Category: Complacency

If The Market Is Being Gamed, Why Not Cheat?

“Well, if you could cheat for $84, you could cheat for $800.” – Green Acres

I had a scam caller the other day threatening to put me in jail for tax fraud.  Heck, I don’t even pay taxes.

First, I’m not a financial advisor, so please consider this commentary by an Internet humorist entertainment – you shouldn’t trust me since I lost $75 betting that Oprah would eat weight watchers in 2008.  Not the food from the company Weight Watchers®, but actual people who were watching their weight.

I’m willing to bet that the people who give tips to sitting Congressmen aren’t, financial advisors, either.  They’re insiders.  Sure, a law was passed in 2012 that was supposed to ban insider trading.  But Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped $1.7 million in travel stocks (in 33 transactions) on February 13, 2020.

I like Mongolian poetry, but it has prose and Khans.

You know, in February.  When he was getting classified Corona briefings where the CIA admitted that they’d have to overthrow the United States government instead of the Russians because of the planned travel restrictions.

But Senator Burr got those briefings before travel stocks tanked.

If it was me who sold that stock right then, you can be sure that the Feds would wonder where I got the psychic ability to make trades.  After all, the Feds put Martha Stewart in the slam after they investigated her for insider trading.  (Yes, I know that Martha went down for lying to the Feds and not insider trading, but that just generally results in an additional term in Congress for most people.)

But not Senator Burr.  Nope.  The FBI investigated him, and the Department of Justice concluded that what he did was just awesome sauce, and awarded him six more terms in the Senate.

I met a baker that was a natural at stock trading – buy dough, sell pie.

The financial performance of sitting Congressvermin is amazing:

  • Representative Collin Peterson, Minnesota, started in 2008 with $123,500. In April of 2020?  He was worth $4.2 million.
  • Representative Judy Chu, California, was worth less than $100,000 in 2008. By April of 2020?  She was worth $7.1 million.
  • Senator Roy Blunt, Missouri, went from $602,000 to $7.1 million in the same time span.

How did these people do that?

I’m sure it was careful investing and not at all sweetheart deals that aren’t available only to powerful members of Congress.  I mean, it makes sense that Barack Obama entered the White House worth $1.3 million and today is worth somewhere between $70 million and $140 million.

Biden is busy in the White House – he spends most of the day watering his hair.

Where did he make that money?  Books.  Public speaking fees.  Netflix® opening up a truck and shoveling money down his mouth.  Certainly, none of this sounds like a payoff, does it?

But every Senator and Representative can’t be shoveled money like that.  I’m betting that in many cases, the payoff is just a tip here and a tip there.  That’s not protected, but remember that Congressparasites can just decide to not pay their taxes and not suffer any significant consequences.

There is, however, an idea that I’m thinking of doing.  I haven’t done it yet, but at some point (maybe next week?) I was going to start checking out trading ideas from here (LINK) or here (LINK).

They had to bribe my brother to be good when he was a kid.  Me?  I was good for nothing.

Yup.  People are now making it easy to track the trades of the people getting paid off in Congress.  Are all of the trades going to be winners?  Of course not.  But the stock purchases by Congressrats outperform the market by between 6% and 10% per year.

Maybe the Congressswine are just picking stocks that are already doing well and jumping on the bandwagon?

No.

The stocks that senators bought had zero abnormal performance before the senators bought them.  After a year?  Those same stocks had abnormal positive returns of 25%.  This is a rock star level of performance – put any of these people at a hedge fund and they’d be billionaires in less than a decade.

This is not chance.

They’re cheating.

Does it matter how they’re cheating?

When Warren stopped running for president, it was the second race she left that year.

Probably not.  As long as they consistently do it, though, who cares?  There does seem to be a skew to it – Senators in their first term seem to do the very best.  Perhaps that’s when they take the ticket and sell out their principles for high returns so they can be blackmailed later?

Nah.  That’s silly, right?

Regardless, although you and I can’t get book deals and have people sell us real estate for ludicrously low prices, I’m going to check to see if I can’t cheat like the pros.

The Biggest Lie Of The Left: Guns

“It’s ridiculous. Invisible? Whoever heard of anyone being invisible? Unless, of course, you have the ring of power.” – Soap

I told Pugsley the other day to sign my name for a note for school.  At least he’ll be in practice.

I once heard some psychologist (I think it was a psychologist, it was a very long time ago) on a television show say:  “Children are naturally truthful.”

With that one statement, I knew that the psychologist had no children.  As a child, I was a horrible liar.  My lies were horrible in every sense of the word.  I told lies that couldn’t possibly be true based on laws of physics that even I knew at my age.  And I told them in ways that weren’t convincing even to casual observers.  As a parent?  Oh, my, I assumed anything any of my kids told me before the age of ten was a lie.

I do recall telling one other little kid that I could turn invisible – I think I was five.

Why?  I have no idea.  But if you tell someone that you can turn invisible, eventually they’re gonna want to see some sort of proof, even if they’re five.

Now, however, our politicians and media are teaming up to tell a lie that’s just as stupid as my “I can turn invisible” lie.  That lie is this:

Mass shooters with AR-15 weapons are a national problem.

Well, no, they’re not.  At all.

Last year, about 364 people in the United States were killed with “long guns” – rifles.  More people have died from vaccinations than have died from AR-15 style weapons this year.  More people died falling out of bed (450) and over 2,500 left-handed folks die using right-handed items incorrectly.

People who are left-handed score higher on standardized tests than people who died as infants.

Yes.  More people die from being left-handed than from the dreaded “assault” weapon.

The odd obsession of the Left (not the left-handed) to take assault weapons, in particular, has long fascinated me.  Here is a gun that is provably twenty times safer than doctors with bad handwriting scrawling out prescriptions in what appears (to me) to be some sort of script that only a retarded (yes, I’m taking it back) chimpanzee with shakes from palsy could produce.

Honestly, for a device produced to expel a projectile at around 3,000 feet per second, the AR-15 is about the safest invention ever.  It’s like the ten million or so AR-15 shoot Nerf® darts if they only manage to kill 364 people a year.  So what’s the deal?

Let’s dissect the idea:  what really scares the Left about guns?

  • First, most gun deaths are Leftists shooting other Leftists.

Washington, D.C., had 920 people shot last year.  95% of the people in Washington, D.C. are Leftists.  People shooting each other isn’t a problem for the people on the Right, it’s just Leftists shooting each other.  People on the Left don’t understand why people on the Right aren’t upset.

Well, it’s because we’re not killing people and we’re not being killed.  Duh.

In fact, if you took lawful gun owners on the Right and their homicide rate (using guns) it would be among the lowest in the world for any country, including those that ban guns outright.  The gun homicide rate of people on the Right is similar to people on Mars, and Elon Musk hasn’t killed anyone recently.

People on the Right don’t shoot each other.  Generally, the only time people on the Right shoot people on the Left is when the people on the Left are trying to kill people on the Right.  Sure, you can come up with a few oddball examples where somebody on the Right shoots someone, but they are really the “man bites dog” stories because they are so unusual.

People on the Left killing each other?  That’s what you call “Friday” in Chicago.

What did the German say when he went into the French bread store?  “Gluten tag!”

So, when the latest shooter (FedEx shooter in Indianapolis) showed up, the Left pounced.  It was and is the man bites dog story that they’ll use to prove their lie.

To prove the point:  the Left was ecstatic when the Boulder killer showed up.  They were even more thrilled when it appeared that he had an AR-15.  Then reality hit.  When the killer proved to be an “intersectional” member of two of the Left’s worshipped classes – an immigrant and a Muslim, the Left was quite sad.

How to get out of their lie?   Blame it all on unfounded claims of “white supremacy” for the killing of nine white people.  If that’s white supremacy, the guy, just maybe, is doing it wrong.  Now if the goal was to kill white people in Boulder, well, he got that part just right.

NPR® had a lovely story:  “Why Boulder Is Trying To Keep The Focus On The Victims And Not The Shooter.”  See, if it’s a Muslim, they can’t even call him what he is – a killer.  This was all so that the story could be properly memory-holed.  It was the story they were looking for, but just the wrong killer.

Betcha $5 that NPR™ doesn’t run a similar story about Indianapolis.

Now, after half a dozen fizzled attempts to get the narrative they were looking for (someone who wasn’t a Leftist shooting other Leftists), they found it.

  • Second, individuals with guns scare Leftists, because Leftists love the State.

Leftists love statist solutions.  To them, the State is power.  It’s power for their ideas.  Leftists don’t see a world where they can go and create and change things they don’t like.  Nope.  Leftists see a world where the State has to exist to right all of the wrongs that have been done to them.

Go and create a business that serves thousands or millions of people?  Or wait for the State to forcibly take money from other people to give to you as reparations for a crime that occurred decades or even hundreds of years in the past?

Are the hieroglyphs in the pyramid hard to read because they’re encrypted?

The second one seems ever so much more fun.

But people forget that the Second Amendment was specifically written to prevent tyranny that the People wouldn’t put up with.  An armed populace are citizens.  An unarmed populace are subjects.  A stoned populace are Oregonians.

Leftists want subjects, not citizens.  Leftist want masses who vote for collectivist politicians so they can take power, and never let it go.

People on the Right?  Mainly they just want to be left alone.

  • Finally, Leftists politicians are scared because armed citizens limit what they can do.

January 6, 2021 was quite a surprise:  a group of people petitioned their government for redress.  Was there violence?  Yes.  Was it less than nearly any of the 2020 Some Black Lives Matter protest?  Certainly.  Damage was minimal.  The only death due to violence was one girl in a red hat who was shot by a cop.

That wasn’t the damage.

The damage was to the minds of the elite.  They realized that, as I’ve said before, the governance of an armed nation requires the consent of the governed.

Prior to this, the biggest fear of Congress was chlamydia.

I’ll take a second to make an aside.  People keep talking about “majority rule” as if there is some sort of magical win that comes from 50% plus one vote.  Let me ask a fairly simple question:  if a law or rule is so repugnant that 20% of the country finds it intolerable, is that a good law?

Probably not.

Here, however, the elite have figured out Wilder’s Law:  20% of the people, if armed, can stop 100% of the laws, if they are committed enough.  And it scares the elite to death.  An armed populace always scares tyrants.

My prediction is fairly simple:  Americans will continue to own guns.  Lots of them.  Legally or not.

The Left lies like a group of five-year-olds.  They say that “assault weapons” are a problem.

They’re not.  Provably not.  The left is lying.

Okay, if I really was invisible for a day?  I’d kick a mime nearly to death.

Children are not naturally truthful.  And neither is the Left.  And the Left is certainly not invisible, even when they try to convince you they are.

Welcome To Being An Outsider

“Now, I didn’t start it, but be sure as Hell I mean to see it through.” – Shooter

If you boil a clown you get laughing stock.

We’re Outsiders.

Well, not all of us.  But when you look at the system, most of the people reading this post are Outsiders.

I happen to live in a place filled with Outsiders.  Here in Modern Mayberry, you’re ten a hundred times as likely to see a Gadsden flag on a flagpole as a Bernie® bumper sticker.  Besides the Bernie supporters around here have now all been kicked out by their roommates, you know, “Mom and Dad”.

That’s why it’s Modern Mayberry.

It’s not paradise.  There are some thefts.  There are some drugs of the most destructive kind.  There’s even a hipster who was an outdoorsman before it was cool – you’d call him a homeless guy.

But yet . . .

People here still remember the United States that was, or at least the United States we remembered from our dreams.  One where the Constitution was the rule.  One where the dream wasn’t one of dependence on handouts.  One where you could ignore it when the government called you at home – you could let freedom ring.

A friend of mine used his stimulus check to buy baby chickens.  Money for nothing and the chicks for free.

Tonight I drove home along Main Street, and I saw people out and about.  In one block I saw six people that I personally knew, and most of them made it off the sidewalk in time.

Yet all of us in Modern Mayberry are really Outsiders, and I think that we know that.  And I think we cherish it, just like the EpiPen® my friend gave me as he was dying – I know I’ll always cherish it.

I watch the news stories of places that seem alien to me.  I know that California in 1980 was overwhelmingly what we now call a Red state.  Now?  It’s alien even to many that were born there.

The politics that created what would have been one of the most prosperous nations in the world have given way to politics that has made California one of the most impoverished states in the United States.  I know Gavin Newsom tried to fight poverty, but he kept losing.  Homeless people can be deceptively strong when you try to wrestle them.

Sure, I’d love to have California back.  I’d love to have Disneyland® back and the American Dream Vacation™, too, with bonus points for stops at the Grand Canyon and Uncle Eddie’s place.  But the beliefs that I believe most readers here have aren’t shared by most voters in California in 2021.

There was a person who saw the California ban coming:  No-Straw-Domus.

I don’t blame the native Californians – they voted against this insanity again and again, but were overruled from activist benches.  We know what sort of trash is on the benches, but what is on the table for the United States?

  • Individual Rights – these are being replaced by group rights. Reparations for crimes committed nearly two hundred years ago?  By the descendants of people who moved here from Germany in 1880?
  • Freedom of Choice – this is being replaced by coercion, explicit and implicit. Want to do business?  You can have whatever opinion you want – as long as it’s the right one.
  • Due Process – this is being replaced by guilt by inference. Red flag laws, anyone?
  • Right to Keep and Bear Arms – this is being replaced by the right of approved people to potentially be allowed to purchase a limited number of weapons and keep them locked in a safe at home. As long as we know the weapons are kitten-safe.

Propaganda for collectivism has long been in the offing.  For all of my life the programming has been in place to change attitudes to accept this – Leftists have monopolized the major networks since I was a kid.  Society has changed in ways that promote collectivism.  People move from location to location or live in monolithic cities or sterile suburbs that actively discourage people from acting together in the spirit of real community.

What is it replaced with?  City governments.  Homeowners’ Associations. Neither of those build community – those are, in larger cities, the expression of power and control.  The Mayor of Chicago holds more power than governors of many states.  That’s not any semblance of community – when is the last time you heard of anyone holding up Chicago for the face of election fairness?

What part of the mayor of Chicago weighs the most?  The scales.

That’s the downside.  But it gets better from here.

The first part of winning as an Outsider comes from knowing that you are an Outsider.  There is power in being an outsider – it only took a dozen Outsiders to eventually change the entire Roman Empire from people who worshiped Funko Pop® figurines to Christians.  Well, a dozen people and a few years.

Ideas are powerful.

Likewise, Outsiders are powerful.  Once a person realizes that they’re an Outsider, entire routes open to them.  This is a special type of freedom:

  • Freedom from the system. The system was built not to reward me, but to keep me in line, to keep me fearful.  To keep me compliant.  Recognizing that is everything.
  • Freedom from caring about the opinions of the world. Do I care about what France thinks about me?  Do I care about what Google® thinks about me?  Most (not all, but most) of the people whose opinions matter to me know it, and they all have excellent posture and dental hygiene.
  • Freedom to set my own goals. What is it that I value?  What is it that I want to accomplish?  This is mine, and mine alone.  Oh, wait, except for trash day.  I have to remember trash day.
  • Freedom to not apologize. When I make a mistake and I agree I’ve made a mistake, I own up to it, proudly.  When I don’t, I don’t apologize.  And I won’t.  Especially not for the bad jokes.
  • Freedom to change the world. And I will.  I’m going to keep going so I can inject my ideas so deeply into the Outsider psyche that the mRNA shot from Pfizer® will seem like a non-invasive procedure.

Kamala Harris is very concerned about COVID.  She heard that super-spreaders were the problem.

One piece of the puzzle, interestingly enough, came to me from crappy Star Wars® movie, The Force Awakens™.  The movie was horrible.  One thing that I couldn’t figure out was why, after killing the Emperor®, that the Rebels™ were . . . the Resistance©?

The movie was awful, partially because it was poorly written and choked with social justice.  But it revealed the mind of the Left in ways that I hadn’t realized before:

  • The Left wanted to identify with the Resistance© because they rely on powerlessness. Powerlessness is necessary to recruit Leftists – the core of Leftism is self-hate.
  • The Left is about power, but it refuses to admit it has it. That’s why Leftist professors from Leftist colleges complain about insufficient Leftism from Leftist politicians and Leftist media.  And vice versa – it becomes self-reinforcing.

Leftists rely on powerlessness as a route to power.  It is their foundational myth; it is their unifying element.  They are downtrodden, even as they control every major corporation.  They are disenfranchised, even though they control nearly every major media outlet – if there’s a cure for that, it’s unTweetable.

Twitter® is like a Leftist bank account – after you enter the wrong opinion five times, you’re locked out.

Given all of that, why am I so happy?

Because I’m free.  I’m free of my illusions.  I’m free to be an Outsider.

I’ll enjoy seeing the Gadsden flag tomorrow.  After all, there were another group of Outsiders a few years ago who seemed to like that flag.

And you remember where the Gadsden flag first flew?

On a pole.

Welcome To The Exponential, Including One Bikini Graph

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country For Old Men

When I went to Ireland I met some shy people, which surprised me.  No one expects the Irish inhibition.

I had noticed it some time ago a strange mathematical relationship – the National Debt (sort of) doubles about every eight years.  Is it an exact mathematical relationship?  Nope.  It varies a bit based on which eight years that you pick.  But the relationship is simple – the national debt is growing faster than yeast in AOC’s armpits, at about 9% per year.

It wasn’t always like that.

I also looked at the national debt between World War II and 1970 or so.  During that time period, the national debt was as flat as Joe Biden’s brain activity scan.  Hmm, whatever could have happened around 1970?

You’ll be happy to know that my search for “Richard Nixon bikini” came up empty.

The reason for most of our problems is that understanding the idea of exponential growth is difficult.  Our minds are (mostly) made for understanding linear things, or things that happen slowly.  No one really expects that, no matter how badly they eat, that they’d double in weight overnight, or even over the course of a month or year.

Yet, a lot of natural processes do follow exponentials, at least for a limited amount of time.  Take a baby.  Please.  I really have no use for them anymore.  Even the thought of a baby makes me exhausted.

Babies start with one cell, then two, then four, and then eight, and so on.  The initial growth of a child is exponential.  Thankfully, that levels off, or else there would be no way that I’d be able to afford to feed Pugsley.  If that exponential growth rate had continued, he’d be the size of the Solar System and need to eat cheeseburgers the size of Saturn just to make it to lunch.

Want fries with that Saturn?

No.  He’ll settle for the rings.

So, exponentials can’t continue on forever.  Math proves that.  If exponentials could continue forever, by the year 2032, the only blog left on the Internet would be this one, and everyone on Earth would have to spend 18 hours a day reading it.

Ahhh, I can dream.

But our national debt is following that trend.  Here’s a graph I put together:

Actual conversation with The Mrs.:  I said, “I promise I can make this [economic idea] interesting.”  The Mrs. responded, “Bikini graphs aren’t interesting to me.”

One of the lines is the actual national debt.  It’s the red one.  I just picked actual national debt data every eight years going into the past from today.  The other one?  I extrapolated back into the past from today: I just assumed that the national debt doubled every eight years.

How accurate was I?

In 1973 the actual national debt was $466 billion.  My backwards approximation?  $438 billion.  Close enough that a snake that was 3.14 feet long could be called a πthon.

Sure, in the middle, sometimes I was higher, sometimes lower.  But in general, I stuck the landing.

That means that in 2029 (if the United States is made of math) that we’ll be seeing a national debt of $56 trillion.  And in 2037?  $112 trillion.  Jeff Bezos sometimes works a whole year and doesn’t make that much money.

I heard he didn’t want to be CEO or president, just Prime® minister.

Does it make sense to anyone that the world will still keep accepting a doubling of debt every eight years and still keep sending us oil and steel and copper for the dollars that we print?  Sure, it worked for a long time.  Having an unmatched military and all the nukes gives a lot of room to dictate terms.

But how many people remember back to 1980 when the winner of the Cold War was in doubt?  The United States couldn’t print all of the dollars it wanted to without inflation.  The rule that the dollar followed changed, though, when the Soviet Union decided that it wanted to retire and spend the rest of eternity in Boca Raton in a retirement community gumming applesauce.

After that, the United States printing press could go wild.  Inflation?  Well, why bother with that?  The United States could print all the money it wanted and ship it overseas.  What else were people going to want?  Rubles?  Marks?  Rupees?

No.  The way that international trade was done was with the dollar.  We could print them up, and the world would soak them up and then the inflation could be exported all over the world, since the demand for dollars was now the entire world.  The United States could, in essence, tax the entire world to allow them to use the good old dollar.

I heard my chiropractor owes back taxes.

It was a good ride.  Need oil?  Print a few billion and send it to the Saudis.  Need copper?  Print a few million and send it to Chile.  Need cars?  Print a few billion and send it to Japan.

There are good things that happen when you win it all.  You get a trophy.  You get a party.  You get oil and copper and cars.  But if you have too much fun at the party?

There’s always the hangover.

Exponential growth can continue, and it can continue for quite a long time.  Without it, life itself wouldn’t be possible.  But life proves, again and again, that there is only so far that growth can go.

But, hey, it’s different this time, right?  The national debt can go on forever, right?

A Brief Guide To Human Action – Which Leads To Human Freedom

“They say you’re a man of vision.  Is that true?” – Lonesome Dove

I’ll never forget Pa Wilder’s last words:  “Find a woman that holds you as tight as Nancy Pelosi holds a vodka bottle.”

(John Wilder note:  Please read this post all the way through because I think you’ll find this one of the most useful posts that I’ve put together.)

Ludwig Von Mises is was an economist.  His pronouns are dead/buried.  The sure sign of the best economists is that they’re dead, because then they can’t ask to be paid for being wrong all of the time.

One thing that Von Mises left us with was a book called Human Action.  Really, it wasn’t a book, it was him sitting at his typewriter and generating a 400-page doorstop like he was getting paid by the punctuation mark.  I read some of it back in my more libertarian days.  Dry doesn’t begin to describe it – after completing two hundred pages you become as desiccated as King Tut’s armpit.

Thankfully, the main ideas of Human Action are quite powerful and also pretty simple.  And, it won’t take me 400 pages to get to the point.  Von Mises created a model of human action where he states that each and every voluntary human action requires three things:

A Vision Of A Better State:  For example, me having a beer.  If it was Friday, I might consider that having a beer would be a better state than not having a beer.  In most cases, the vision is based not on cold, logical thought, but on emotion.

A Path To Get To A Better State:  It just so happens that there’s a beer in the fridge, so if I got my sorry butt off of the couch, I could walk over and get one.

A Belief That Action Will Really Lead To A Better State:  I really and honestly believe that I could walk to the fridge and get a beer, since I deactivated the trap door that leads to the alligator pit.

How many economists does it take to fix a lightbulb?  Don’t know, they’re still arguing over why the last one broke.

In my example, I started off with a Vision first.  That’s one way that action can occur, but not the only way.  The three necessary conditions can really come in any order.  I might have a pile of lumber and a saw and a hammer.  So, I have a Path.  I have Belief that I could build something out of wood since I’m okay at building stuff out of wood (just okay, not great).  After thinking about it, I decide to build a PEZ® dispenser sized for PEZ© the size of cinder blocks with an articulated carved Anne Coulter head so her jaw can open as wide as a python’s.  In this example, my Vision of a better state (and need for a really big spring) came last.

I’ve found when analyzing the actions I personally take, a truism:  if all three of the Human Action requirements are met – Vision, Path, and Belief – then my action is guaranteed.  Likewise, if even one of them is missing, nothing (and I mean nothing) happens.

This model is useful to use when people that you’re working with aren’t doing what you want them to.  Analyze the situation:  which of the three elements of the Human Action model are missing?

People in business have been using this model on you for as long as you have lived.  Think of a typical car commercial:

  • Vision: Buy a Mustang® so hot chicks in bikinis will like me and want to pat my bald head.  See!  They’re patting the bald head of that man on the commercial!
  • Path: Go to the dealer and buy one, they have tons of them.
  • Belief: Hey, zero percent financing and no credit check.  They’re giving the money away so I can buy one!

All commercials are based on manipulating these three simple elements.  Commercials are attempting to get us to take action – or to avoid taking an action.  Most are trying to get our money, but some are trying to convince us that Steven Tyler from Aerosmith© personally cares whether or not we drive drunk.

Steven Tyler just released two books.  One’s a cookbook, and the other’s an art book:  “Wok This Way” and “Doodles Like A Lady”

Manipulation is the key to this game.  Understanding when you watch a commercial how they’re trying to change our views allows us to be on guard against that manipulation.  And, as I noted before, it is a very rare commercial that wants to appeal to logic.

Emotional manipulation is where the money is at.  The advertisers want us to use their gasoline and love it because, um, it’s more gasoline-y than the competitors?  Because it has special molecules in the gasoline that make gravy in your pistons?  Regardless, look for the emotional manipulation – it will be there.

So, we’ve saved a few bucks because we’ve kept the advertisers out of our heads.  Hurrah!  But who else is using this model?

Well, Big Government, for one.  On January 6, 2021, all the Congresscritters had at least a bit of pee in their pants.  A group of relatively aimless protestors stopped off at the Capitol to share their opinions with their elected representatives.

I was on a witness stand at a trial in Alaska, and the lawyer asked me, “Where were you on the night of November to March?”

The group’s Vision was murky.  “Walk over and complain” might be a good description.  It was certainly more peaceful than most of the George Floyd riots (and more on them in a minute).  The Path was easy – it’s not even a very far walk from their rally to the Capitol Building.  Did they have Belief that their action would allow them to “walk over and complain”?

Sure.  So they did.

But that’s not what the Congress Swamp Rats saw.  They saw a group that, with a slightly different Vision could have easily started a movement that would have ousted our current government via a revolution.  As every reader here knows (and as every Congressional Parasite knows), the rank and file of the Right are the single largest army the world has ever seen.  Even if the Right was pitiful, it could take over forty (?) state governments in 24 hours.

We are truly governed only by our consent.  Seizing power in America would be trivial if people on the Right had a Vision, a Path, and Belief that didn’t include a government more intrusive than if Google® was a proctologist and more bloated than 1977 Elvis.

That’s exactly what happened when the Berlin Wall fell.  The people suddenly had a Vision:  sexy American girls in bikinis, CD players, and not having to drive crappy commie cars anymore.  They had a Path:  tear down that Wall.  Once they had Belief?  The Wall didn’t last an afternoon.

As another Floyd, Pink Floyd© tried to metaphorically tell us, The Wall is built in our mind, brick by brick.

Communism is the noble struggle of the proletariat to overcome the problems that are only caused by communism.

Anyone who thinks the “assault” weapon grab has anything to do with “mass shooting” has bought the emotional propaganda that Big Government (along with Big Business and Big Media) is selling.  Big Government wants the guns off of the street because they are the only real threat that Big Government sees to itself and the privileges that it has given itself.

That’s why the George Floyd riots were so important to Big Government.  What were the protesters protesting for?  More Big Government, more handouts, and more government control – this time not only of our rifles that are rarely used to shoot anyone (484 people a year in the United States for all rifles, compared to 1,476 for knives and other pointy things), but also our speech, our national heritage, and even our thoughts.

The BLM riots weren’t stopped because they’re everything Big Government wants.

I started carrying a pistol after a mugging attempt.  Now my muggings are more successful.

The biggest trick the Devil tries is to convince you he isn’t real.  The biggest trick that Big Government tries is to convince you that you have no power.  But if we have no power, why are there more troops in Washington D.C. than in Afghanistan?  Big Government has set the Right as the enemy.  I assure you, they are more afraid of the 80,000,000+ people on the Right than they are of the Chinese.

Now that you know their intentions, what else is Big Government, Big Media, and Big Business trying to make citizens feel?

Does this change your Vision, Path, and Belief?

Leftists, Lawnmowers, and Liberty

“Except lawnmowers don’t have turn signals.” – Psych

It’s obvious that guy never read the script.

Today I welded up a riding lawnmower deck.

It was the first time in years that I’d had the garage clean enough to get whatever tool I wanted without conducting a gymnastics routine worthy of a gold medal – and I didn’t even have a Soviet Commissar that was getting ready to shoot my family.

My garage had been so chaotic that it could have been the White House press corps falling all over themselves explaining why President * intended to lose a fight with gravity going up Air Force One. But that’s another story. I’m sure Snopes® has already debunked that President * fell down, and instead called it “Mostly False” because he obviously fell up the stairs.

Back to welding up the mower deck:

My welding is really, really bad – it looks like toddlers played with molten metal, but without all of the emergency room visits. Regardless, the mower deck seemed more stable when I was done. Pugsley pronounced the mower “fixed” and was happy. If the crack in the mower deck stays fixed it will be due to luck and not my Civil War surgeon-level skill at welding.

You can imagine my glee when my kids had splinters. “Fetch me the hacksaw. . .”

Fixing the mower deck was important for several reasons. First, it showed Pugsley that when something is broken, if we think we can fix it, we should at least try. There have been a couple of times that this has backfired on me like the time I burned out a wiring harness on a Nissan Altima™ installing a stereo. Likewise, I try to tell The Mrs. that if she wouldn’t have stopped me from drilling that hole in my skull, my plan really would have worked.

Second, it showed Pugsley that our destiny is in our hands. Sure, that’s not always exactly true. Those dinosaurs munching on dino cabbage on the Yucatan peninsula certainly were having a legendarily bad day when the meteorite blazed them into future motor oil and plastics for making G.I. Genderless® action figures.

But most of the time, it really is true. We make our own destiny. Our choices, our courage, our virtue, and our tenacity are much greater indicators of our futures than any outside force. That’s a message I want etched in Pugsley’s mind. Of course, I might regret that if he chooses my nursing home – he might choose the Ayn Rand Retirement Villa®, where their motto is: “We only feed you if you have the will to get to the dining room.”

Just like Schrödinger, I should probably have an open casket. You know, to be sure.

Third, we don’t give up. If we fail, we try again. I fully imagine my preschool-level welds will have been just like bear porridge: too hot or too cold and not at all just right.

That’s okay. Another message to Pugsley is that we’ll try again. Honestly, these were very bad welds, but they were the best welds I’ve ever made. They may hold, but I doubt it. I think the metal will crack so badly that Pugsley will claim he was from a broken home.

Then? I’ll weld it again.

One of the reasons I engage in these adventures is that I want to inoculate Pugsley against Leftism. Fixing a mower deck is a small part of that, but still, those messages remain.

How will this inoculate Pugsley? The Left’s main reason for living is being a victim. The Narrative of the Left is always, everywhere, the same:

  • They Are The Victims

This is the first tenet of Leftism. Everywhere, always, the Left is the victim class. Can I prove it? Sure.

Look at any protest. Ever see a Leftist throw themselves in front of, say, a semi-truck? They want to die. They hate themselves. They look to the world and see how utterly wretched they are, and they hate the world that made them with a religious fervor. If they can’t die, they want to see the world burn.

There is no redemption for them.

I was going to go as a suicide victim for Halloween, but I decided to go as Jeffery Epstein instead.

  • They Seek To Convert By Creating Envy

Not everyone can be a True Leftist. Many are converted by creating a culture of envy. Envy is a powerful Evil. Why?

Envy makes a person want what others have. Did the other people earn it? In many cases, certainly not. Trust fund kids didn’t earn the right to drive a Lamborghini®. And lots of people who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year don’t work nearly as hard as the people who fix the streets or flip burgers.

Looks like COVID inoculation day in a Red State.

That’s a fertile ground for Envy, since in many cases there is only a minimal relationship between happiness and money. When Envy takes over, however, I’ve seen teams tear themselves apart because a single team member convinced everyone that The Man was taking advantage of them.

In 2021, I also see Leftists upset because other people get better jobs. I mean, why wouldn’t someone with a degree in Medieval Albanian Poetry not be making $234,000 a year two years after college? I mean, they were so smart in understanding what Murgatroid the Great meant when he said, “Oh, my headache ist such embiggened by a trough of wine thy previous night.”

  • They Seek To Divide The Country By Making A Country Meaningless

What is a country? A country is made by people born there from parents who were born there from grandparents who were born there. There, I’ve said it. If a person’s lineage isn’t at least that deep?

They’re not really American. Oh, sure, we’ve welcomed them, but unless they’d name their son Brandon or their daughter Kayla (both names I detest) they’re not really American.

If they have a second passport? Not American. Their loyalty is divided.

Being a part of a country means something.

The Left seeks to make it mean nothing. The Left thinks we should take care of a child 15,000 miles away the same way that we would take care of one in our hometown. Certainly, I understand that, but, really, doesn’t that kid have parents and a government? I am compassionate – but I care a lot more for the people in my town than for people who aren’t.

In Chicago, you ignore both.

The Left wants an endless stream of refugees into the United States. Why? So everything that made the United States great becomes the average of countries that were so awful that people came here instead of staying there.

  • The End Goal: To Gain Power.

Aesop rightly pointed out that this is the end goal in the comments a few weeks ago. And, he’s right. Leftists can’t gain control of the country unless they subvert the things that made the United States wonderful. This is also true of the West in general.

They must create enough anger, distrust, and division as possible. In this crisis, they imagine that they will step into power. This worked in France. In Russia. In China. In Venezuela.

The goal is that this will work in the West the same way it worked all over the world.

To make this happen, the values and beliefs of the Right have to go: they become politically incorrect in a storm of feigned weakness and victimhood. If you’ve seen pictures of Antifa®, one thing is amazingly obvious: they’re physically weak.

I’m sure he’s planning to be the poet in the collective farm. Or maybe make special bracelets for the farmworkers.

People who lift weights are more likely to become . . . Right wing. Lifting a weight removes illusions – it’s me against the weight. The man isn’t holding me back. No outside force is oppressing me. And, lo and behold, the people who are lifting will help you.

But only if asked. They won’t come out and suggest a thing. It’s you versus the Iron. They’ll help, but the know, deep down inside, it’s your struggle, not theirs.

So, it’s that simple. Learn strength.

And, teach strength. Teach responsibility.

I’m sorry. I meant weak bedwetters.

That’s why Pugsley and I welded the mower deck. We’re responsible. We can try to fix it. And we won’t give up.

If you want an antidote to the Left, you won’t get much better than that. Lift weights. Be responsible for your own life and your own surroundings.

While I’d like to be able to weld better, but as you can see, fixing the deck a dozen times might provide a much better result.

Read This Post Because You Want To See Why Efficiency Can Suck

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!” – Python, Monty

I’m scared that German sausage might be dangerous – but I guess that’s a wurst-case scenario.

One particular afternoon (decades ago) my ex-wife (She Who Will Not Be Named – SWWNBN) moved out.  It was one of those things where we were both immediately happier, though the process of getting a divorce was rough – the judge finally had to sit me down and tell me I couldn’t get the engagement annulled, too.

I kid.  SWWNBN and I were awful for each other.  One of the major disagreements in our life was money.  I was cheap – when SWWNBN wanted to get out of the house for dinner and I fed her Hamburger Helper® in the garage, well, SWWNBN wasn’t pleased.

So on that particular afternoon, SWWNBN moved out she handed me a plastic grocery sack.  It was filled to the brim with papers.  “Here,” she grunted as the heavy sack thudded on the dinner table, causing the legs to audibly groan, “are the bills.  And here is the checkbook.  I have no idea how much money is in it.”

SWWNBN then turned and walked out the door.  For good.

There’s a dentist office in the Vatican – it’s in the Listerine Chapel.

Let me explain how I got into this situation:  stupidity.

I had the brilliant idea when SWWNBN and I argued about money to give her control of the bills.  I figured that if she was responsible for paying them, she’d make sure that they were paid, and help economize around the house, keep the thermostat lower, turn off the lights, and understand that our income versus our bills was a constant fight to avoid trying to find the choice real estate under the overpass – but you have to remember location is everything.

SWWNBN had managed the bills for a few years.  Surely she had been competent.  I picked up the bill on top.

It was a gasoline company credit card.  It hadn’t been paid in two months.  The balance was (from memory) $780.

For gasoline.

SWWNBN had been paying the minimum balance and juggling the payments so it looked like the Titanic was doing swell, thank you very much, until the alarm went up and the crew jumped ship.

The movies The Sixth Sense and Titanic are about the same thing:  icy dead people.

The show of horrors went on as I went through the stack and started sorting them into piles:

  • Paid and up to date (one account, the mortgage was in this stack).
  • Only one or two months late.
  • Late and building a ludicrous balance.
  • Company threatening to send people named Vito and Chico to break my legs.

I then went to my computer and opened Excel®.  I started making a spreadsheet.  The bills were enormous.  In order to not have to “donate” a kidney to someone from the United Arab Emirates, my one option was to take an immediate loan against my 401K.

The next 24 months of my life were an exercise in extreme budget management.  Every single expense was an exercise in nearly zero choices:  every cent had a home before my company direct-deposited it into my account.  How close was I budgeting things?  By the time I was through with a five-dollar bill, Abe was clean-shaven.

My pay had become exactly coupled to my expenses.

Did you hear about that movie role Nic Cage turned down?  Neither did he.

When people think of efficiency, they describe, for instance, a manufacturing facility where all of the equipment is used at maximum capacity, all the time.  Whatever is being made flows from one process to the next and there’s no lag.  All of the processes are coupled.  There is no slack in the system.

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

Just like my income being exactly tied to the seemingly endless stack of bills that I had to pay, that kind of factory would bring nothing but chaos.  Whenever any part of it had to slow down or stop unless there was a place to put the “in progress” work, the entire factory would have to shut down or Lucy would have to eat a lot more chocolates.

My life was just like that factory.  If the dollar didn’t come in, I couldn’t pay my bills.  If I had been out of work for even a few months, I would have been bankrupt.  At least if I was bankrupt in summer, I might get some prime real estate in the stormwater culvert.

The example factory isn’t something I’ve made up.  If you look at the outages of natural gas and electricity during the February storm, you’ll see a system where all of the excess capacity had been used.  In colder climates, the systems are built for the cold.  In Texas?

Not so much.  The excess capacity for electrical generation (in some cases) was down for maintenance as pointed out by Nick Flandrey (his website) in the comments section here.

And it would be difficult to convince a business executive to build a lot of excess capacity for the coldest winter storm to hit Texas in over 120 years.  If there’s excess capacity, that executive will try to figure out a way to use it.  His career and BMW® payments require it, although I still feel sorry for that poor German that installs turn signals on BMWs™.

Excess isn’t tolerated – it’s not efficient.  Not a lot of polar bears use sunblock.

But don’t worry about teddy bears.  They’re already stuffed.

But in resilient systems, the excess isn’t just tolerated – it’s required.  There is a conscious decoupling from one operation to the next.  These are systems that are built to be reliable.  Part of our jobs as adults is to scan the horizon as hard as Joe Biden works when he tries to form a complete sentence to see where those breakdowns might occur.

Decoupling is required for many things – the very idea of prepping, for instance, is a conscious act to decouple from a fragile, efficient system.  Building up excess capacity (food, ammo, water purification, heat, shelter) is that very act of creating slack.  It’s building up space between your car and the idiot in front of you in case they hit the brakes on a wet road and you rear-end them and realize you’re underinsured and then they complain about neck pains and then say just kidding and this just got far too specific.

So, back to me, decades ago, sitting in a chair at a dining room table staring at a pile of bills.  Knowing that a truck had pulled into my life and as the bed went up, it had covered me up so deep that only a farmer could pull me out, since he knew that I wouldn’t make the soil richer.

And I dug out of debt, bit by bit, bill by bill.  When I retired a bill was a time of great joy.  And, the first one I paid off was that gasoline credit card that had been at the top of the stack.  Each time I turned a balance to zero?

Why did Angela Merkel cross the road?  Because she wanted to go that way and the pedestrian crossing sign indicated it was safe to do so.

I smiled.  I had decoupled a bit from my debt.  It took six years to get out, and four of those I was married to The Mrs.  I still recall paying a final bill on my final credit card on a crisp January morning.  I had no debt, not even car debt at that point.  Heck, I even paid the exorcist so my house wouldn’t be repossessed.

In my case, decoupling my bills from my paycheck was one of the greatest days of my life – knowing that, regardless of what happened next week was safe.  Then that savings stretched out to a month.  Then six months.  Then a year.

Decoupling gives you time and space, often those things in an emergency that you can’t buy with any amount of money.  Remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020?  Sure it was rough, but that’s just how Americans roll.

But one of the biggest lessons is, according to Henny Youngman:

“Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.”

The Left’s War On Truth

“I’ve heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers.” – The X-Files

Wow.  It’s like some of these might be made up.

The first enemy of the Left isn’t the Right.

The first enemy of the Left is the Truth.

The examples go back through history, starting with the Leftist takeover in France after the French Revolution.  In order to completely cut ties with the past, the Left even changed:

  • The names of the months: the Revolutionaries changed all of them, though they kept 12 months.  The coolest name was Therimidor which was, roughly, July.  I’ll give them that one:  Thermidor sounds like a place you keep wine.  I don’t know much about wine, but I do know you have to keep it hot.
  • Weeks went from 7 days to 10 days. Why?  Metric weeks!  They even had special names for the day, but they were all in French and looked like they might cause inadvertent strangulation if I tried to pronounce them.
  • The day went to ten hours. Each metric hour had 100 metric minutes.  Take that, Babylonians!
  • The units of measure. All standards of mass, energy, temperature, and length had to be changed.  Why do I call the metric system communist?  Because it started with the commies.  Did Stalin know how tall he was in feet and inches?  Nope, he was all metric, comrade.

Truth is the enemy of the Left, and the idea was (and is) to destroy history.  This is the reason the statues have to come down in city after city – they represent a Truth that the Left can’t control.  Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves?  His statue has to go.  He didn’t do enough.

Abe doesn’t go to plays anymore.  That last one blew his mind.

This Leftist hatred of the Truth might explain two stories that are recently in the news.

The first one is the reaction of the United States military versus Tucker Carlson.  Tucker Carlson:  Is he a legitimate military target, perhaps more dangerous than Russia?  More dangerous than China?

Well, no.

Mr. Carlson made a 10-minute segment where he criticized the President * for changing the military for political reasons.  The changes?  Most were tied to the feminization of the military.

Carlson made the point that the military’s job is winning wars.  Having pregnant female pilots probably (in Carlson’s estimation) didn’t make sense after President * made a comment about “maternity flight suits” in his address.

I hear this pilot’s husband complained that she worked too hard.  “Well, somebody’s gotta fetus.”

The response, from military personnel, in uniform consisted of a Marine sergeant who said, “. . . those decisions were made by medical professionals, by commanders, and our civilian leadership . . . .” and followed up with, “ . . . let’s remember that those opinions were made by an individual that has never served a day in his life . . . .”

I’m wondering what would have happened to a Marine in uniform attacking someone on the Left on social media?  Oh, wait, Marine sergeant Gary Stein was kicked out with an “other than honorable” discharge for criticizing Obama.  Sure – Tucker Carlson isn’t the Commander-In-Chief, but this is a political attack while in uniform.

John Kirby, Pentagon Press Secretary:  “(The United States Armed Forces) . . . won’t take advice from a talk show host or the Chinese military.”

But would the United States Armed Forces take advice from the Marines?

I hope I don’t give her low elf esteem.

In 2015, the Marines did a $35,000,000 (that’s a lot of crayons) study about integrating women into combat groups.  A pretty decent summary is here on the Marine Corps Times (LINK).  I’ll publish a few snippets from the article that highlight findings of the study (All bullet points are direct quotes from the Marine Corps Times):

  • All-male squads and teams outperformed those that included women on 69 percent of the 134 ground combat tasks evaluated.
  • All-male teams were outperformed by mixed-gender teams on two tasks: accuracy in firing the 50-caliber machine gun in traditional rifleman units and the same skill in provisional units. Researchers did not know why gender-mixed teams did better on these skills, but said the advantage did not persist when the teams continued on to movement-under-load exercises.
  • All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams. Those teams had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
  • Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle and the M203 grenade launcher.
  • Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system, at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.

Shockingly, women are different than men, the study found (All bullet points are direct quotes from the Marine Corps Times):

  • In anaerobic power and capacity, female Marines averaged 15 percent lower levels than their male counterparts. In anaerobic power performance, the top 25 percent of female performers and the bottom 25 percent of male performers overlapped.
  • In aerobic capacity, female Marines demonstrated levels 10 percent lower on average than male Marines.
  • Over the course of the assessment, musculoskeletal injury rates totaled 40.5 percent for women, more than double the 18.8 percent rate for men.

The Marines declare war on Tucker Carlson?

To the Left, Tucker Carlson is evil incarnate – Tucker is questioning one of the Sacred Points of Liberalism – Reality Is What We Say It Is.  That cannot go unpunished.  Personally, I know one former Air Force officer who is female who probably could have done any specialty she wanted to in the Air Force.  She is so far off the charts by multiple standard deviations on intellect and physical ability so as to be not comparable to average in any way.

She has contributed more to the national defense than I ever will – and she’s still doing it.  But the outliers don’t prove the average.

Women can serve, and can serve meaningfully, but they have physical limitations so significant that the Marines in 2015 said that combat infantry wasn’t an option if your goal was killing people and blowing up things.  An average college varsity swimmer can beat every woman’s swimming record – world record.  The woman’s record for deadlifting is 683 pounds – that’s quite a lot.  The men’s record?  1,104.5 pounds, nearly double.

Who says guns aren’t sexy?

No, we’re not deadlifting our opponents to beat them in combat, but strength, speed, and quickness mean something to the Marines or else P.T. would consist of couch time and nachos for lunch.  I’d think physical fitness mattered for people engaged in combat.

The Marine study agreed:  the top 25% of women overlapped with the bottom 25% of men in physical ability.  Also, in sheer competence, the all-male Marines clearly won 70% of all combat exercises.  Though I can’t find the quote, I do recall reading that several female participants in the study were quoted as being of the opinion that females shouldn’t be in combat after seeing the results.

What’s most frightening to me is that the military has come together to attack Carlson.  For the military to attack a civilian in the news media over an opinion that is political in nature is unsupportable.  It’s the next step to the United States Military becoming involved in domestic politics.  Oh, wait, there are troops in the Capitol and permanent fencing going up to keep citizens out?  Nevermind.

Ooops.  Looks like someone reads Twitter®?

The second news item might not originally seem related, but I assure you it is.  The last week has seen the growth of a new orientation:  Super Straight.

Super Straight has its origin in transgender ideology.  You see, if you are a male that doesn’t want to date a “trans woman” the trans community would call you a “transphobe” because, in their world, “trans women are women.”

Well, Super Straight was an amazing troll of this philosophy.  It was actually the brainchild of a 16-year-old on TikToc®.  He was lamenting that he would be called a “transphobe” for not liking “trans girls” so he came out . . . as Super Straight.  That meant that he was only attracted to women who were born as women.

The group noted they felt being called “cis-male” or “cis-female” was hate speech.  Orange and black are the SuperStraight colors.

In 2021 the idea that a biological male might want to only date biological females is being sold to kids as odd.  But even kids can see this is nonsense.  That’s why they’re revolting.  They were using the same language that the Left uses back at them, “Why can’t you stop attacking me for this?  I was born this way.”

And the Left must stop that – the idea that “normal” can defend itself is not acceptable.

The Left has to portray themselves as the undisputed victim class.  They are the ones that are horribly abused.  They are the ones that are deserving of pity because society oppresses them.  The idea that another group might take this from them?

Worse than death.  The Left agrees.

Remember,  trains is hard job.

So, the plug was pulled on the Reddit® forum r/SuperStraight after just over a week – despite the fact that over 25,000 people had joined it that quickly.  Or was it because that many people joined it that quickly?

Ironically, it wasn’t long before SuperLesbians started showing up.  They were creeped out by transwomen wanting to date them and calling them transphobes if they said no.  Also?  SuperGays showed up.  They didn’t want to date transmen.  It was a strange, weird, and amazingly polite group of people who didn’t want to be forced to date people who are (let’s be clear) more than a little creepy.

Is it a crime to notice?

I don’t dislike trans people – I don’t know any of them.  There just aren’t that many in the world.  There might be 0.1% to 0.3% based on a 2014 study.  Many of them have other underlying psychological issues:  their suicide rate is 20 times their peer group after surgery.  Based on everything I’ve read, they are a group that deserves sympathy and psychological help.

The trans movement is probably the biggest finger in the eye of Truth that the Left has pushed so far.  The idea that a 10-year-old kid can make decisions that would lead to them being put on very potent hormones with far-reaching implications to block puberty is frightening.

But the Left will support that with everything they have:  when Rand Paul questioned Dr. Levine about giving kids powerful hormones and conducting surgery on them during confirmation hearings, all Dr. Levine would say is, “Transgender medicine is a very complex and nuanced field with robust research and standards of care . . . .”

See, even the sign language interpreter isn’t buying it.

So, yes.  Levine supports it.  The Left agrees.  And mainstream news was, unsurprisingly ready to complain that Rand Paul didn’t understand medicine.  Dr. Rand Paul, M.D.

It erases our past.  It erases our norms.  It erases the current structure of society.  This is the same exact playbook as the military.  The military ceases to be about protecting the country, it becomes an arm of the political Left, erasing hundreds of years of tradition and purpose.

You realize this is next, right?

That’s why the SuperStraight movement made me smile.  It was founded by kids who see the lie.  They know they are being lied to.  They know the people who are lying, know they are telling lies.  This is the best element of hope:  Truth matters.

The Truth will win.

The Great Purge Ahead

“When a forest grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural.” – Batman Begins

Stalin was better than most magicians.  He really made people disappear.

The Soviet Great Purge started in 1936.  Stalin already had a bad reputation as a Dictator who couldn’t say no – he had gotten rid of millions already in the Holodomor (In The World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold And Silver!).  The Great Purge was different.  The piles and piles of earlier dead had been peasants and kulaks (kulaks were peasants that had enough money to own a cow), mainly.   Even before the Great Purge Stalin had the world record for Russian killing, a record he still proudly maintains.

By 1936 Stalin, always paranoid, decided his main opponents were, surprise, still Russians.

Anyone who had been a trusted advisor of Lenin had to go.  Anyone who looked like a threat to Stalin?  Had to go.  The Red Army had troops with guns.  Three out of five Soviet Marshalls were executed.  13 out of 15 army commanders, 50 out of 57 corps-level commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders were caught up in it.

The very top of the Soviet Military was decapitated.  But that was a small portion of the Great Purge.  In the end, probably a million or more were murdered or died in the Gulags.  Anyone in politics was fair game, and the more power the bigger the target on their back.  Many of the people who helped Stalin with the Great Purge eventually were victims of it themselves.

What did Jack Nicholson say to his dentist?  “You can’t handle the tooth.”

What was the basis of the Great Purge?  Even though Stalin binged and purged, it wasn’t bulimia, it was Power.  Stalin wanted to keep power.  His greatest weapon?

Fear.

And fear is currently the weapon (predictably) used by the Left today.  They want to push people to the fringes, isolate them, and then purge them.  The first step is making them feel alone.

Of course, there haven’t been executions in the United States.  However, Obama purged 197 high-level officers in the first five years of his administration.  That’s quite close to the Stalin numbers, and perhaps even greater when you consider that the military in 2000s America is far smaller than in late 1930s Russia.

The purge has lately increased.  The current SecDef has made it clear:  “The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies, but we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”

Just let that sink in.  The current Secretary of Defense has stated that he thinks that the biggest enemies of the United States are in the military, right now.  Today.  The leadership of the military has already been purged.  Now?  The rank and file is in the process of being purged.  Anyone not actively supporting the Leftist agenda will be drummed out.

If you need sink jokes, I’m at your disposal.

They want to purge anyone who is involved in “extremism” from the military.  As far as commies, I certainly agree.  But extremism for a Leftist is mere disagreement with a Leftist.  Don’t agree that having a 9-year-old boy dance as a girl in front of gay men at a strip club is entirely good and appropriate?

Extremist!  Behavior that would have resulted in imprisonment for the mother in all but the last 10 years since 1787 is now considered so sacred that it is impossible to challenge.  Now, speaking out against it is extremist.

Hollywood® is already on the job with this requirement.  Star Wars® was a part of my childhood.  I saved money when I was 12 to buy overpriced dolls action figures.  The mythos of Star Wars© was always one of Good versus Evil, which burned itself into my young imagination.

Now?  It’s Leftism versus the Right.  At every opportunity, the creative element at DisneyLucasFilmStarWars™ has abandoned the production of good movies to produce movies that are water carriers for the narratives of a Leftist agenda.

I grew up loving Star Wars©.  It was fun.  It was escapism.  It was a place where there were good heroes and evil villains.  Okay, I’ll admit, the entire series should have ended when the Emperor© said, “And now you die, young Skywalker™” during Return of the Jedi©.

Luke was late because he had to take an R2-Detour.

The latest is that an actress got fired for expressing mildly Right viewpoints.  Heck, they weren’t even something that 95% of every American wouldn’t have agreed with when Kurt Cobain was still sucking air instead of pushing daisies.

And that is the technique of the Left.  If they can’t directly imprison you, they do their best to turn you into an unemployed, destitute outcast of society.

Imagine 50,000 Leftists watching everything you re-Tweet® to catch you.

But, thanks to me, you can watch the purge unfold in real time.  The Long March through the institutions of the United States is ongoing.  Here’s the current status of the things the Left owns:

  • The K-12 educational system.
  • Colleges and Universities.
  • Most Protestant religious organizations.
  • Most Catholic organizations.
  • The psychological establishment.
  • The American Medical Association.
  • All mainstream news media.
  • All mainstream entertainment media.
  • Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
  • The general officer corps of the armed services.
  • The courts.
  • Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • Many (but not all) Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

The result in 2021 is that of the institutions of the United States, the Left has or is consolidating control over nearly all of the important ones.  What remains?  Junior officer and enlisted men in the armed forces (at least for the next few months) and the governors and legislators of a few states.

Oh, and at least 80,000,000 inconvenient people.

The idea is to scare Americans about the Purge, to scare them about their place in society.  If the State and the Media can scare Americans like that, they can achieve their ultimate goal:  to make them be quiet.

One of the greatest compliments I’ve had from a friend about this website was this, “If they (the powers that be) were really reading and understanding the things you say, you’d be much, much higher on The List.”

The Mrs. prefers the elevator, I prefer stairs.  I guess we were raised differently.

The reason I don’t feel fear is this:  I’m not alone.  As I said earlier, there are 80,000,000 other inconvenient people on the list.

Standing together?  We can’t be canceled.

Standing together?  We can’t be purged.

Standing together?  We can’t lose.

This isn’t over.  We’re not done.

Fear, Rats, G. Gordon Liddy And A Machine Gun Bikini

“Hold them back!  Do not give in to fear!  Stand to your posts!  Fight!” – Return of the King

I can jump higher than any fence.  Fences don’t jump very well.

When The Mrs. and I were newly married, and before the stork brought The Boy, The Mrs. and I had time to just do, well, whatever.  That often involved driving, and driving in that involved radio.  We listened, mainly, to talk radio.  We had to, because we had been banned from a gas station for listening to a song by The Who too loudly.

I guess we won’t get fueled again.

One day we were listening to the G. Gordon Liddy show.  For those of you who don’t know, Liddy was sent to prison as part of the Watergate break in during the Nixon era.  If I had just one word to describe Liddy, it would be intense.  I hear that Liddy was doing five hundred sit ups a day, but had to stop – he couldn’t take the ab use.

In particular, I remember one story of Liddy’s very vividly.  The dialogue below isn’t exact (this was over 20 years ago and I slept at least once since then) but it’s pretty close:

“When I was younger, I had a particular fear of rats.  It was a very, very strong fear.  I didn’t want to be afraid of rats, but I was.  So, to get rid of the fear, I killed one, cooked it, and ate it.  I was never afraid of rats again.”

If a relative passes away, you can get a free Starbucks®.  It’s your mourning coffee.

See?  Intense.  Also the kind of thing that made me glad that Liddy wasn’t afraid of me, since I have no idea if I’m good with ketchup.

On one hand, that level of behavior is bordering on insane.  On the other, it showed an amazing amount of self-awareness.  If Liddy’s goal was to go through life without fear, facing it was certainly the way to overcome it, although I’ll say the number of times I’ve come face to face with rats is exactly zero.  If that’s your top fear, you’ve gotten rid of most common fears.

I’ve related in the past how when climbing a really tall mountain I reached a ridge and looked down over, expecting that there was no way it could be as steep as what I had just climbed.  I was wrong.  Sheer cliff.  I was looking down very far.

Several mountain climbers caught the ‘Rona but didn’t give it to anyone.  Scalers aren’t vectors. 

I never had vertigo before, in fact I never had much of a fear of height at all.  But in that moment, I developed it.  From then on, whenever I could find a tall spot to stand on and look down, I would.  And I’d stay there until the vertigo went away.

It was a lot harder than just killing and eating the cliff.  It also took a few months, but the vertigo went away.  It’s mostly vertigone now, though I will admit that sometimes I get a chill when I watch Internet videos of people doing stupid stuff on very tall buildings.  Most of the videos seem to come from Russia, for whatever reason.  I’m betting it’s vodka, but it could also be . . . no, it’s vodka.

Bad pun?  Check.  Bikini?  Check.  Machine gun?  Check.  Russian hat?  Check.

Not all fear is bad, and not all fear is debilitating.  A lot of Evil comes from fear.  I used to think that all Evil came from fear, but that’s certainly not correct (Three Kinds Of Evil).

But a lot of Evil does come from fear.  Why?  Fear is fuel for Evil:

  • Fear leads to cowardice.
  • Fear leads to deceit.
  • Fear leads to anger.
  • Fear leads to hate. (Quote about the Dark Side®, there may be here.)
  • Fear leads to regret.

Cowardice might be the worst, though.

The reason is that cowardice is, at the root, a betrayal.  First, a betrayal of internal values.  Second, a betrayal outwards.  A perfect (but small) example is someone who is afraid of the consequences of disappointing a customer.  That leads to a lie to the customer.  Which leads to another lie, which will eventually end up with a very angry customer.

The Mrs. and I started our relationship with a strict “no lies” policy.  That’s why The Mrs. never asks me, “Do these pants make my butt look big?”  She knows I’ll tell her the truth.

“The pants?  No, the pants don’t make your butt look big.”

It was half an hour outside of Bakersfield when the catnip began to take hold.

Fear is natural.  A healthy respect for fires and firearms is a good thing.  But when any single fear?  That fear has to be confronted.

It has to be killed and eaten.  It can change the world.  Say, if you were afraid of undercooked bat . . . .