Purpose – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Gamer Gate 2.0: Ugly Women Edition

“Report here safely, stop. Do not play video games.” – John Wick

Proof once again you’re an un-person if you remember the 1990s, intact families, and Christmas. (as found)

Pop culture exists, and I often write about it. The reason is that it is pervasive, surrounds us, and can absolutely be used to manipulate human feelings and behavior, so, in a sense it is a form of programming about who and what we are. In essence, it can be a myth that evolves with us, sort of like intestinal parasites.

Pop culture has always been around, but it has transformed over the millennia of human existence. It likely started with Grug talking around the communal fire, telling stories of the clan, their origin, and the evils they defeated, and how he had to walk uphill both ways to get back to the cave when he was a child and that they didn’t have any of those new-fangled flint arrowheads when Grug was small.

Through this mechanism, the ideas that the clan had, its virtues, its norms, and even its fears were transmitted from one group to another. It told the story of the group. Their story. That narrative bound them together as one – they knew the deeds of their fathers and sang songs about the virtues of their fathers.

My eye got infected with COVID. I had Corona-Iris.

Control of that story, then, is very, very powerful, and Grug probably (rightfully) skipped the part where he pooped his wolfskin jockstrap the first time he had to fight someone from the Wilder clan. Grug’s stories and pop culture thus both provide and define the Overton Window – those ideas that are safe to speak about in a polite society.

An example:

The idea that JFK was assassinated by literally anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald acting totally alone was not acceptable to The Powers That Be®. What did they do? They invented an entire new term to disparage any idea that varied from the Warren Commission report – “Conspiracy Theory”.

Oddly, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations looked into the JFK Lone Gunman theory in the late 1970s, they decided that, no, it couldn’t have been Lee Harvey Oswald acting by himself. The results of the Committee were mostly ignored. The smear of anyone with a different opinion continued, and if it weren’t for the Zapruder film, I imagine they’d probably try to convince everyone JFK killed himself because he hated Dallas.

I promise, I don’t know any dirt on the Clintons.

The cast of people who benefited from Kennedy’s death was huge: The CIA, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Mafia, LBJ, Israel’s nuclear program, the gun control agenda, and the Boy Scouts™ all benefited. Okay, maybe not the Boy Scouts©, but you get the picture. The only person I’m sure wasn’t involved was me, and that’s because I wasn’t born yet.

Beat that alibi.

But crafting that public opinion isn’t just for the CIA or whatever thinktank meme’d the phrase “Conspiracy Theory” into existence. Nope. Pop culture is largely put out by Hollywood™ and, increasingly game companies.

Hollywood™ (if I include television, which I should) was the biggest influence when I was a kid. Everyone in my grade was watching the same movies at the same time on the same station. If a James Bond® movie was on, you were watching that, because cable came to the vicinity of Wilder’s Mountain about the time I was finishing high school and you had three choices (no one watched PBS™) and James Bond™ was always going to be better than whatever else was on.

I’ve never played Warhammer®, so I’m really hoping that it doesn’t have a “Shoe” or I’ll feel more stupid than usual.

We watched the same television shows, too. And, I’ve related before, I remember wondering in middle school if there was a reason that the TradRight couldn’t be funny, since even in seventh grade I recognized that every comedy and drama on television was written from a GloboLeftElite perspective. Even in middle school I recognized that Hollywood™ was a Leftist enclave.

Television (and movies!) was a pipeline that was well in place as owned turf of the GloboLeftElite by the end of the 1970s. But a new medium was emerging, and the old monolith of the big three networks was fracturing.

The new medium was gaming.

I hear she wears Fruit of the Tomb™ underwear.

Gaming was, especially at the early parts, unabashedly libertarian, as was much of the infant Silicon Valley at the time. Games like Pac-Man™, Pong©, and that one with the plumber were big, and largely free of politics, which is to say skewed towards the TradRight in the opinion of the GloboLeft.

Games rose under Atari™, sank, then rose again, this time higher and higher with Nintendo™ and then Sony™ and Sega™ and finally the X-Box™. Each iteration brought more story and visual complexity to the games, but the consumer was mainly the same: young white dudes. Sure, women have always played games, but the biggest gamers have always been boys. Oh, and the Prussians. They invented wargaming when it wasn’t convenient to duel or kill someone just to pass the time (seriously, look it up).

And what do boys like? Girls. Thus, Lara Croft™ and the Tomb Raider© series came into existence, complete with her huge . . . eyes. And shapely . . . hair. Lara Croft® was about as realistic as He-Man® was, but that was okay. She was an idealized version (through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy) of what a hot woman looked like.

But the GloboLeftElite have started a war against hot women. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s because that women feel threatened by hot women. I will note that not a single feminist ever jumped out and said that Superman™ was an unrealistic body model, or has tried to get Brad Pitt out of movies and replace him with that guy that plays Paul Blart.

When He-Man© did a PSA, was he He-Man®-splaining?

No. They want to uglify women characters in video games. I think so that ugly feminist women feel better.

The latest? Jean Grey™, that buxom fiery-haired psychic that, ahem, inspired so many young men, has been redone. Yup, here it is.

Yes, hot Jean Grey™ has been turned into a plank of wood that looks like Melinda Gates. And who was responsible? Not sure, but Sweet Baby, Inc. (links below) have allegedly been busy as they can be with Jean Grey, gumming up the works to make sure that all of the GloboLeftElite talking points and propaganda is included in the game and that the women in the games are as ugly as the Sweet Baby, Inc. women feel that they are inside. And outside, I guess.

When I play a video game, I’d rather play a cool strong character rather than Archie Bunker. Do women want to play as a hot chick, or do they want to play as a woman with a body best described as “tubular and featureless”?

Gamer Gate 2.0: Woke On Patrol

Gamer Gate 2.0 Update: Disproportionate Response Edition

It’s not just video games. Dungeons & Dragons™ has said that they’ll be happy when white guys stop playing their games.

Okay, done. (meme as found)

Disney’s© latest Star Wars™ flop, The Acolyte, has lesbian witches creating a baby without needing no man via the Force™. The producer also said that if we didn’t like it, don’t watch it, and then when we didn’t watch it, blamed us for not being the audience she (yes, you guessed it) deserved. I guess that in Star Wars©, they don’t need no man to have a baby.

And since Sweet Baby, Inc., Marvel™, D&D®, Disney© and Star Wars© don’t need me, I won’t be there.

You can do what you want, but I’ll be skipping this round. I like Grug’s stories better, anyway.

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:

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).

It Came From . . . 1985

“Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.” – Better Off Dead

People with babies can be really rude at the movie theater. One kid was crying so loudly that I could barely hear the person I was talking with on the phone.

I was recently looking at some graphs that showed, by birth year, what time people thought were the “best” for various things. For example, most people thought music peaked about the time where they were stupidest and going through puberty, say, 12-14. I recall reading that one “dealmaker” would always put on music that would have been popular when the person he was trying to influence would have been in that age range.

Worked like a charm for him.

Movies are different. For most people, surveyed, regardless of birth year, movies peaked in the 1980-1990 era. Why? They were creative, not afraid to take a risk, and great new movies were coming out almost weekly. My initial cut at this list of movies had 25 movies on it. And I thought of including at least 10 more.

It was an embarrassment of cultural riches that we had at that time. Well, at least we have Marvel™ Movie Product #432 now.

As always, the list isn’t in any particular order, and feel free to toss your favorites in the comments.

Witness – What I like best about this movie is that I’m fairly certain that it inspired Weird Al to do Amish Paradise. Other than that, just a fish out of water movie about a crusty cop pretending to be Amish and an excuse to put Harrison Ford in something that wasn’t Indiana Jones® or Star Wars™.

If you see an Apple™ store get robbed, does that make you an iWitness®?

The Breakfast Club – I really didn’t like this movie. It tried to make as if teens were angsty and filled with self-loathing and/or had bad relationships with pushy parents. Most of my friends were fairly well-adjusted, so I just didn’t relate to any of the characters. Of note: I think people are complaining now that the characters were all white. Imagine how it would fly if they were all BiPOC? Regardless, it makes the list because it’s a cultural touchstone for so many other people.

Vision Quest – Now this character I could identify with – a teen who has a vision, and goes on a quest. Okay, it’s about wrestling, girls, and life, and features a great soundtrack and lots of wrestling. Oh, and Linda Fiorentino.

When two silkworms wrestle, how often are the results a tie?

The Sure Thing – 1985 was Peak John Cusack. Sure, now he is an uber-Leftist on XX, but back then he was just another actor who could put in a great performance as a teen everyman. Of note: this was the first time I ever saw a cordless phone in a non-science fiction movie.

Lost in America – This is a movie about yuppies who decide to retire and go around the country in a big camper. On their first stop, the wife gambles away all of their money. Low-key hilarity ensues. My favorite line? “You are not allowed to use the words ‘nest’ or ‘egg’ ever again.”

Brewster’s Millions – Richard Pryor has to spend $30 million in 30 days and have nothing to show for it to inherit $300 million. John Candy plays the sidekick. Good times.

Rambo: First Blood Part II – This movie transformed the brooding John Rambo into something closer to Batman® in a bandana. Normally I wouldn’t put a sequel on the list, but this is a very different movie in every way from First Blood.

First PEZ™, Part II

The Stuff – What if your ice cream was eating you? Yes, that’s the plot. Yes, it’s played for laughs.

Back to the Future – Ever daydream about making sure your parents had sex? Well, no, not until I saw this movie. Time travel showed up in quite a few 1980s films, but this and Terminator probably top the list back when it was still a “new” movie concept.

Day of the Dead – Yes, a sequel, but, wow. It was considered very, very gruesome for the time and place of release, but now this stuff is on TV all the time. Interesting plot that could have had a much better script.

Fright Night – What if vampires were cool, suave, your next-door neighbor, and looking to bang and drain your girlfriend? Better call a washed-up TV horror movie host to help!

The Amish do not approve.

Weird Science/Real Genius – People were optimistic that science could solve our problems in the 1980s, such as getting a girlfriend or popping a lot of popcorn all at the same time.

Summer Rental – Who wouldn’t want John Candy as a neighbor? Well, I wouldn’t, since he’s dead. But he also got in a feud with Richard Crenna (also dead) and Rip Torn (also dead) comes to the rescue by turning his restaurant into a pirate boat. Okay, it’s essentially exactly the plot to Caddyshack, but who cares? It’s funny.

The Return of the Living Dead – Is it a floor wax? Is it a dessert topping? If Shimmer™ could be both, why can’t The Return of the Living Dead be a comedy and a horror movie? It is. It cost $3 million, made $14 million, and though it was a very stupid movie, was certainly not brainless.

Volunteers – John Candy, again, but this time as a Tom Hanks sidekick who is brainwashed by the communists and teaches them the Washington State fight song. Again, fun, and no Asians were killed in the filming of this movie.

Fight, fight, fight for Washington State . . . .

Better Off Dead – John Cusack again, 1985 was really his year. In this movie where teen suicide is played for laughs, and I loved every minute of it. Savage Steve Holland’s career was too short in movies, but lived on in animation. The humor is mainly focused on the absurd, like the two Japanese brothers, one who speaks no English, and the other learned by listening to Howard Cosell. I liked it.

Commando – I didn’t wear underwear to this movie, thus leading the expression “Commando” meaning not wearing underwear. Okay, that’s not the case, but Commando could almost be titled Generic Arnold Schwarzenegger Action Movie because it is mainly just Arnie blowing things up and making bad puns. And that’s okay.

In an Arnie voice: “Well, at least my hat is purr-fect.”

Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins – Until getting writing this post, I had no idea that this silly movie was based on a book series called The Destroyer that lasted for over 150 novels. Yup. But this is Fred Ward in a humorous movie that never takes itself too seriously, and has the production values of a TV movie, including Joel Grey as an ancient Asian master.

Re-Animator – I’m a sucker for great H.P. Lovecraft movies, and there are very, very few of those because Lovecraft built a wonderful world but didn’t write all that well. This one involves a medical student who invents a reanimation fluid that make the dead walk again, which was a big 1985 theme, apparently. This is Lovecraft, done right.

White Nights – Very much a Cold War movie, Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov are dancers who plot to escape the Soviet Union. It’s a spy thriller with sand dancing. It’s the closest to a drama on the list, so, it’s got that going for it.

Brazil – No, still haven’t seen it. Yes, I will at some point.

Does this capture the spirit of the movie Brazil?

The Truth, Neutrinos, Taylor Swift, And Otto Von Bismarck.

“I know what you’re thinking, ’cause right now I’m thinking the same thing. Actually, I’ve been thinking it ever since I got here: Why, oh why, didn’t I take the blue pill?” – The Matrix

When I was a kid, I could walk into a 7-Eleven with just a dollar and walk out with a six pack of pop and three candy bars. Now? They have cameras everywhere.

I write a lot about the Truth, but I think the Friday before Memorial Day is a fine time to talk about the Truth in general. Why? Because I said so.

The first thing I want to point out is that a quest for Truth, does not mean everything is bright and happy and puppy tails. The Truth is, very often a grim thing. I have found things sometimes aren’t the happy web that I imagined. Like the Wedding Guest in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I ended up being “A sadder and a wiser man” because of The Truth. I guess the Wedding Guest’s bright spot is at least Iron Maiden® wrote a song about him.

That is part of the issue of looking for the Truth – I thought I understood life, and then a curve ball hits. Some people call this sudden exposure to the Truth: The Red Pill, based on the red Reese’s Pieces that E.T.® ate with Indiana Jones™ in the movie Jaws.

Or something like that. Heck, I used to worry about the evidence that the Sun’s neutrino count was half of what would be expected, and that maybe its internal fusion had stopped. But that was just too scary, so now I worry about celebrity gossip.

What was Otto von Bismark’s favorite Queen song? Under Prussia.

The Red Pill is choosing to see reality as it is, not as we’d wish it to be. In this quest, I’ve seen things I didn’t want to see, and understood things often people are willfully ignorant of because the consequences of the Truth are . . . disturbing.

That’s difficult, because then I have to go back through what I formerly believed to be True, and reassess – how does this new Truth change what I thought I knew? What else do I think to be True that is similarly wrong? What I trusted as the Truth, after taking the Red Pill, I had to reassess and review my whole worldview through different eyes.

One of my first Red Pills was when I was a sophomore in college. I realized then that most people simply didn’t care about me, didn’t care if I succeeded or failed, and that the majority of my presence in the world was like that of a finger in a cup of water – pull the finger out, and two seconds later you’d never know a finger had ever been in the water. Unless I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom.

There are several things still functioning on the Titanic, for instance, the sinks still hold water.

And, it’s True. Most of the journey of most lives is shared with just a few very close people. I remember that one of my friends died not too long after high school – a car crash. I hadn’t seen him for four years afterwards, and was sad, but, you know, I shrugged and moved on.

That’s not the case for everyone – families are much tighter, obviously, but lots of marriages are transactional: it’s based not on a bond, but on a transaction, like nearly every Hollywood marriage.

But it comes down to friendships, too. I once had a close friend at work. I left the job, and boom, the friendship status was closed. Our relationship had been a transaction, and it occurred in an artificial setting. Didn’t mean I wasn’t irritated, but, hey, like Mark Twain said, Red Pill is gonna Red Pill.

She said, “Strip down, facing me.” It wasn’t until the McDonald’s® cashier screamed that I figured out she meant my credit card.

Searching for the Truth isn’t about avoiding ugliness, searching for the Truth is about being able to make actual choices, using free will free of illusions. It’s about making actual conscious moral decisions without pretending. This is better, even if the Truth is ugly.

Why? Decisions made with the Truth in mind work out better. If I tried to use reason and logic with a toddler, we’d both end up frustrated and I’d end up with a black eye and a fractured clavicle. Again.

That’s a key problem with making decisions or basing reality on anything other than the Truth: “solutions” won’t solve any problems if they’re not based on reality except by accident. Those “solutions” may even make things worse. For instance, if the problem is youth crime, and New York City decides that to stop youth crime, for any crime short of murder, they’re going to ignore it and put the criminal back on the streets immediately, what will happen?

For illegal aliens, if the policy to stop those illegals is to fund them to get to the border, bus them from the border to relocation centers, feed, clothe, fund, and then fly for free to yet more free stuff: housing and food. How many illegals will that policy stop?

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

The True solution to a problem often requires a True understanding of the problem. In the examples above, the True problem isn’t the illegals or the young criminals, the True problem is the GloboLeftElite who want the illegal aliens and the youthful criminals to be doing exactly what they’re doing.

Not using the Truth to make decisions when you have it is morally and ethically bankrupt, and the GloboLeftElite and their stooges have a lot to answer for.

The biggest ally I have in my search for the Truth is humility, which is probably one of the best inventions, ever. Although I’ve learned a lot, the best lesson I’ve ever learned is that I can be 100% dead wrong. Because of that history, I always, always try to ask myself, “what if I’m wrong?”

It’s a powerful question. If everybody is doing the same thing, and I do something different, what happens if I’m wrong? What’s the upside if I’m right? We live in a world of uncertainty, and finding Truth is not always clear. It’s True that the dollar will eventually go to zero, but it’s also True that I could go broke waiting for that to happen.

So, I try to seek whatever evidence I can to help me. I also like to use those close friends (and The Mrs.) as people to help point out when I’m delusional. They try, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes I’m right. By writing these points down in the posts I’ve put out, I’ve also made it so it’s harder to delude myself that I knew better than I really did.

Just kidding.

I’m really hoping this isn’t a spoiler for you Civil War buffs.

The reward, though, is to live a life where you’re guided not by delusion, but by Truth. It may not always be the happiest outcome, but it is the real outcome. Or if that’s too scary, I’ll just concentrate on whatever Taylor Swift is doing instead.

Stupid neutrinos.

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.

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 20^th 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?