to count on was a people that they pushed too far. Historically, they’ve always pushed too far and outpaced the populace, at least in European or Western nations. It’s like The Mrs. trying to get me to do chores. Don’t push, I told you last year I’d get those socks picked up.

In France after the Revolution, it ended with Napoleon – a strong man to push back the insanity of the Terror. In Germany, after the public revolted after the (failed) communist revolution, the economic destruction of the 1920s and the unbridled degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, to, well, you know what happened.

Stalin managed to take a gun after taking power and shoot everyone to the left of him, setting himself up as the single source of communist thought (well, after also taking an icepick to a rival living in Mexico), which I’ve heard referred to as the Leftist Singularity. It’s like the old joke, “Robespierre and Trotsky walk into a bar. There are no survivors.”

An example of the Leftist Singularity in action. All memes (from here on, including this one) are “as-found.”

Leftism is inherently unstable since it nearly invariably ends up feeding on itself. The college Leftist poets are despised by the “real” Leftists. Real communism has been tried, and every single time the results are the same. But this time, will it be different?

The grounds for a bit of optimism is that the American consooomer seems to have started voting with their wallets and is refusing to consooom the Woke products.

Disney™ has lost nearly a decade of growth in stock price, and has lost half of its value since 2021.

Disney© is the source of endless corporate cultural rot. Brought about as a child and American friendly company, it now openly panders to people who want to push sex-change surgery to kids. The result is oddly predictable – the people who have kids don’t want to take their kids to a movie to have their values subverted. Bud Lightyear™ was a character that everyone loved. Disney™ solution? Inject LGBTQIABIPOC+ into the movie. Result? Parents avoided it, and it was a huge money loser.

I’m thinking this might be the secret Disney™ corporate strategy?

Inject values about woke female empowerment? Everyone stops going to their movies because their movies are now boring because it would disrupt The Narrative if a woman had to learn something, if a woman had to struggle, if a woman ever had to be saved by a man, and if a woman wasn’t the best one ever at whatever she chose to do, the first time out. Huh. I’m thinking my ex-wife might be a big Disney™ fan.

Seriously, Disney® managed to make Star Wars™ boring and devoid of wonder, all in the name of Woke.

Oops.

I’m thinking some prankster changed the numbers on the sign, but if you notice, all that Bud® is still sitting there.

Bud Light® is now down over 25% in sales.

That’s devastating to the bottom line, and I won’t go into the story in too much depth because it’s pretty fresh in everyone’s mind. But what’s not fresh is the beer, since it’s rotting on the shelf and I heard today Bud™ is now having to buy it back, and corporate is having to buy dusty, expired cases back. To make it even more amusing, now the LGBTWTF groups have disavowed Bud™, making them about as popular as polio or monkey pox, depending on the group.

Ooops.

Target® sold “tuck-friendly” female bathing suits, plus a line of “pride” clothing for kids.

Why is Target™ in the business of sexualizing our kids? In the “how could it get worse?” files, it turns out that one of the clothing designers for Target’s™ “Pride” line is featured in a shirt noting that “Satan respects pronouns.” Plus, well, look at him – nothing about him says, “safe to leave kids with,” and a lot that says, “voted most likely in high school to be found to own a house with a crawlspace filled with bodies.”

Target® is feeling the heat. They’ve reportedly (in at least some stores, crunched all the “pride” material into the back of the store into smaller sections. Apparently, this is mainly in the South, though stories are conflicting. Since Gavin Newsom has solved all of California’s problems and successfully revitalized San Francisco and stopped street pooping, he has taken the time to show great concern that one store stopped, under public pressure, selling propaganda materials.

Ooops.

It’s afraid.

I think this is what scares the Left. The idea that people will rise up without ever even talking to each other and destroy the companies that force-feed the populace a diet of propaganda and Woke. It starts small, with a beer. Now, at least some companies are backing off the idea of Woke.

Will this stop the Left?

No. I think they’re filled with hubris, and can’t see the real danger that they’re provoking, and the inevitable backlash as children become the targets of sexual predators is going to be stronger than all the Diversity Inclusion and Equity that BlackRock™ can extort. The backlash will end up in a predictable place . . . with a predictable reaction if we don’t stop it before it goes too far.

Now this is the kind of transitioning I can support.

Do we win? Yes I, I’m sure we will. This month? No. Next month? No. But people are awakening, learning that this is money we don’t have to pay to them, that this is a game we don’t have to play, that we don’t have to give them the minds and souls of our children, which in the end is what will end Woke.

FYI, friend in from out of town, might not have a post on Friday.

COVID-19, Looking Backwards

“What is more dangerous than a locked room full of angry Narns?” – Babylon 5

Behind every angry woman is a man who has no idea what he did wrong.

This will probably be my final post on the ‘Rona. It may get a mention from time to time about lingering effects on the economy and society, but I think the whole COVIDmania is far enough in the rear-view mirror that it’s time for the final review, barring some amazing new revelation like Corona was actually made by Big Toilet Paper to move product.

The disease clearly did kill people, but so does the flu. It did kill elderly folks by far in a greater percentage than in a normal year, but was nearly a nonexistent threat to most people in good health under the age of 65 or so. It was a threat ranking somewhere below “blood poisoning from cutting a finger opening an aluminum can” for anyone under the age of 20.

Everyone in my house had it, and everyone is fine now. It was a light fever (99°F, 3.2 kilometers) in the afternoon for me, Pugsley never noticed having it (but was confirmed to have antibodies) and hit The Mrs. the hardest, but I don’t think she missed more than a few days of work.

It did take one person I knew, but he was nearly 100 years old. It also took the life of one of my friend’s relatives – an elderly father-in-law. I found that one out after making a COVID joke, so, yeah. For my follow up, I’ll probably end up saying, “Thank you for your loss” at a funeral.

In a world where I expect that “get boosted” will qualify as a synonym for “drop dead” – I’m certainly glad that we’re not Vaxxed.

Being un-Vaxxed was a really easy decision. First, this was a novel use of a new technology on a massive scale. In that respect, I’d much rather be the control than part of the experiment, to the point that I’ve never even been tested for the ‘Rona. How do I know I had it? Like I said, I had a small fever one afternoon.

I heard that when Elvis was in the Army he spent time looking for suspicious mines.

Yeah, I know that having “a small fever one afternoon” isn’t in the diagnostic manual for the ‘Vid, but since that small fever one afternoon happened after The Mrs. coughed on me at close range about a million times during the night.

Second, I wasn’t personally that afraid of the ‘Rona by that point. The peaks in the infection rate had been up and down and up and down, but the numbers weren’t adding up, especially in my age range as all that scary. Back then, I think I said that the only age range where I would even think it might make sense was above 60 or 65.

Third, the propaganda was huge. Some of the biggest attacks (hackers) came after this site after I posted content that was contrary to The Narrative. Public relations campaigns were imposed. The trick where the Leftists swap one chip for an updated chip (Comey Bad Because Clinton Laptop becomes Comey Now Good Because He Hates Trump) was really in play for the ‘Rona. Thankfully, the Internet remembers:

Above is a short list of people who I hope took their boosters.

The Leftists were well programmed. And then, in a move that is especially Evil, they approved this technological monstrosity for kids. Babies as young as six months. And they died, and are dying today from the Vaxx. How many healthy athletes in their 20s had a heart attack prior to the ‘Vid?

None.

The evidence for the Vaxx being awful is piling up. Approval for the Johnson & Johnson® Vaxx has been pulled, as it is apparently the worst one in use in the United States. I know two people who took that Vaxx at about the same time. They had major heart surgery within a month of each other. That’s an anecdote, I know, but the plural of anecdote is data, and that’s probably why Johnson & Johnson™ is no longer available.

But it’s cold showers. And video games. And . . . anything but the Vaxx™.

Oops.

Yeah, you can get COVID if you get the Vaxx™. You can spread it, and you can also die of it. Based on some data that I’ve seen, the ‘Rona that Vaxxed® folks get is actually worse in duration and impact than those who are pureblooded like me. Perhaps that’s why peabrains like Jeff Spicoli want purebloods to be in prison camps.

I’m on the opposite end. I actually hope that all of the people who took the Vaxx™ aren’t harmed by it. I do think that the powers that be are ready to let it go. For whatever reason this was pushed, even if it was something as simple as getting Trump out of office, it’s served the purpose that they intended for it, and when Russia invaded the Ukraine, well, it was okay to shut it all down.

I wonder what the next thing they push will be?

33 Things To Think About On A Friday

“I didn’t know there was a no train list.” – Archer

If you would like a list of ways technology has made life worse, press one for English.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a list post, so, why not?

Here are some things I think:

The struggle is important. If every day were placid and peaceful and there was no want, life would become dry and boring, and we would choke on our luxuries. The Garden of Eden could never last.
When I come home my dog is always happy to see me, but then I remember he also gets happy sniffing the cat’s butt and chewing on furniture.
Risk is important, too. Judging good risks and bad risks mainly comes from taking bad risks. Avoiding all risk is perhaps the worst risk.
They say a penny saved is a penny earned, but it really takes a few million to buy enough crack and prostitutes to make Hunter happy.

Again?

Women are best when they’re being women, not crappy imitations of men.
Men are best when they’re being men, and masculinity isn’t toxic.
If the glass is half empty, there’s probably room for some vodka.
The biggest fights are over the smallest things. A trillion-dollar budget shortfall? No one on Earth can even understand it. The neighbor’s lawn being an inch too tall? That’s a fight.
If men are strong in the balance of power, civilization endures. If women are strong in the balance of power, civilization is imperiled, in the end for lack of children.
If Life give you lemons, look Life right in the eye and say, “I want beer instead.” Life should know better by now.

If you put root beer in a square glass, do you just get beer?

Moderation is good, because there should be balance in life.
Moderation is bad, because there is power in passion, and no progress was made by anyone being reasonable.
Both 11. and 12. are true.
They say money can’t buy happiness, but it bought Hunter Biden so many laptops he forgot where they all were.
I find the most peaceful sleep I have is when the thunder is blasting out a constant tattoo against the night sky, the worst when it is utterly silent.
All things must end. This is good. Without an end, there is no new beginning.
That thing about all things must end? I forgot revolving doors.

That door hit me as I got out. It was a pane in the butt.

Success is often more damaging than failure.
As Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be lived forwards, but understood in reverse.” The worst things in my life have always led to the best things in my life.
Corollary to 19., if you don’t have a plan to go somewhere, you won’t go anywhere. If you have a plan, you might not end up where you thought you’d be, but at least you’ll be moving.
Corollary to 20., I might be lost, but I’m making good time.
Corollary to 21., don’t just follow your dreams, chase them until they file a restraining order.
Of course the game is rigged. What’s bothering you now is the idea that they’ve stopped pretending it isn’t.
They say, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” What could be closer than locked in the crawlspace?

I wish I had a wine cellar with an elevator. That would lift my spirits.

A large part of the last few decades has been spent in trying to convince Americans that their culture is entirely based in commerce and pop culture. That is not true – the values that built America rely on neither.
What are you doing today to make sure that today matters?
Kindness is free. So is sarcasm. I found out that one of these works better at funerals than the other last week.
As I’ve said before, happy is easy. Not being bored is easy. Standing up for something that matters is the most important thing.
One of the saddest things about today’s society is that young people find more challenges in the virtual world than in reality. When reality catches up to them they won’t be prepared.
Jenga® would be more interesting if the pieces exploded when the tower fell.
Beauty exists. Truth exists. Goodness exists. Those who would rule you would blind you to those simple facts.
It’s called work because they pay you to do it. If it were always fun, it would be a hobby.
I think Elon Musk has a lot of hobbies. And ex-wives.

If Musk started making robot lawnmowers, would he call them E-Lawn®?

If you have a choice about your attitude, be positive. Enjoy the moments you can, and you can enjoy most of them.
You have a choice about you attitude. Sometimes it’s your only choice.

Unstoppable Failure And Elon Musk’s Next Ex

“All this fuss over what? Is it a hill, is it a mountain? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter anywhere else, but this is Wales. The Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, but we did none of that, because we had mountains.” – The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down A Mountain

What are the first words of a baby volcano? Mag-ma.

Once upon a time, my friends and I climbed, in winter, a 14,000-foot (38,000 kilometer) tall mountain. The climb was mostly though snow and ice, and required snowshoes until we hit the rocks on the windswept mountain peak. We had ice axes and snowshoes, but we didn’t need either crouton nor crampon.

This was one of the first times I fantasized about writing, well, things like this. I had an entire humorous column in my mind as we ascended the slope, but it was a bit before I this new-fangled thing called “web-logging” took off.

Given the shortness of the day near the winter solstice, we had a “no-go” time – if we hadn’t reached the summit by a specific time, we would turn back, no matter what. Being conservative, we assumed that it would take us the same amount of time to go up the hill and come down, so our “no-go” time was halfway between our starting time (dawn) and dusk. Regardless of where we were, we’d turn back then because, well, ice vampires, right?

Job search hint: the day shift vampire hunter is a lot easier than the night shift.

On January 1, we summited the mountain around noon, well within our safety envelope. We took pictures. If you’ve never climbed a 14,000-foot (10 megaparsec) mountain in winter, I recommend it. The crisp wind that blows in winter is dry and cold and clean. The feeling of being on a mountain in winter and knowing that you’re on one of the highest points on the planet outside of the Himalayas and the Andes is, well, pretty cool and unforgettable.

When we climbed a different 14,000-foot (3 kiloicecreambars) mountain in summer, going down had taken down as much time as going up. Sure, we didn’t have to rest, but the big issue was not tumbling downhill. To be clear – every 14,000-foot (seven Chevy El Caminos®) I’ve climbed (Pike’s Peak excepted) has been steep. Really steep. Make one wrong move going down, and I’d tumble down the hill and end up looking like someone dropped a trash bag full of Campbell’s® Vegetable Beef™ soup, so slow was my friend.

Winter, however, was different. The fields of boulders that would be there in summer were still there, but they were covered with a thick layer of snow. The solution?

Glissading. Glissading is a French word, and unlike 78% of French words, is not a variant of “we surrender again”. Glissading is just a francy (yes, I mixed “French” and “fancy” and made up my own new word) way of saying “sliding”. The way we glissaded was to:

Sit on our butts, holding our ice axes diagonally across our chests,
Slide down the hill at up to 20 miles an hour,
Turn over so our ice axes dug in so slow us down if we wanted to stop.

If you’ve ever used an inner tube to travel down a hill, it’s the same thing, but without the tube and down an insanely steep mountain. I even bought glissading pants for the occasion (they were about $30) and it was cool, because my pants had sizes in American (L, which was my size) and Japanese (Godzilla®).

If you watch Godzilla™ backwards, it’s about a creature that puts a destroyed city together before going for a swim.

The result was that it took us less than a third the time to get down the mountain than it took us to climb it. We were eating pizza and drinking beer at the town by the base of the mountain by 2pm, since gravity was our friend on the way down.

Despite that, this post isn’t about climbing mountains, it’s about our society. To build it, and build the wealth that we have, it took hundreds of years. Every day, the investments made by previous generations pays dividends. An example? The interstate highway system, built out in a fit of rationality in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, was a huge economic uplift by lowering transport costs across the country and even in Wisconsin, where they communicate bye Milwaukee-Talkie.

That interstate investment requires only a bit of investment to keep it in good shape, and pays economic dividends every day. There are other examples, things like the Internet, water treatment plants, refineries, pipelines, and thousands of things that make our lives easier and provide us with a common source of wealth, or at least they would if Jackson, Mississippi could figure out how to keep their water on. Now, I guess they just drink whiskey.

When it all works well, it’s great. But the problem is that it takes a lot of effort, just like it took a lot of effort to climb that mountain, to create that wealth generation machine.

Where was the peak wealth? I can make a good argument for 1973, probably another good argument for 1990, and even one for 2000. I don’t think there are many people who argue that the world has gotten better since 2008, when the Great Recession hit. Since that time, certainly, wealth creation has stopped. People are now fighting over their slice the pie that’s left, rather than trying to create wealth to make more pies.

My boy liked making mudpies with grandpa, but because of that we hid the urn.

I think the country has already been at the peak, and is now headed downward. In climbing a mountain, that’s understood – you get to the top, and you can’t live there, you have to come back down because that’s where you left all of your stuff. With an economy, the idea is that there’s perpetual growth. And when the wealth growth stops?

People have to fight over what’s left. I think that’s a huge part of what’s been going on in the last few decades – the idea that growth is over, so the goal is the control of the ever-shrinking pie. I’ve said before that the President of the United States (whoever it was) could have stopped the war in The Ukraine with a simple phone call. Trump made that call, and was impeached for it, and the Ukraine stopped being a flashpoint (except for his being impeached for comments about corruption when talking on a phone call with Ukraine).

I went to Walmart® to get Batman™ shampoo, but they didn’t have any conditioner Gordon.

Ukraine isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. What, then is it a symptom of?

The cascading failure of the West. What’s going wrong? Here’s a short, uncomplete list:

Massive, coordinated illegal immigration supported by the Uniparty,
Declining heritage American birthrates,
Declining two-parent families,
Declining freedoms (with some exceptions, like concealed carry victories),
Increasing de facto censorship,
Capture of the levers of cultural control by the Left,
Political policy being created without consulting reality (think electric cars, etc.),
Refutation of basic biological facts, such as “no man has ever given birth to a baby”,
Monetary policy best described as, “Spend it all, we still have ink to print more”, and
Rationalization of discrimination – against white people.

We’ve reached the “sliding down the hill” part of the climb. Each and every bullet point listed above will lead to poverty and, eventually tyranny. Period.

I guess some people can read the future.

Culture in the West is in full collapse. And if it were only one of those factors, we could work around it. But all of them together? We’ve reached the stage of cascading failure in the West. These failures feed off of each other, and lead to an even faster decline. Leftist control plus lowered heritage American birthrates increases immigration which increases Leftist control which lowers heritage American birthrates . . . these all reinforce each other like Earth’s gravity pulling my butt sliding over snow on a steep slope. If I don’t stop in time, it’s over.

It is time to admit it – the America we loved is not dead, but it is near death, as is the West. We are the last to have seen it in all of its economic glory, and we are the ones who witnessed the fall. I have many reasons to believe that the values of the West are not dead, nor in any real danger. What will we lose? The easy life we have had.

In truth, the way to kill the West is through the easy life. Give the West hardship? We shine. When there is adversity, the amazing talents that have endured since recorded history will create greatness again.

This may be our last shot at the stars for 1,000 or 10,000 years or more. That’s okay. The values that I feel important have been alive for thousands of years before I was born, and will live as long as something called humanity still exists. The reason I climbed that mountain in the snow on January 1^st, so long ago? It’s a spirit that will continue to exist.

The things that we lose will only be the things that never mattered to us.