Chevron And The Fall Of The Deep State

“I’m Jack’s medulla oblongata.  Without me, Jack could not regulate his heart rate, blood pressure, or breathing.” – Fight Club

Don’t worry!  I’ve been told by 51 intelligence operatives that the Deep State isn’t real.

I know that the event of last week in the media was the debate.  I’ll agree, it was pretty significant, significant enough that I stayed up even later to chat about it with The Mrs., who gets up really early.  How early?

JW:  Tonight’s debate was thermonuclear.

The Mrs.:  You mean yesterday’s debate.  Oh, wait, you haven’t slept, so for you it’s still yesterday.

Whatever timeframe you’re using, a really, really big thing happened on Friday.  Let me explain, I’m a trained professional.

Let’s go back in time a bit.

Back in 1938, the Congress passed a law establishing a thing called the “Code of Federal Regulations” act.  That act required all federal regulations to be put in a single source, which is now called the CFR.  Note that I didn’t say a single book, since the CFR pages totaled 188,343 in 2021.

That’s not a typographical error.  There are nearly 200,000 pages of federal regulations.  They say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but I’m pretty sure that there is no sane human that could read and retain that insane level of regulation, except for Alex Trebek, and he is, alas, no more.

That meant that people like these were responsible for making the regulations you had to live by, with no restraint.  It’s like allowing random members of a Pride march to decide on your healthcare.  Oh, wait.

Now, there are several groups that really love that level of regulation:

  • Lawyers, who build careers on understanding them,
  • Big Business, to keep out small-fry competition that can’t afford lawyers to interpret the rules to keep them out of trouble,
  • the Antifa® fascists, who are the people who really get bent out of shape if your lawn is 0.05” higher than the regulations say, and
  • They exist to write regulations, so they just want to write more.

This is an unholy combination.

Regulations are based on law.  The Congress of the United States passes a bill, and the President of the United States signs it, and, a law is created.  I learned that on Schoolhouse Rock™ when that damn bill just wanted to be a law.

If we emailed the Constitution to each other, would the NSA give it to the Deep State so they’d finally read it?

Laws, however, almost always constrain human activities.  In some cases, like murder, a law can be a net social benefit, at least when the courts actually enforce the law equally and without favor.

But murder is simple when compared to some of the federal laws on the books.  I could get into the details, but it’s a federal crime:

  • to wash your fish at a faucet if it’s not a fish-washing faucet,
  • to let your pet make a noise that scares wildlife in a national park,
  • to sell onion rings that resemble onion rings, but made with diced onion,
  • to skydive drunk, and,
  • sell wine with a brand name including the word “zombie”.

Yes.  This was made the force of law, that unelected regulators could make up whatever they wanted and put you in jail if you didn’t do what they made up last week.  This was based on the “Chevron Deference” – a court decision that effectively let the Executive Branch make regulations, enforce them, and courts had to bow to their interpretation.  It’s been the rule for 40 years.

Here is a partial list of the people who will actually have to have a law to rely on to take away your rights in the future.

But the most pernicious part of this is that it feeds into the same mindset that the GloboLeftElite has relied on for years.  They want to take an existing law and pound and beat it to meet whatever they believe this Tuesday.  For example, there was a requirement that industries stop pollutants from going into the air.

That makes sense.  I could argue that it doesn’t need to occur at a national level and that states could regulate it and that might make it un-Constitutional, but, whatever.  The law is there.  It’s been there forever.  The regulations meant to enforce the law when it came out made sense – spewing methyl-ethyl-death across the elementary playground might not be a great idea.

On the other hand, maybe it would have made our children strong enough to work in the mines.

But that same law, written decades ago, was interpreted to mean that sweet, sweet carbon dioxide, you know, plant food, is now a pollutant.  Why?  Because the GloboLeftElite knows that gives them more control, and because it now fits with the Narrative of the Moment despite the original law being signed into law in 1963 and last amended in 1990.

I just found this X account, and I like the cut of their jib.

Since CO2 wasn’t on the list of evil things in 1963 or in 1990, having the EPA to suddenly decide it was evil is just regulators making things up.  The Supreme Court said, “No, you can’t do this.  You have to pass a law.  And no, the President can’t just say so.”  The Chevron™ Deferral effectively allowed the Executive branch of government be also the Legislative and Judicial.  This is extremely dangerous.

92% plus of people in Washington D.C. voted Biden.  If regulations can be made willie-nillie without congress even having to pass a law, well, it will be members of the GloboLeftistElite that will write them.  And, remember, these folks live to do one thing:  write regulations.

One of the worst regulators at fault is the ATF®, who can’t even decide what a gun is.  They’re in trouble on the rules they made up on “ghost guns” and pistol braces, and even the definition of who can sell guns without needing an ATF license.

Make no mistake, this is a shattering blow for the Deep State, who wants to make regulations with the force of federal law, without there even having to be a federal law change in the first place.

Why does the GloboLeftElite and the GloboLeft hate this?  Because all of their termites that have burrowed into the Fed.Gov are now less useful, and they actually have to follow the rules to make their changes.

If a priest becomes a lawyer, does that make him a father-in-law?

And that’s the sand the GloboLeftElite will have in their panties.  They have to pass a law.  They can’t make their regulatory changes in the dark of the night by unelected bureaucrats who reliably only vote for more government.

And, no, I won’t be waiting up for The Mrs. to get up so we can discuss this post.  I’ll probably just sneak into bed while she gently snores beside me.

Hey, wait, is there a federal regulation about snoring?  I’ll bet there is . . .

Also – this is what winning looks like.  Enjoy this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To expose him.

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

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

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

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

A voter watches a debate.

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

(The DNC does not respond.)

Voter: ‘Ello, Miss?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DNC: Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!

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

(DNC hits the cage)

DNC: There, he moved!

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

DNC: I never!!

Voter: Yes, you did!

DNC: I never, never did anything…

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

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

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

DNC: No, no…..No, ‘e’s got COVID!

Voter: COVID?!?

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

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

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

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

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

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

(pause)

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

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

DNC: No no! ‘E’s pining!

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

(pause)

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

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

DNC: (pause) I got a Kamala.

(pause)

Voter: Pray, does it talk?

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

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

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

Voter: Well.

(pause)

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

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

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

Illegal Immigration: It’s a Pyramid Scheme

“If you’re trying to extort us because we are immigrants, we know the law.” – Taken

If you would like a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve our lives, please press 1 for English. (All memes today are as found.)

As I look to the vast, teeming hordes of illegals washing on to our shore daily, I ask myself, what rational nation would make it easy for hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men to easily enter the country each month, every month, for the entirety of the Biden administration?

Some have claimed that as many as 11 million to 13 million of these fighting-age men are entering the country every year.  That’s a total of nearly 40 million in the three and a half years since Biden assumed the office.  Of military aged men.  Who won’t be in the military.  At least not our military.

It has even gotten to the point where the normies that tend to vote left (not the committed GloboLeft, mind you, but the normies who voted for Biden) have come to realize, “No, this is too much.”

It’s gotten to the point where other immigrants have said, “No mas.”

It’s gotten so bad that Joe Biden, he who Executive Ordered out of existence Trump’s border strategy in the first forty minutes after he took the oath, had to pretend it was the Republicans who were against border security last month.

Oh, and a few minutes after that he then offered immediate legal status to 500,000 spouses of illegals.  It must be wonderful to be a GloboLeftist and have the memory of a goldfish.

Of course, one of the main reasons the GloboLeft want to haul in illegals over the border is that most people who are illegals want free stuff, and most immigrants in general (not all, but in general) have come from countries where a higher degree of socialism is the norm.  Plus, many don’t speak the language, so they’re left to whatever the local GloboLeftist “Community Organizer” tells them for political beliefs. 

But, perhaps, another reason that the GloboLeft wants so much immigration is debt. If you look at average debt in the United States, it’s at $104,000.  Even Gen Z is getting on the debt train:  the average Zoomer debt is about $30,000, even though the oldest Zoomer is 26.

Average illegal (or legal) immigrant debt load?  Zero.

The opportunity then appears:  load the illegals up with loans at silly high interest rates.  Keep in mind, they have crappy credit, so a 20% interest rate to buy a car at a buy here/pay here place seems like a good deal.  Illegals also have, generally, lower reading comprehension and less experience with the debt-industrial complex, so renting to buy a tv, a car, furniture (rent to own!) which makes it look like the immigrant is actually adding to the economy rather than subtracting from it.

And they are subtracting from it:  medical care, schooling, infrastructure, housing, and criminality all pile on.  While American might have become a third-world hellhole all by itself (which I doubt) illegals are a pyramid scheme.  The scheme requires more and more illegals to take on the debt and consooom the resources.

The solution to all of these problems brought on by the immigration?  GloboLeftists want to import yet more illegals to solve the problems caused by all of the previous illegals.  The endpoint of this is disaster.  It ends up destroying the countries, no, nations, that were insane enough to practice this importation.  A nation, like Ireland, filled with Irish people ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish.  A Moroccan born in Ireland is no more Irish than a mouse born in a stable is a horse.

No, Ireland then ceases to be a nation when it ceases to be Irish, and then it becomes a country, and it will never be the same.  I think the Irish have figured this out, as they’ve been pushing back on the GloboHomoElite as of late.

Several years ago, I was listening to NPR™ before I gave up on it entirely – it was probably 2016.  This was an out-and-out propaganda piece, and I realized it at the time.  In this snippet, the child of Iranian parents that had lived in California had moved to Copenhagen.  He was quite upset that his daughter (born in California) was not considered to be Danish.

Well, she’s not.  She never will be.  Persian?  Sure.  Danish?  Never.  At best, a resident.  Her children, three or four generations hence?  Maybe so, as soon as they are named Viggo or Alfred or Clara or Freja.

These changes have consequences that range far deeper than just the economic.  England was a country made for the English, and that’s how it works.  The customs and attitudes of India or Pakistan?  Well, import enough of that, and England won’t be England.

America is not Ireland – I’m of Scots-Dane-English extraction, and no Scot, Dane, or Englishman would claim me as anything but their very distant kin, which I understand.  But I am more than three generations American, so I have no other home, no other place that is mine.

And just like England was made by and for the English, America was made by and for the Americans.  Whoever is coming across the border is not an American, but someone who is actively destroying America.

None of the GloboLeftElite care that this will ruin all of the nations of the West economically or demographically.  As an anon put it,

“They’ll destroy it all, all of society, for a lifetime of personal hedonism and debauchery, funded off of the suffering of billions.”

I’m not sure that’s right.  The forces of the GloboLeftElite do like their pleasures, but many of the foot soldiers of the GloboLeft simply want to watch it all burn.  They don’t care, particularly, to see anything grow in its place, just so long as the True, the Beautiful, and the Good are destroyed.

Destruction, though it may be easy, and though it may be very common in the coming years, will not be the final say.  In the end, since the beginning of man, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good have proven to come back alive, again and again, even when the night seemed the darkest.

I have never said the path is easy, and I’ve never said any of us will live to see the end of the tale, and I hate to give spoilers, but we’re not done.

Not even close.

Catabolic Collapse – Coming Soon To A Place Near You

“Out these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history.” – Fight Club

My friend struggled with steroid addiction, but it only made him stronger.

If you’re a bodybuilder, the word “anabolic” is your friend.  While often used in conjunction with the word steroids, anabolic really means “taking the proteins and stuff you eat and turning it into more complex stuff for your body”.  Like I said, that’s a good thing if you’re in shape as a body builder.  The Mrs. says that that spherical is technically a shape, so I guess I’m technically in shape.  At least in “a” shape.

But just like there is day balanced by night (see, I can be poetic!) anabolic is balanced by the less commonly used word “catabolic”.  And, just like an anode has a cathode, catabolic means the opposite.  If I’m dieting, the word catabolic is my friend – it rips apart complex molecules like fat that represent stored energy, releasing the energy, and making my shape appear less spherical as the fat is turned into energy releasing sweet, sweet CO2.and plutonium.

Ahh, back when a screwdriver was the height of nuclear safety protocol.  (meme as found, if obscure, look up “demon core”).

Economic growth is anabolic.  Building a house takes a complex logistics chain of materials and manpower and creates a yet more complex outcome, assembled only with effort and time.  A house fire is therefore catabolic – it torches and burns the whole thing down, much faster than it took to build.  But allowing a house’s roof to fail and the house to rot is also catabolic – it just takes a lot longer.

Just as it applies to houses and body shape, catabolic can also apply to economies.  Essentially every day after the paving of a road is complete, the road is rotting.  At first this happens slowly.  However, then, as water gets a chance to penetrate it and freeze and thaw, the decay happens much more quickly.

What happens when we can’t afford to fix stuff?  It slowly rots.  Buildings slowly decay.  Street signs fade.  Water pipes burst.  Kardashians move in.

How are Kardashians like deer?  They get new racks every year.

Just like keeping a body from starving requires continual food, keeping a complex system operating and running requires continual wealth and effort.  Every bridge, unless maintained, will collapse.  A comment last week talked about a pullback of restaurants in their area, more in keeping with what was in place decades ago.

Decades ago, even in Modern Mayberry, there weren’t a lot of external chain restaurants, not even a McDonald’s™.  McDonald’s© business model requires a Regional owner who owns multiple McDonald’s™ to build a restaurant on land the McDonald’s Corporation© owns and lease the restaurant from the Corporation®.  It also requires that the restaurant go through suppliers that the Corporation® selects to purchase stuff like food and cups and napkins.  On top of that, the Corporation™ takes a percent off the top for profit.

The Regional owner pays the Corporation©, but also takes the profits.  The remainder goes to costs, including labor.

I once had a sirloin sandwich at McDonald’s®.  I’ll never do it again, that was a Big McSteak™.

Back in, say, 1960, all the profits, including the money the local bank lent for the mortgage on Ma and Pa’s Diner, stayed in the community.  Many of the costs would as well, especially if the beef and vegetables were locally sourced through the butcher.  While the City wasn’t a closed economy, it still retained a lot of the money currently being extracted and kept it local.  But when the economy is prosperous, there’s enough wealth being generated, and the extraction of a bit of it doesn’t matter all that much.

Now?  The excess cash is hoovered out of the local economy with maximum velocity.  That turns the people that would have run Ma and Pa’s Diner or the butcher shop or the local grocery store into wage employees rather than entrepreneurs.  Amazon© and eBay™ have removed the reason for small shops selling specific items like games or cooking utensils, and that leaves room for Walmart™ to sell bulk commodities.  At least our local Walmart® isn’t like a Target® store in the big cities, which I hear now come complete with their own police precincts.

In a small town like Modern Mayberry, that’s one thing, but last week I wrote about the beginning of the collapse of the casual dining (as opposed to the philosophic problem created by causal dining) restaurant chains.  There are none of these in Modern Mayberry, because we’re far too small for an RedAppleChiliLobsterBees™.  No, the extraction is starting to fail in the suburbs as well.

I always stop my microwave when the clock hits 0:01, which makes me feel like a bomb disposal expert.

It was mentioned that area was going back the earlier “norm” of restaurants, but the reason is because the middle class has been squeezed.  This squeezing of the middle class is catabolic and will destroy demand.  This is why, right now, the economy shrinking while stocks continue upwards.  A recession is occurring in the middle class even as profits are up.  This is the collapse, but as discussed last week, it’s not sudden, until it is.

I’ve described Modern Mayberry, but I’ve also described the core areas of many larger cities, where as our economy moved from making things into reality to making profits on paper, the core died.  I’ve walked through the bones of industries long sent overseas and seen the majestic steel columns holding up the roof over an empty space, long since dead and forgotten.  That’s also catabolic.

The good news is that it starts slow, but picks up speed.  As I’ve said before, we’re standing on the edge of a new land ready to be born, that will be far different from what we’ve seen in the past.  The things we’ve taken for granted will no longer be there in many cases.  I’m looking at you, Social Security.

When The Mrs. was giving birth she seemed in discomfort, so I asked, “What’s wrong, honey?”  She responded, “These contractions are killing me!”  So, I asked, “What is wrong, honey?”

What matters is the rebuilding.  There will be choices to be made – some that will lead to freedom, some to serfdom.  As we’ve seen that paths leading away from the True, Beautiful, and Good always end in failure, most often spectacular failure, I’m optimistic.

I must be.  That’s why I keep dieting.

What Is It All About? Humiliation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Wins? The True, The Beautiful, And The Good.

“And I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory.” – Terminator 3:  Rise of the Machines

In 1970, all female solo artists were pre-Madonnas.

WRSA is back online here (LINK).  Bookmark it.

The birthrate is dropping in most locations on the planet.  And it’s dropping fairly quickly – quickly enough that in South Korea there will be only 40 people alive in the year 2100 for every 100 people alive today.  That’s how you get collapse, and I’m sure it’s caused a lot of Seoul searching.

There is an explanation, and you’ll see fairly rapidly that that explanation cements the assurance of the ultimate victory for the True, Beautiful, and Good.

The first problem leading to our current set of troubles is cities.  Cities depend on technology, but they also depend upon having a supply of people living in the cities.

Being in a large city ultimately and always brings about a tendency of a large segment of the population living in them to move to the Left.  Why?  Because being in a city is dependency.  If I want to get rid of some excess trash, I can take it into my backyard and burn it, quite legally.  This is because the minor air pollution source from burning trash isn’t very long and my neighbors don’t live all that close to me.

What do you call a broken dumpster?  A trash can’t.

But if everybody in San Francisco decided they wanted to burn their garbage on the streets, the air pollution would be horrific.  And where would they put all the street-poo?  Burning your own trash isn’t an answer in San Francisco, so people that live there are dependent on someone to do it for them.  They’re also dependent on people for lots of other things:

  • Make food for them so they can eat while watching people poo in the streets,
  • Make roads for them to drive on and for people to poo on,
  • Provide them water to drink and to wash the poo off of their shoes,
  • Provide a sewer for people who poo in the streets to ignore,
  • Protect them from the people that poo in the streets, and
  • Protect them from the fires that the people who poo in the streets set.

There are tons of other things that people in big cities require, things like electricity, and gas, and I could go on for a very long time.  People in the cities even want the city to entertain them with museums and theaters and, I guess, poo fountains.

I took a survey of what shampoo women used in the shower.  98% said, “What the hell are you doing in my bathroom???”

Contrast that with someone living out in the country.  Sure, they need food, but they often have gardens and chickens and cattle – many a local farm here produces a lot of excess food just from their gardens that they sell in the farmer’s market, plus that one dude who buys corn from Walmart® and sells it at a 50% markup.

Roads?  Yup, the county grades the gravel road a few times a year but most farmers box blade their own roads with their tractors.  Water comes from a well, mostly, and although there’s an electric pump in the year 2024, there’s also a creek and a pond if it came down to it.  They’re on a septic system, and if that breaks, an outhouse isn’t very high tech at all.

And protection?  God made men, but Sam Colt made ‘em equal and if someone tries to break into an occupied farmhouse, I certainly hope that they have their will in order.

I think The Mrs. put glue on my pistols.  She denies it, but I’m sticking to my guns.

Yes, the typical farmer or rancher today is much more dependent on the outside world than one even 80 years ago, but they control so much more of their own destiny than a comparable city dweller.  It’s psychologically better to live in the country, and the feeling of independence provides a feeling of power that calling 911 never will.

People in the cities (even recent immigrants, illegal or not) aren’t having kids, but people in the country are.  This is not a fluke:  John C. Calhoun’s (not the president, the scientist) Mouse Utopia experiments showed this:  in a closed environment free of predation and with all the necessary food and space to live, mice essentially stopped breeding, got weird, and then died out.

This is what is happening in cities.  Is this enough to create breakdown?

No, probably not.  There’s one other missing factor:  religion.

Cities are more secular.  It makes sense – when I lived in a city, I noted (not positively) that every single day most workdays my feet went from carpet to tile to concrete to car to concrete to tile and back again at the end of the day.  Every step I took was on an artificial surface that man had made.

I guess that Eve was the first person not to understand the Apple® terms and conditions.

People living in cities can look around and, in some places, can’t see anything other than what was conceived and made by man.  Yet, when I get up here in Modern Mayberry at my house, I walk outside and I’m on grass, I look on natural slopes and trees and creeks and things not made by the hand of man all the way to work.  I don’t know if the utter absence of nature in a day is enough to inspire secularism, but it’s sure nice to see the hand of Someone Bigger Than Me at work as I make my way to my much less important work.

It’s beautiful.

WhatIfAltHist is a YouTuber® that does history and philosophy stuff.  In one of his recent videos he noted that his researcher had found that in every single case, when a society became urban and secular, birthrate collapsed.

A case in point in American history is that the birthrate dropped starting in 1920 as society became more urban and more secular.  However, the Great Depression started a spike in birthrates that lasted until 1958 by a population that was under stress from economics and a world war and lived not in the cities, but in the suburbs, which allowed room for (more) independence and much more nature.

After secularization took hold again and the pace of urbanization increased, the birthrate dropped again and my generation, Gen X, was the result.

God was originally going to use wasps to pollinate flowers, but in the end He went with plan bee.

It seems that historically humanity has been walking this tightrope back and forth between urbanization and rural, and between religious and secular.  There’s obviously a tipping point where people just give up, and those that are in the rural areas keep breeding – there’s a reason that the Amish and the Mormons are gaining as a percentage of the population:  they’re rural and they’re religious and they make babies.

When Obama talked about clinging to our guns and religion, it was his biggest fear that he was vocalizing.

That’s where the seed of the new civilization to replace this one will spring from:  it certainly won’t be San Francisco.  And, whatever emerges from this transition won’t be like what came before it.  We’ll be able to recognize it, we’ll be able to explain it, but we can’t fully predict what it will look like.

I do, however, expect that whatever this new civilization won’t be drenched in either degeneracy or tyranny, and will respect and see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

The Post On Nihilism I’ve Been Working On (Here And There) For Weeks

“Think his nihilism got the best of him and he tried to kill himself?” – House, M.D.

Nietzsche couldn’t use pencils.  He thought they were all pointless.

A big danger is Nihilism.

It’s certainly one of the biggest dangers that society faces today.  As our society has become less religious, more urban, and has a greater and greater embracing of technology, people begin to ask:

Does any of this matter?  Do our values have any real meaning?

My answer to both of those questions is, of course, yes.  Values and virtues don’t become outdated.

But what is Nihilism?  Nietzsche defined Nihilism fairly simply:

“That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs – no thing in itself.  This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.”

To a Nihilist, nothing matters and everything that anyone can think of is true.  Read that sentence again, and tell me what I’ve missed in what’s ailing society at its foundation, right now, today.  To quote Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, if Nihilism is the “extinction of the individual, then this world and everything in it – love, goodness, sanctity, everything – are as nothing, nothing man may do is of any ultimate consequence, and the full horror of life is hidden from man only by the strength of their will do deceive themselves; and ‘all things are lawful,’ no otherworldly hope or fear restrains men from monstrous experiments and suicidal dreams.”  I’m guessing he knew my ex-wife.

Observance to a religion gives a society many things:  purpose, values, unity, and stability, among others.  But a Nihilist would say that all religions have the same validity, just like all cultures have the same validity.

But that is observably false.

Say what you will, but the Aztec people had a great motto:  “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

I’ll cherry pick an example:  Aztecs.  The Aztecs were a bloodthirsty, cannibal, slaving religion.  When their ancestors escaped up north, they became known (later) as the Anasazi, and were so hated that they managed to get a huge coalition of all the other tribes together to unite to kill them, probably because having cannibals as neighbors is horrible for property values.

We live in a nation where academics and the news media are trying to normalize everything from cannibalism to “minor-attracted persons” to men pretending to be women.  The only, and I mean only, way that this sort of normalization attempt occurs is because the GloboLeft are a group of nihilists that don’t have any fixed beliefs, at all.  They were HATING former FBI Director James Comey before Trump fired him.  Then, in the span of a single day, they were converted to loving him.

“Comey was always the good guy.”

We were always at war with Eastasia.

When Amy was a child, she said she wanted to go into comedy.  Well, no one is laughing now.

If horrible religions like the Aztec religion can result in murder, wholesale slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, imagine how much worse it is to have no religion at all?  Now, it becomes open season on anything.  The Mrs. likes to talk about an article she read once (maybe it was back when we subscribed to Reason?) about the author attending a Washington, D.C. dinner party.

The conversation went something like this . . . .

“Well, of course Africa is a problem, and probably has 200,000,000 too many people.  I think that it can be solved, though, by withholding food supply.”  This wasn’t a politician, but probably a GloboLeft academic or regulator.

The author confronted the GloboLefty:  “You’re casually talking about starving 200,000,000 people to death?”

Apparently, the GloboLefty didn’t really like it when it was phrased that way, but when he could hide behind pretty words that disguised the real meaning of what he was saying, well, he was good with it.

I was going to donate my clothes to starving people in Africa, but I decided not to.  If my clothes fit them, they’re definitely not starving.

The French Revolution was, perhaps, the very first example of this sort of extreme Nihilism, where the idea was not a war on man, but an organized war on God, Himself.  Mankind has certainly had its share of civil wars and genocides throughout history, but the French Revolution was something entirely new – the desire of an idea, Nihilism, to remake an entire nation and discard every idea from the past.

To a Nihilist or a GloboLeftist (but I repeat myself) I am nothing.  You are nothing.  We are not even worthy of consideration as humans.  We are beneath contempt.  To quote Rose again, “The Revolution, in fact, cannot be completed until the last vestige of faith in the true God is uprooted from the hearts of men and everyone has learned to live in this void.”  In the words of V.I. Lenin:  “. . . there will be no way of getting away from it, there will be nowhere to go.”

Really.

Should the Russian Revolution be renamed the Tsar Wars?

The greatest horrors (that’s “horror” – I’m not talking about Madonna) in the history of humanity have been brought about by GloboLeft governments while being run not by atheists, but by antitheists.  Period, and that’s verifiable by actual numbers.  The end stage of this is the Nihilism we see around us now:  The Nihilism bent only on destruction.  The French Revolution started it, but you can see it daily at work

As I’ve said again and again, I believe we will win, because we stand for something and to win they have to kill us all.  Every single one of us.

They can’t.  After 74 years of trying, the Soviets couldn’t erase Religion and the values it provides.  Today, only 13% of Russians are atheists.  Infecting everyone with Nihilism is really, really hard.

My doctor said I should drink more wine.  He actually said, “less beer”, but I’m pretty good at reading between the lines.

Why am I so certain we’ll win?  Because we’ve been winning for at least 2000 years, and that won’t stop now.  I do believe in Truth.  And I know others to, too.

That’s all it takes to win.

Forbidden Opinions: The GloboLeft Versus The Beautiful

“Look, there is light and beauty up there, that no shadow can touch.” – The Return of the King

I’m trying to improve my double entendres.  But it’s not easy.

This is the last in the series about the GloboLeft’s war against the Good, Beautiful, and True, at least for now.  We’re down to Beautiful.  Why did I do them in the order of True, Good, and Beautiful?  Because they’re not really in order, and they each complement the other.  Or maybe I have a problem with authority – who can say?

Which one of the three is best?  Each of them.  They all work together.  That is why the GloboLeft fights these so very, very hard.  Their typical pattern is to pick a value, and then pick its absolute opposite, and then celebrate that.  To pick from Monday’s post:  why to they look at men dressed as women and call them women?  Because that’s the opposite, and it must be celebrated.

(as found)  My take?  There are two sexes, two genders, and about a million fetishes.  I mean, I have a logic fetish – I can’t stop coming to conclusions.

Beauty is the last of the three that we’ll discuss, but it figures in so much of what we see in our lives today, especially since everything that’s ugly is now celebrated, and there is an active attempt to remove beauty from public life.

A GloboLeftist would try to convince you that beauty is subjective.

It is not.  Back when people were allowed to experiment on human babies, they’d show babies pictures of pretty things and ugly things.  Babies reacted positively to pretty things (and people!) and negatively to ugly things (and George Soros).  It is a part of us.  And we know it when we see it.

So, here are some of the statements that the GloboLeft actually believes:

GloboLeftists believe that every female is stunning and brave.

Not so much with males, since they don’t like the patriarchy.  Or something, not sure what, but it’s still okay to make fun of dudes.  This is one where they’re specifically talking about female (which includes, bizarrely, transexuals) beauty.

Here’s an example:  Lizzo is just as beautiful as (insert actually attractive actress here).  I wasn’t originally aware of what a Lizzo even was, until I saw a video of her playing a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison.

(meme as found) Where do you find the scariest part of the internet?  HTTP Lovecraft.

Wow.  She (at that point) looked to weigh about as much as a World War II Iowa class battleship.  And she wore a skintight leotard.  There isn’t enough eye-bleach in the world.  It looked like a potato (Lizzo) with a crystal toothpick.

Another example:  Zendaya was named one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world.  I’ll admit that she’s a middling character actress with a range of emotions that go from “irritated” to “thinking about talking to my doctor about my inability to have regular bowel movements.”

10 most beautiful women in the world?  She wouldn’t have been in the top 10 in my senior class.  Plus, I think she’ll fill out and look like a middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears® before she’s 35.  The good news is I don’t think she’ll go full Lizzo-potato.

I know which choice I’d McMake.  (meme as found, so my criticism is not unique)

The GloboLeftists believe that all art is valid and beautiful.

There are so many different ways that humans work to create beauty that it’s hard to catalog them all.  But I’ll start with architecture.  Sure, I don’t live in a city, but lots of people do.  Here’s one made by actual humans in Copenhagen versus a nameless, faceless, commieblock.  Which is more beautiful?  Which makes you feel more human?  Which would contain more PEZ®?

I worked with an Asian who dipped Copenhagen.  His name was Mr. Chu.

And then there’s music.  We started the 20th Century with Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1908) moved to I Want to Hold Your Hand in 1963, 55 years later.  What came out 57 years later?  Wet Ass Pussy.

Sure, Take Me Out to the Ballgame doesn’t mention virtues, but it’s innocent.  I Want to Hold Your Hand shows a little intent.  But Wet Ass Pussy?  It’s beyond crass and replaces Beauty with it’s very opposite.

Likewise, literature (mainstream) has gone downhill.  I’ll pick science fiction.  Why?  I’ve been reading that since I could read.  Around 2010 I had the idea that I’d outgrown science fiction, that I was older, jaded, and the genre didn’t have anything for me anymore.

I then picked up one of the old books I’d loved as a kid.  It was still awesome.  I hadn’t changed, the genre had become ugly.  And that’s coming from a Hugo®-nominated (really, this is true, under a pseudonym) author.  But there are still great novels out there.  And maybe one of those authors will (hint) post links to his stuff below.

No, the Beauty still exists in literature, but the GloboLeftElite that controls the mainstream press wants to make it ugly.  That’s the same reason that movies are sucking now, and actresses often look like a burlap sack filled with doorknobs.  The movies are no longer meant to exult in what’s best in us, to show and celebrate virtues.  Nope.  Movies are there to sell the opposite of the values and the opposite of Beauty.

Speaking of movies, Disney® apparently is forcing video game creators to make characters ugly.  From Overlord DVD (a YouTube® channel) comes the news that a new Star Wars® video game is . . . ugly.  The rumor is that Disney© is requiring that the studio make the characters that way.  Why?

(as found at Overlord DVD’s channel)  “Fugly girl, come out to play . . . Fugly giiiirrrll, come out to pla-ay.”

Disney© isn’t doing this to make money.  There must be another purpose.

I could go on and on, but at some point I need to hit the hay.  Here are more examples, and you no doubt could make a very, very long list where Beauty has been replaced by ugly recently:

  • Painting contests, won by an actual chimpanzee.
  • Celebrating every family structure except ones with mothers and fathers,
  • Natural foods versus slop – I think nacho cheese is probably made in a refinery out of Vaseline and yellow crayons, but I can’t prove this.

The end process is to pick a value, invert it, with the goal of subverting the actual value.  The best news is this:  The True, the Beautiful, and The Good are going to win.

How do I know this?

Even the GloboLeft knows the True, the Beautiful, and the Good when they see it.  They just hate it.

So, they dress up a potato and celebrate it playing a flute.  This is their best play.

We’ve got this.

Read The Funniest And Best Post You’ll Read On Regret In The Next 431 Hours

“Everything depends upon speed, and the secrecy of his quest.  Do not regret your decision to leave him, Frodo must finish this task alone.” – LOTR:  The Two Towers

A burglar stole all my lamps.  I should be mad, but I’m de-lighted.

People rarely change.

Perhaps the only thing that makes people change is an intense, emotional, experience.  Nearly dying is one of those.  Losing a land war in Asia is another.  Having a loved one pass away is yet another.  How we react to those intense moments in life can be significant.

Why is this important?

For the most part, you are who you are.  As I started this off, by observation I’ve seen that most people don’t change very much, at all, throughout their lives.  There are several friends that I have known for decades that I only talk to every few years.  Why don’t we talk more often?  Not much has changed – we’ve gotten to the point in life where those bright and technicolor moments of childhood and young adulthood are behind us.

Oddly, I think many of those folks would jump in a car and drive a day to help me if I told them I needed it and it was an emergency.  Now, I have no idea if they’d do it a second time if I just made up the emergency, or if the emergency was that I couldn’t find my car keys.

Yeah, there’s probably a limit.

But Jesus never bragged:  “For I speak not of my own Accord.”  John 12:49

One conversation I recently had with a friend was about those people we went to high school with that were either very ill or have already passed away.  As I look around to the people I know, it’s getting to the point where I’ll be going to more funerals than weddings.  That’s okay, I’m sure I can be the guy that puts the FUN in funeral.

When I talk to my friends, however, the things that brought us together rarely, if ever change.  That’s not to say that that things don’t happen in our lives, but the core of our being stays the same.  The character traits that made me admire them, or the personality quirks that made us laugh at the same jokes or love the same movies, or the shared experiences that bond us are still there.

I did a google search for “lost medieval servant boy” but it said, “this page cannot be found”.

Of course, everyone has tragedy in their life – experiencing the tough parts of life is what makes experiencing the best parts of life seem ever sweeter.  Part of getting older is getting that perspective so that I can look back and see which of the things that were so important to me twenty years ago are still important.  Some of them aren’t.  Those are the ephemeral things in life, like my favorite songs.

Oh, wait, I’m still stuck at 17 with those.  Darn.  But I will say that I certainly care a lot less about what people thing – I guess I’m becoming a curmudgeon.

Which is also okay, since I’ve also learned that most people don’t think about me very much at all.  That’s not a statement based on sadness – it’s a statement of reality.  Unless I was Donald Trump.  Then I’d live rent free in the minds of millions of GloboLeftists.

And she also falls way high on the Crazy axis and way low on the Hot axis.

I also know that, looking back, were there things I would go back and change, knowing what I know today?  Of course!  There is no fully human life that has ever been lived where mistakes weren’t made.  But spending even a single second of my life in regret, kicking myself, is a waste of that second, and an emotion that will lead to nothing but despair, which is certainly an advanced form of Evil.

Why?

The past is gone.  Unless someone develops a time machine or John McAfee successfully shows everyone how to drastically shift quantum worldlines, well, those major mistakes of the past are with us and will be with us until we shift off this mortal coil ourselves, moving from the washer to the dryer of life.

But we can’t let those events define us.  Sure, they can change us, and any significant emotional experience will change us.  Yes, we can work to atone for our errors.  But when we have the time, why not focus that emotional experience into something good?

“When you’ve fallen down, and you’re lying there on the ground, pick something up and bring it with you when you get up.” – John Maxwell

When I was faced with my last major setback, I tried to see what aspects of that setback were mine and mine alone.   Rather than spend time in regret or revenge, I really tried to focus on things that would make me better after the experience, not in anger or fear, but out of a desire to really get better as a person.

When a Venn diagram wants revenge, does it become a Venn dettagram?

Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise is part of what came out of that experience.  The other part was I decided to file my teeth into little fangs.  That part didn’t work out so well.  Never file your teeth into little fangs.

My question and challenge to myself was to see what I could do to make myself and the world a better place.  Do I always do that?

No!  Of course not.

But I try.  My perspective has changed.  As much as I share about me in these posts, these posts are not about me.  These posts are, when I do a really, really, good job, about the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

Back to regret:  I’ve got a simple question that I asked myself at my last big setback:  “What price am I willing to pay to hold on to feelings of regret rather than channeling that feeling into something that changes the world for the better or to repair the wrongs that I’ve committed?”

That’s really a powerful question.  I could have stayed with regret, which leads to despair, which leads to . . . nowhere.  Unless it’s channeled to make changes in me for the better.  My first marriage failed.  The result?  I resolved to never, ever lie to The Mrs.  So, in return, she never asks me “does this pair of pants make my butt look big?” because I’d have to answer, “no, it’s the butt that makes your butt look big.”

A friend of mine married a trophy wife.  Apparently, she didn’t win first place.

In one sense, it’s freeing.  But it’s a change I made that made me better.

I think that, in the end, our efforts to better ourselves, especially morally, are a very big part of why we’re here.  Human beings are really, really pathetic when they don’t have to struggle to achieve greatness.  I have the receipts on this:  Prince Harry, whose greatest trauma was that his brother once said something mean to him.  But he’s paying the price:  Meghan Markle.  Perhaps Harry should feel regret.

It’s been said that God gives his toughest loads to his strongest servants, and it has been my observation that this is really true, since most people are actually better than me.  Though I’m trying.

Again, people rarely change.  If you’re in the position to change, pick something up when you get up.

Unless it’s Meghan Markle.  You should leave that trash right in the gutter.

Give War A Chance

“War is brewing.” – The Lord of the Rings

Pa Wilder survived mustard gas and pepper spray.  He was a seasoned veteran.

War.  What is it good for?

Absolutely nothin’.

I have a different answer:

Saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Whaaaaat?

Yeah, war, it turns out, is an amazing catalyst for providing lots of life saving technology that has saved far more people than it has killed.  I need to jump in here with this because everyone has their sphincters clenched because it appears we’re on the edge of the Third World War.  Maybe that won’t be so bad.

Hang on, this will all make sense in a moment.

I’m a trained professional.  Or I would be if I were trained.  And if I were getting paid for this.

Give a thief a gun and he’ll rob a bank.  Give a thief a bank and he’ll rob everyone.

But I made a pretty bold statement, and I have the receipts to back it up.  First let’s start with what I’m counting.  I’m not counting as “war” when governments kill their own citizens.  In the 20th century alone (no Fox® required) governments killed an estimated 262 million of their own citizens.

Yeah, that’s an ugly number, and it’s certainly the largest man-made source of involuntary death.  This is also the biggest argument EVER that the Second Amendment is the very best life-saving technology ever conceived by mortal man.

Ever.

War is a different kettle of fish, and it depends on the counting.  One source says the total number of combat deaths since 1800 is around 35 million.  Sure, that’s a lot, and I’d love to have them all over for a nice dinner, but it’s small compared to those killed by their own government.  A broader definition of “war” would put it at 131 million in the twentieth century, but I’d guess that also includes a big overlap of citizens killed by their own government.

I hear that Stalin collected political jokes.  When asked how many he had, “Four GULAGs worth.”

Tomato, tomah-to.  Let’s split the difference and say it’s probably 80 million in the twentieth century, or roughly as many people as Joe Biden has allowed to come streaming over the border in the last three years.

But how, John Wilder, you amazing stud, you said you had receipts on how war brought about benefits that exceeded the costs?

War provides an acceleration of humanity, it provides the necessary push and investment into things that help troops do unexpected things on the battlefield.  Like living.  That leads us to penicillin.  It was spurred into development (it had been discovered earlier) in World War II.  Would antibiotics have been lost in a research paper without World War II?  Don’t know – but World War II allowed them to be tested on Allied soldiers.

While we’re on medical, what about smallpox?  Oh, sure, it doesn’t sound bad, but I’ve been told it is far worse than bigpox.  What spurred that innovation?  War.  The Revolutionary War, in fact.

Well, there’s a joke coming back from 2012.  I guess humor ended then.

I know I try to avoid drinking water since mankind developed beer and wine, but water chlorination has saved lots of people who aren’t drinking booze.  Who developed the process to make chlorine gas cheaply so he could gas a bunch of French?  A German guy in World War One.

There are more, but there are hundreds of millions of lives saved in just those three developments.

What else did war provide?

  • Nuclear power – sure, just like OJ’s obituary, someone will say . . . “Oh, and there’s that one other thing” but nuclear power has produced clean power over the globe with, well, a few exceptions.
  • Jet engines – without World War Two, would Steve Miller have ever had someone to take him home?
  • Radar – I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard that it’s pretty good at keeping planes from hitting each other.
  • The Internet – how else would we get pictures of cats?
  • GPS – it can guide bombs, or it can take us to a liquor store in an unfamiliar town. Guess which is used more often?

I found a $20 outside of a liquor store.  I decided to do what Jesus would do, so I turned it into wine.

  • Satellites – without World War Two, would we have these? Probably not.  And satellites have made weather prediction a pretty trivial thing.  Doesn’t mean the prediction will be any good, but, you know, we can do it faster.
  • Computers – created to calculate firing tables for artillery and to decode German stuff. Again, now we use for pictures of cats.  And porn.
  • Medical imaging, including x-rays and ultrasound – all started with military tech.
  • Medical prosthetics – this is grimmer, but the more things got shot off, the better the tech.
  • Telecommunications technology, including wireless networks – the very first time I used WIFI in a house, the host noted that it was based on tech used in Gulf War I. WIFI?  Yeah, thank a war.
  • Aircraft technology – when you make tens of thousands of aircraft that are used to the maximum extent of their capability, you learn what makes them fall out of the sky. Which is useful.
  • Rocket technology – no bucks, no Buck Rodgers. From Werner von Braun to Elon Musk, I’m raising my glass to the foreigners who get us into space.   Oh, von Braun’s first rockets weren’t aimed at the Moon.
  • Sonar – I don’t fish, so, I guess this is okay. Meh tier.
  • Chemical engineering – this is a really important one – in making all the gases to kill people in World War One and in all the bits and pieces required to make tires without rubber and how to make ammonia to kill yet more people in World War One, our modern world wouldn’t exist.
  • Trauma care – how is it that 35 people are shot in an average Chicago weekend and only eight die? Trauma care.  This stuff was built on lots of combat experience, and thankfully keeps lots of innocent people breathing.
  • Cryptography – the entire field of cryptography is due to war. It’s the backbone of current connections and internet transactions, but started when people wanted to figure out where the Germans were going to be next week.

But when the Vikings used dots and dashes to communicate, it was Norse code.

I’m no longer scared of war.  Sure, it sucks if you or your friends got exploded, but the numbers don’t lie:  war has killed probably between 35 million (low) and 131 million (way high) in the twentieth century.  The advancements from war have probably saved (one estimate I read) five billion people.

War seems to have saved more people than it has killed.  By a huge margin.

So, in the immortal words of P.J. O’Rourke (peace be upon him):  “Give war a chance.”

Maybe, but maybe we’re on the eve of creation?