Category: Energy

Global Warming Is For Losers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are illegals in Sweden known as “artificial Swedeners”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never let a cat run your nuclear power plant.

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

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

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

Leftists oppose it:

“Environmentalists” don’t understand it:

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

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

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality.  This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology.  If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality.  If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”.  And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy.  The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming.  Yes, people died.  And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top.  Oh, and it wrecked the economy.  Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues.  There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances.  Yes.  In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.”  May 3?  The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings.  Huh.  Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes.  I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more!  This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality?  Doesn’t matter.  Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality.  There is a difference between the words country and nation.  A country is a group of people living under a government.  A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government.  Those two are different things.  Japan is a nation.  China is a nation.  Denmark is a nation.  That is clear.  Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese.  Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer.  Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging.  For InBev®?  Less so.  It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want.  Beer commercials and ads used to be cool.  Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer.  I’m not making this up.  I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right?  What else do beer drinkers love?  Hillary Clinton?  Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again.  Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer.  You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds.  He knew they were always after them.  Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share.  I think that they might be a bit upset if they do.  I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right?  That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl.  It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar.  Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency.  The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent.  The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious.  It was the strongest economy in the world.  It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons.  I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music.  That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler.  I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency.  First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff.  If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit.  It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper.  I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end.   Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework.  Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos.  Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money.  How much?  $1 trillion.  That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust.  In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.”  Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year.  The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me.  I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars?  I’m not sure.  Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here.  Why are they headed back?  Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates?  Inflation kicks higher.  If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less.  If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t.  And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society.  Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government.  Then everything will change.  Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.

Watch How Biden Uses This One Weird Trick To Turn The United States Into A Third World Country

“Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He was an English Guy. He came to fight the Turkish.” – The Hollywood Knights

I asked for a book on oil, and the librarian suggested the non-friction section. (you’ll be able to figure out which are my memes in this post)

This has been a very consequential week in American history, and though I see the seeds of (hopefully peaceful) revolt that will eventually end in a restoration, the other seeds I see this week show that rough times are up ahead.  I’ll discuss Trump in conjunction with Monday’s upcoming Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, but today I’ll focus on a much more momentous development:  the Collapse of the Dollar Empire.

This week several major moves happened, all of which are negative for the United States.  Heck, someone did a meme of this – I’d quote them, but I just found this info snippet without attribution:

If there was a children’s book of Joe Biden’s Very Bad Terrible No Good Week, well, this would be it, but knowing Joe it would have to be a scratch and sniff. 

The United States has had several things going for it in the Post World War II era:

  1. Lots of nuclear weapons,
  2. A monopoly on PEZ® dispenser licensing in the world’s biggest PEZ™ market,
  3. The premier military force in the world,
  4. The premier economy in the world, and,
  5. The reserve currency of the world.

The first one is self-explanatory.  We even used that threat successfully several times, especially when Kissinger convinced the Soviets (with Nixon’s permission) that Nixon was unstable and often flew into rages and just might decide that he’d trade Moscow for the East Coast.  To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the idea is to “act insane and have a massive nuclear arsenal”, or, as it is also known, “my ex-wife’s divorce strategy”.

The second one is just a reflection of the cultural dominance that the United States had.  There were McDonald’s® restaurants calorie dispensing units around the world, but the most prominent foreign restaurant most Americans know is the International House of Pancakes®, which I assume is from Bulgaria or some place.  Plus no one else could make Elmer Fudd™ PEZ™ dispensers.

They also don’t like tank tops.

The United States also had the premier military in the world.  Period.  We spent trillions of dollars emulating the successful bits of the Wehrmacht, so we were totally ready to fight World War II part II, if everyone agreed.  Only one country wanted to play (Iraq) so we showed them what we could do if an enemy gave us six months to prepare along with the previously pre-staged equipment in Saudi Arabia.  Not content with that L, they went for a rematch.

We also built the best economy in the world.  Sure, it had ups and downs, and American cars manufacturers were stunned by Japanese quality in the 1970s, but we really did catch up, and by the 1990s were producing stuff that didn’t suck.  We led in technological and information systems.  By many measures, though, we peaked in 1973, and then the decline started.  I might add that was around the time the Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started being felt.

Huh.  Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

They hated Trump, yet the lines didn’t form up to head south . . .

More potent than nuclear weapons was the economic policy of the United States – it was called dollar diplomacy.  Since the Soviet Union’s idea of diplomacy was sending burly Russian women to show foreigners how to use diesel tractor made in Tractor Collective Factory 231 that had all the charm of a T-34 tank and all the reliability of something made by workers that considered a hammer a precision instrument, who were fueled on vodka and cabbage.  Obviously, a foreign head of state could choose those cool tractors that weighed in at 34 tons (45 kiloliters).  That presented a problem.  In no country that I know (outside of the Soviet Union) could you trade a behemoth tractor that could double as a tank for hot chicks and booze.

Foreign leaders therefore adopted the “take the Yankee money” attitude, because mistresses need more than what the Soviet tractor lubrication manual could provide.

The really weird and cool side effect of this dollar dominance is we could just print as many of these things as we wanted, send them overseas, and people would send us stuff.  Heck, that was too much work, so we invented a computer payment system so that we could pretend we printed dollars, send people a receipt, and they’d send us booze, cars, compact disc players, and, well, anything.  I hear cocaine was popular in the 1980s.

I’m no rube.  I saw Scarface.

I was disappointed the first time I saw Scarface – he didn’t really know anything about scarves.

But there was one little, tiny thing that made the dollar so prominent.  Oil.

That brings us to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal.  He got along okay with the West, hated commies, and tried to modernize (somewhat) Saudi Arabia.  Faisal also led the Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974 (related to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War).  This generated a lot of money for the Saudis as well as economic chaos in the West.

Oddly, Saudi king Faisal was, um, ventilated by his American-educated nephew in 1975.  And the new Saudi King agreed to buy and sell oil only in dollars.

Huh.  Surely those things weren’t connected?

Likewise, through the 1980s, the Saudis sold lots and lots of oil cheaply at the request of Reagan to bankrupt the Soviet Union, make the dollar triumphant, and leave the United States as the sole superpower.

If Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg had a kid, would it be called Slush Puppy?

One major reason the dollar was the reserve currency of the world is that it was the only currency that oil was bought and sold in.  It became the de facto settlement currency because of that and the highly developed financial systems that made the transfer of billions of dollars effortless and easy.

That’s the history lesson.

In 2017, one of Trump’s first official visits was to Saudi Arabia.  They even had that weird moment where they put their hands on a glowing glow to power up some sort of Saudi CIA that would help fight terrorism.  Relations were good.

In two years, Biden has conducted a stunning array of foreign policy missteps that has unwound all of the work done since 1973.  One of the powers of the dollar as a weapon is that if you use it, maybe it isn’t so important, and if people feel really threatened?

I wonder if we’ll start calling our sanctions “Special Financial Operations”?

They’ll create a system where it won’t hurt them.  Russia’s a case in point.  Regardless of how their military is doing (I don’t trust either side to analyze this one) their economy really hasn’t been hurt in this conflict.  It was hurt in 2014, but they planned for the disruption, and from the reports I’ve recently seen, they’re doing fine.  For Russians, which wasn’t much to start with.

The point that Biden missed (and that your humble correspondent picked up on immediately) is that Russia doesn’t need dollars since they make their own stuff, with the exception of tracksuits, iPhones®, and porn.  They can figure out how to make new Vodka-Pepsi® or Vodka-Starbucks™, but the world still needs their grain, fertilizer, oil, and natural gas.

Biden has done the near impossible in a little over two years as Resident of the White House.

  • He’s pushed China closer to Russia.
  • He’s pushed Saudi Arabia closer to Iran.
  • He’s created a situation where large-scale trades are going to be conducted in currency other than the dollar on a regular basis.
  • He’s drawn the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down levels not seen since 1984.
  • He’s working on maximizing inflation while spending everything possible.

In Saudi Arabia, all the bike thieves say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

But Joe has shown that a previous statement by Barack Obama to be correct:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

And he’s got 581 more days to the election.  And we’ve got 656 days until the next inauguration.

The Shape Of Things To Come

“This always happens, Oliver. Every time you open your mouth, somebody sticks a phone company in it.” – Green Acres

I think this cat might be chairman of the Fed®.

I heard a story once about an AT&T office, this was back in the 1970s or 1980s.  There was a particular employee who the day crew would always see finishing up at the end of his shift, putting tools up, and getting the work set up for the day crew.  They really appreciated him, since when they showed up, things were neat and ready to go.  They thought he stayed late to do this for them.

There was also a guy on day shift crew.  He’d show up early and prepare for work.  He impressed the night shift crew, because he came in early, and was getting his work ready to go well before the day shift showed up.

Eventually, after about a decade (or so the story went) the day shift manager told the night shift manager how much he appreciated how old Steve stayed late to get things ready for them.

“Steve?  He works day shift, and always comes in early, right?”

Ooops.  Steve finally got caught after working forever a little over an hour a day, showing up “early” for one shift, and leaving “late” from the other.

So, he worked about 200 hours a year.  For a decade.

I think he must have had a hobby.  Maybe fishing.

I think it was Alexander Graham Bell who first said, “How in the hell did you get this number?”

In the news recently, the layoffs have already started at “big tech”:

  • Amazon®: 18,000
  • Alphabet® (Google™): 12,000
  • Meta© (Facebook®): 11,000
  • Microsoft® (Microsoft™): 10,000
  • Salesforce©: 8,000
  • HP™: 6,000
  • Twitter®: 3,700

That’s like 71.56 miles (4,259,400,000 cubic centimeters, and yes, Ricky, you can check the math) of people.  It might be more cubic centimeters if they had a lot of carbs.

Some of these jobs are bogus, like the AT&T hour-a-day guy.  I’ve enjoyed watching the Tiktok® videos of the PowerPoint® making drones with no technical ability.  Typically, the drone shows up at work (if they’re not working remote) and has a free breakfast.  Then they goof for a bit, have a meeting, do a free lunch.  They indicate the lunch and breakfast are very tasty.  Then they have at least one more grueling meeting.

Photons never take luggage to an airport – they’re traveling light.

And that’s it.  From every one of the videos I’ve seen, the folks have no technical ability.  Some don’t even work at all – one person complaining about being fired hadn’t worked since May of 2021, since they were on medical leave because of PTSD.  What was the PTSD from?  Her managers were “mean” to her.

I’m not making this up.  She was shocked to be fired.

The other indicators are not good.  Paul “the Internet will be as important as the fax machine” Krugman put out a graph just recently on Twitter®:

What’s up with Paul Krugman?  Not his I.Q.

This is the single dumbest take I’ve seen since Custer said, “C’mon, man, how many Indians can there be?  We don’t need those cannons.”

Krugman has artfully taken out the things that people have to buy from his super-good news.

  • Food,
  • Energy,
  • Shelter, and
  • Used Cars

This is a fantastic analysis for people who don’t eat, are immune to freezing, live outside, and don’t need to go anywhere or buy gas to go anywhere.  It’s like asking Jackie, “Besides the car ride, how was your trip to Dallas?”

Why are prices of other stuff going down?  Because people aren’t buying them because they have to buy food, energy, shelter, and used cars.

Duh.

And he kneaded that!

Behaviors are changing.  Frivolous purchases are being limited.  The recession indicators are significant from things like yield curve inversion, Modified Mannarino Market Risk Indicator (LINK) and the banks closing down entire units.

But thankfully Paul Krugman says it’s all going to be spiffy.

And, it will be.  All of those cubic meters of people will end up doing something more important than making PowerPoints® and attending twenty-seven meetings about what shade of aqua and how many pixels to make the Google® doodle.  Let’s face it – about 70% of Google® employees could be axed tomorrow and nothing would change.  How do I know that?

That’s what Musk did with Twitter®.  Most of the folks Musk fired added no value, and the ones he kept were elated to finally be able to do something of value for the company.  The folks that were fired will certainly find jobs in the food service industry, become moms, or just sit on the couch at their Dad’s house curled up in a fetal ball of PTSD.  I for one am happy, because we need better waitresses.

From the Tiktok® videos, it certainly looks like they know how to serve food.

I searched “Lost Medieval Servant Boy” but got, “This Page cannot be found.”

Some of the destruction that comes from a recession is good.  It’s a reset, and it clears away silliness.  The danger, of course, is the destruction that comes from a runaway recession.  Small recessions clean.  Large recessions/depressions?  They can cleanse nations.  Look what happened in the 1920s and 1930s around the world – entire governments were replaced.

Thankfully, I hear AT&T® is hiring.  Night shift or day shift?

Both, please.

D’Oh, Canada: Showcasing The Leftist Plan So We Can Plan, Too

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we… are the cure.” – The Matrix

Greta is the solution to climate change.  Every time she’s on the TV, tens of millions of people shut it off.

Apparently, Justin Trudeau up in Canada needs to be reminded that in the movie, The Matrix, Agent Smith was the bad guy.  Really.  Check it out.  Keanu Reeves fought him, and everything.  For whatever reason, Canada (and Leftists in general) have adopted the idea that Agent Smith was their dude and the inspiration for their philosophy.

In two words, their philosophy is self-hatred (does the hyphen make it two words?) and power.  I’ve established that again and again.  It is why (really) I’m in favor of bringing bullying back.  As a society we let losers do loser things, give them participation medals, and then after having zero incentive for self-improvement, they wonder why they’re not the head of the class.

I was bullied in school.  I deserved it.  I used it to get better, stronger, and faster.  I’ve even seen communications between Leftists where they advise each other not to exercise because exercise leads them to become members of the Right.

God, I wish someone had bullied Justin Trudeau so that he would have developed into a man, rather than the corporate globalist man-child with no sense of identity and a sense of entitlement the size of Canada.

Okay, this is supposedly a Photoshop®.  But, admit it, it wouldn’t surprise you if it was real.  And this is my only original meme for this post.  Rest are “as found”.

This brings us to Canada’s plan for self-immolation – “Just Transition”.  Just Transition refers not to Justin finally admitting he’s transitioning, but rather the “teenager’s idea of a good plan because climate is scary” transition from fossil fuels to, well, they don’t really say.  It can’t be too much solar, because, last time I checked, in the winter in Canada at northern latitudes, the SUN IS DOWN MOST OF THE DAY.

That probably doesn’t bother Sunshine Trudeau, since he will be in some mansion somewhere pretending to be Queen Victoria’s seat cushion.  But I’m thinking that ordinary Canadians, the ones who have to deal with this nonsense and will either freeze or starve, might have an objection.

Another Just Transition that probably wouldn’t surprise Canada.

The plan itself contemplates that at least 200,000 Canadians will lose their jobs, which will certainly hurt the back bacon and Elsinore Beer prices.  These 200,000 Canadians are in the energy industry.  What will replace that?

Don’t know.  This Just Transition plan, again, has nearly zero actual thought by adults who have more than a single functioning brain cell.  It is built on those old Leftist thought patterns:  self-hatred and a desire for power.  Why would people need light and heat?

Alberta is not a hot girl who has daddy issues and is thus a stripper with a heart of gold, but rather a Canadian province.  I guess that means admitting I’ve been in Alberta sounds a lot less dirty when I put it that way.  But Alberta does have a heart of gold, because they’re pushing back, hard, against the nonsense coming out of whatever town where Trudeau lives.  Ottawa?  Heck, I thought that was a river mammal.  Turns out Ottawa is where the bad things come from in Canada.

Maybe it will work this time?

Canada planning to destroy its own economy just to gain good boy points and score some additional chicken tendies at dinner isn’t unusual under the Trudeau leadership.  The main problem with Canada is that it doesn’t have an actual constitution with a bill of rights that puts a brake (no matter how fleeting) on tinpot dictators with delusions of godhood exercising their will.

Looks like Justin’s dad had the same idea.

Alberta, however, seems to have had enough.  The nice part of Canada is that they haven’t yet had a Civil War, and it would appear that the individual provinces seem to be able to tell the national government to go to, well, Ottawa.  Or at least the subject hasn’t been settled by armies yet.

It’s not just energy, it’s food, too.  We’ve seen the protests in the Netherlands.  Why?  They want to shut down the farms.  Why?  To stop climate change.  Canada has promised to do the same thing.  Look it up, search, “Canada nitrogen” – and I remember when I thought Canada Dry® was a national menace.

I’m not making this up:

And this a consistent Leftist theme:

Why do they want to shut down the use of fertilizers?  It’s not climate change, it’s food.  The Mrs. once read a story of a party in Washington, D.C.  At this party, the writer noted that he had a conversation with a Leftist.  I’d give you a source if I recalled it, but it was several beers ago.  “Too many people on the planet, by several billion,” the Leftist said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Well, we will practice food restriction.”

“So, you’re telling me that the Leftist plan is to starve to death billions of people?”

They were silent when the bald fact was put to them like that.  So, yeah, Justin is working to ruin the economy of Canada.  But he won’t be sad if millions starve, in fact, that’s the plan.  I’m not sure Justin is smart enough to figure that out, since I’m pretty sure he’s just a lapdog of below-average I.Q. who wasn’t bullied enough as a child.

Canada has, unwittingly, provided people in the United States with a viewpoint of what the Left intends.  Watch closely.  And pray for the Canadians who will oppose this, in Alberta and elsewhere.

Hopefully, the folks in Alberta are very good at dealing with rats.

And remember, Agent Smith is the bad guy.  And he lost.  And the Leftists will lose, as they always have in history.  But I’ve never said that any of this will be easy.

Related:

Ricky sent me this video, and I can’t recommend it enough.  A few “s” bombs, but otherwise it should be required viewing from elementary schools on up.

The Energy Problem: No Outlet

“Imagine it, Smithers, electrical lights and heaters, running all day long.” – The Simpsons

If Dyson® releases an electric car, I think they’ll suck.

This is the next in an occasional series of posts about the economics of energy.

There was one headline from the last few weeks that has really amused me.  The Swiss, makers of cheese and hot chocolate let folks with electric cars know:  don’t charge them until spring.  Instead, they suggested the Swiss citizens continue to use their diesel and gasoline cars.

Electric economy?

No.

In fact, we’re far from that.  Again, the electricity has to come from somewhere.  Wind is great, when the wind is blowing.  Oh, and Lefty environmentalists are against it because it kills bats and birds.  Hydroelectric?  I love hydro power, except the number of new dams that can be built is approximately zero, since the environmental permitting process and protests don’t allow that.

Solar?

No.

Investing in solar energy won’t happen overnight.

Here is where I have to bring in the concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested.  Not dollars.  Energy.  The idea is simple, if I eat a food that takes more calories to digest than it provides me in available calories that I can use to smoke cigars and think of PEZ®.

If I eat a food that takes me more calories to digest than I get, I’ve invested more energy than I get out of it, and the return is negative.  If the price of oil is a bazillion dollars, and I invest more Btus than I can get out of that oil, it’s the same idea.  Regardless of the dollar price, if the energy price is too high it will simply make me poorer in terms of energy that I could use.

Solar, in the best case I can find, is about a 10 to 1 rate of return on energy returned from energy investment.  The most recent number I saw is 2 to 1.  That means, over the whole lifetime of the solar cell, it produces twice as much energy as it takes to make it, ship it, install it, and junk it.

Sounds great, right?

No.

Like a Dyson®, it sucks.

I think if coal is so bad for the environment, we should just burn it all.

Coal is about 30 to 1, even with stringent environmental controls on soot and sulfur and nitrous oxides.  Natural gas is about the same.  Hydro is 35.  Nuclear (by the most recent estimate I’ve seen) is 75, though I think that’s optimistic.

But nuclear isn’t 2.  And it isn’t 4, like wind turbines.

Where, exactly, is that energy coming from?

And how are we going to get it to houses?  The grid in California can’t take a typical Tuesday in summer, so how is it going to power all the air conditioners and all the PEZ® mines and incubators and tent cities and, on top of that, all the cars?

I tried to sell a tent company to investors.  It was difficult to pitch.

It simply won’t.  Even now it’s so overtaxed that some summers the electric companies release more energy in forest fires than they do in electricity.

We look for efficiency in the world and are taught a mantra – efficiency is good.  The power companies around the country and even in Switzerland have heard that.  They have enough power generation and transmission capacity for most days.  But not every day.  That wouldn’t be efficient.

Mathematicians don’t ever get blackout drunk.  They know their limits.

Why not?  Most days aren’t peak days.  To build that extra capacity in generation and transmission means spending money.  And that isn’t efficient.  It’s more efficient (and better for the bottom line) to have a series of brownouts and blackouts.

It is.

That’s the way it is, today, with all of the gasoline-powered cars.  Imagine a decade into the future with all the Tesla® and Edizzon™ and Voltaire© new-model electric cars, and a grid that goes down when it’s 89°F (34 megajoules) outside.  Finally, the achievement of a full socialist worker paradise – everyone has equal-opportunity HVAC with the people living in tents under the overpass.

Does anyone, I mean, anyone still think that controlling energy has anything to do with climate change?

Even if there were a magical energy source (unicorn hair?  Obama sweat?) that provided electricity better than sweet, sweet fossil fuels, the investment in the grid in the United States to keep the current standard of living using electric cars would be more than Biden spends on anti-senility drugs and the Ukraine, combined, in a month.

It’s a lot.  And that’s ignoring the cost to build the treadmill that Obama would have to run on and the Obama-sweat power generators.  Investment of this type takes decades.  Decades where we haven’t spent the money – not only in California, but everywhere.  Because, instead of wanting resilience, we wanted efficiency.

The end result is this:  the Swiss are right.  Electric cars are not, in any foreseeable future, the answer.  See?  You can always trust people who make great cheese and hot chocolate.  Heck, I just got a Swiss flag for my collection, and that’s a big plus.

 

Remember, never give up.  Share this with someone who might need it.

Energy: The Big Picture

“Dr. Norman was experimenting with energy and mass. To make it brief, it got away from him. He found he had made a mass of energy that somehow came alive. It feeds on more energy, and it lives only to feed. I’m afraid it consumed Dr. Norman before he could stop it.” – Jonny Quest

I was once kidnapped by a gang of mimes.  They did unspeakable things to me.

Apologies to all on missing the podcast tonight – The Mrs. was feeling great this morning, and then headed south about two hours before the show.  Darn her for demanding that she have actual oxygen in her blood.  So selfish!  Should she feel okay, we’re looking at having a New Year’s Eve show (her idea) on, wait for it, New Year’s Eve.  I’m thinking 9pm Eastern, but who knows – her blood is fickle.

So, on to today’s post, inspired by a reader’s comment on email . . .

The most fundamental economic and political choice of our lives is energy.  I phrased that intentionally – the impacts of the energy we use as a society are economic.  Energy has been political since the 1930s, at the very least.

The idea of energy might be economic and political, but the reality is pure physics.  There is no law that Congress can pass that can create more energy – only allow that which exists to be used.  And there is no amount of money that can be printed to that can make energy appear where none exists.

Some Leftists say truth is subjective, but let them try to pretend that their house at -40°F is actually 70°F.  I guess that you could say that they’re trans-comfortable?  No.  They’re frozen.  Reality is like that.  And energy is like that, too.  Unlike monetary policy or laws, energy doesn’t care what people want.

The story of energy, though, is the story of human culture.

Energy has been a part of human life since the first waggling finger (thank you, Rudyard, original poem below) burned itself on a fire.  Meat tastes good, but tastes better once it has been cooked.  It also heated the caves and tents that early man lived in.  It was the original killer app – I can guarantee that at some point, a fire in a cabin or tent or cave saved someone who was your direct ancestor.

I hear you can get fired from the keyboard factory if you don’t put in enough shifts.

In the form of crude wood fires, energy did a few things for people, helping to tan skins, cure meats, harden wood, and eventually fuel fires that made the first man-made metals and ceramics.  The demand was low, but the impacts were huge.  Food, clothing, weapons, and the basis of civilization.  You can’t have beer unless you have a beer bottle, right?

Romans used it even more – they had central heating in their villas in Roman Britain, heated baths, and used it in lots of other ways I’m too lazy to look up.  One hint:  those Roman shields and swords didn’t make themselves.  And the iron nails in Jerusalem, circa 32 A.D.?  Yeah, those required energy as well.

Romans were amazing at using energy, but most of the energy they used was human; they didn’t exactly have outboard motors on their ships.  It was wind or oars.  The Romans used fire, but the real energy source for Empire was animal and human.  That source of energy was totally renewable – people are born every day, and they eat food that is raised every year.

There are huge implications to this:  slave labor was the original renewable energy.  Oops!  That’s not politically correct, though the World Economic Forum® did take notes.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, people continued to innovate.  That’s what we do.  Dams provided water power for mills.  Mills could grind grain, or they could operate pumps to pull water out of mines.  And wind?  Windmills could use wind to mill.  Duh.  It’s in the name.

If a former president didn’t like windmills, could we call him Donald Quixote?

All of that was a necessary predecessor to the real powerhouse:  steam.  Sure, steam-powered toys had been created 2,000 years earlier, but steam power was needed because of the mines that were needed to get the metals to manufacture electric guitars and iPads® back in the 1600s.  Or whatever they did with them.  Maybe banjos?

The Industrial Revolution came almost entirely based on the use of energy.  The developments in the 1800s changed everything.  Transport?  Trains.  Communications?  Telegraphs.  Cool products?  Factories.  Navy?  Fast steamships.  This is a wickedly small set of examples – the availability of energy changed everything.  But at this point, the energy mix changed.  Prior, it was mostly wood.

Now it was the age of coal and steel.

The biggest change it created was the ability to have a metric butt-ton of additional people.  Energy changed agriculture and changed food distribution.  After the Haber-Bosch process allowed for the fixing of nitrogen for increased plant yields (which required another metric butt-ton of energy) but this changed the demand.  Coal was still pretty nifty, but it was no longer enough.

Now was the age of oil.

Cars were required to move products.  Gas was required for fertilizer, and heating and chemical products.

Tesla® cars are expensive because they charge a lot.

The result of all of this was amazing – an explosion of the numbers of people living on Earth like never before, even in places that could never support them.

Wars were fought over energy.  Why did the Germans fight at Stalingrad?  Because they were trying to secure oil.  There was no hybrid-panzer.  The Allies won because there were lakes of oil underneath Texas, mountains of iron ore in Minnesota, and marksmen from Georgia.  The biggest contributor?

The oil.

Without it, the Shermans don’t sherm, the Mustangs won’t must, and the carrier fleet are amusing, odd-shaped coral reefs.  Oil won World War II.  If the Germans had the reserves of Texas under Bavaria, Stalin would have been a minor footnote in history after 1942.

Oil was pretty plentiful as geologists wend around the world hunting for it after 1945.  It was found in the wastelands of the Arctic, the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia, and on the coast of California.  Really, anywhere where people don’t want to live in 2022.

The lakes of oil in Texas weren’t infinite.  In 1973, Texas removed controls on production.  The straws weren’t dry, but the abundance was done.  The Arabs also decided that, perhaps, oil was now (for the second time since 1943) the most potent weapon in the world besides nuclear bombs and Leftism was unleashed.  The oil embargo showed how much the world depended on oil to make Big Macs™ and G.I. Joes©.  One oil shock (combined with Nixon’s taking the United States off the gold standard) was enough to send the economy into the stagflation of the 1970s.

But I heard since he died, he’s a great cook.  His pasta is Al Dante.

Oil is why the Cold War ended.  Star Wars was an important initiative, but the bigger cause of the failure of the Soviet Union was that Reagan convinced the Saudis to pump oil like it was free.  The Soviet economy, dependent on oil revenue to keep their machine going?  Done.  Oil killed the two out of three of the great empires of the twentieth century.

That brings us to today.

Almost all of the growth in oil production since 2008 was based on fracking.  The previous pools of oil were still producing, but the oil companies had to go farther and farther afield, such as deep water miles deep in places like the Gulf of Mexico.  Places where getting the oil was expensive – it’s not like we found another several billion barrels in the backyard behind the garden shed.  Regular places where oil was were drying up.  A game changer was needed.  Something different.

Fracking was different.  It was difficult, required new technologies, and grew by a factor of ten in only ten years, making the United States a net energy exporter for the first time since before John Kennedy did an afternoon drive in Texas.

Oil is an amazing fuel, and I bathe in sweet, sweet gasoline every night.  But to meet the needs of the world, the struggle is difficult.  Cheap energy takes huge investment, but that’s not all.  It requires the energy source to be there.

The Mrs. says I’m cheap.  I’m not buying it.

Our energy has been cheap since about 1920 or so.  The idea that it will be cheap forever is magical thinking, unless oil is infinite (it is not).  Our choice on energy isn’t economic, it’s based on physics.

And, with everything I’ve read, the physics of alternative energy solutions, especially the “renewable” ones that are touted based on political reasons, result in the energy cost doubling (at least) and that’s after the investment of trillions of dollars to build the necessary energy production facilities and infrastructure.  This will likely be the subject of future posts.

I hate to break the Christmas spirit, but it is the single most important question facing humanity today.  When the price of energy is low, freedom is high.  When the price of energy is high?

Oh, yeah.  Slavery.

 

As promised, here’s Kipling, Gods of the Copybook Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall.
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorilas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither clud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promiced these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promiced perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promiced the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘The Wages of Sin is Death/’

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’

The the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tounged wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to belive it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Defeat? Never.

“Okay you people – sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning, and if we’re not back by dawn?  Call the president.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I hear that Rob Halford became an eastern monk, which I guess makes him a Buddhist Priest.

Back when I was in high school, I started a quest.  It would probably be a trivial quest in today’s world with the Internet, and tens of millions of songs available all from a single search.   However, back when I was in high school, the only people using the Internet were computer nerds at colleges or places like Los Alamos sharing nuclear bomb design info and ASCII porn.

Is this how Los Alamos beat the Soviets?

There was exactly one rock and roll radio station that reached the lofty heights of Wilder Mountain, and it was a good three-hour drive from where I lived.  Heck, the nearest record store was a 45-minute drive.  But I heard a song . . . and loved it.

I had no idea who the artist was.  All I knew was that it had guitars that sounded like jet fighters coming in for an attack (metaphorically) and a heavy metal singer with pipes to growl low and also hit the high notes.

This was not helpful.  My bumbling attempts to hum the song to the record store clerk probably sounded like a toddler attempting to instruct an Albanian goat herder on how to repair a Junkers Jumo-004 on an ME 262.  My incoherent rambling eventually convinced the store owner that I could probably be sold a lot of records on my quest to find the goofy song.

What happens when a plane full of Leftist lands?  The Jet turns off but the whining continues.

She was right.  On one particular winter day, I bought two cassettes.  Memo to the young:  a cassette was an attempt to put a part of the Internet on a skinny magnetic tape and take it with you.  Sort of like WIFI but with a really, really low transfer rate that cost over $7 for 42 megabytes.

I listened to one of the cassettes on my forty-minute drive to Stately Wilder Manor.  I don’t recall what the first cassette was.  It was okay.  The song I was looking for, however, wasn’t on it.

When I got to Wilder Mountain, I decided to listen to the other cassette.  Pa Wilder wasn’t home.  It was November, and snow was falling gently across the valley, as I looked toward the volcanic cone that dominated the view above the mountains that surrounded the valley.

I put in the cassette.  I hit play.

A single guitar hit an E note that crunched and then was followed by 41 seconds of guitar solo that made my brain implode.  The first second was enough, the next 40?  Pure passion.  My father’s stereo, which before that day was primarily concerned with playing Dean Martin and Johnny Cash, must have been surprised.

I know I was.  Then?  Another driving song, this time about a sentient A.I. encased in an orbiting surveillance satellite.

The two satellite dishes on my house got married.  The ceremony was awful, but the reception was amazing.

What?  I was in heaven.  The cassette was Judas Priest, the album?  Screaming for Vengeance.

The theme of the music was unabashedly masculine.  It was fueled by testosterone and optimism and defiance.  It was, in short, everything I loved in life.

What was my ethos at that time?  Full speed.  Every moment in life.  When I played football, I played football.  Every ounce of my being was focused on the next play.  The cleats digging into the turf, the snap as the center delivered the ball to the quarterback, my sudden sprint, and the exquisite feeling of my shoulder pads digging into that quarterback’s belly as I impacted him at full speed.  Life was a game to be played at full speed.  When a football game was over, win or lose, the idea that I would have left anything of myself or held back an ounce of myself?  I never felt that after a single game.

Win or lose.  Everything I had.

And that was the ethos.  My focus was on doing everything that I could humanly do during the game.  If we won?  Excellent.  If we lost?  There was no room for regret since I had done every single thing I could for the team.

Amazingly, here that was, in music.

This music and most of the music I have loved since then was fueled by one concept – it was fueled by the idea that, in this life, there are winners, and there are losers.  But there are no victims.  I was responsible for my preparation.  I was responsible for my effort.  I was responsible for me.

If I won?  Wonderful.  If I lost?  Yeah, it stung.  But if I gave it my best, and lived up to my own values, I still won.

I took a survey of what soap people used in the shower.  95% of them told me to get out.

Again, winning was and is important.  But a loss of a single day was nothing.  Winning could and would come.  And I would live my life, on my terms.

Have I been cheated?  Yes.  Have I been wronged?  Yes.  Did I stand toe to toe with my boss and tell him that I wouldn’t sell my honor and principles to him for any reason?

Yes.  And did I pay a price?

Duh.

Do I regret it?  Not for a minute.  Not for a second.

There are moments in life, where honor and values will be tested.

Heck, that was in this music, too.

In this world we’re living’ in, we have our share of sorrow
Answer now is don’t give in, aim for a new tomorrow

Also in the music?  Questions of deep philosophy.  The eternal battle between Good and Evil.  Oh, yeah, and hot chicks.

Eventually, this changed and fell out of fashion.  I think it was Bush.  Or maybe raising the drinking age to 21.  Or maybe drugging generations with lithium and Adderall®.  Or maybe the new “zero tolerance” lifestyle, where fighting for Good and being right still resulted in a suspension.

Or maybe all of that.

Kurt Cobain was depressed at 13.  Guess that was his midlife crisis.

Music based on honor and testosterone and optimism eventually fell out of favor.  I can even give you the date:  September 21, 1991, when Nirvana launched Nevermind.

With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us

That abomination of learned helplessness replaced this from Judas Priest:

Thousand of cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We’ve found the place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there
To ram it down, ram it down
Straight through the heart of this town
Ram it down, ram it down
Razing the place to the ground
Ram it down

One of these makes me feel like slitting my wrists.  The other?  Fills me with the idea that none of us are alone.  We have power.  We are . . . going to win, no matter what the damn odds are.  Judas Priest is still touring.  Kurt Cobain?  Not so much.  I guess it proves that one person can handle only so much Courtney Love.

Fast and furious, we ride the universe
To carve a road for us, that slices every curve in sight
We accelerate, no time to hesitate
This load will detonate, whoever would contend its right

I refuse to accept defeat.  The idea is against every fiber of being in my body.  I realize that I will not win every battle.  And I am going to listen to music, and I am going to take in media that tells me the truth, but I shall never, ever, despair no matter how dire the situation.  My family?  They come from heroes.  So does yours.  Never, ever, give up.

I always took a piece of paper to a wrestling match.  That way I could beat The Rock.

I’m not going to stop until I stop breathing.  And I won’t relinquish my honor to any man.  And I am responsible for every aspect of my life and my situation.

Oh, I did find the song I was looking for, a year later:

The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, sing and cry
Valhalla, I am coming

But that’s another story, though the song remains the same.

How Did We Get Here?

“Dividing and mutating at the same time?” – The Andromeda Strain

Two guys stole a calendar and divided it equally. They each got six months.

I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question:

How did we get here?

Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.

The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.

So, how did we get here?

The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.

And, despite what Biden thinks, Andrew was not a member of the Jackson 5.

How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.

Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.

What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.

“9 or 10? Let ‘em in! 3 or 4? Here’s the door.” will be my presidential campaign slogan.

The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.

Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.

No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.

A friend told me he made a voodoo doll of me. I said, “You’re pulling my leg!”

Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.

The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?

Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.

Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.

My friend’s house was also hit by the dessert thief. He takes the cake.

A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?

The Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed – it’s no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.

Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?

Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16th and 17th Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.

Fetterman also had a prostate exam the other day – thumbs up!

This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.

I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready.