TEOTWAWKI – Page 15 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All

“This man has the gift of death.” – Zardoz

Whoops, sorry! Just a regular old death cult after all.

This is the second post about Leftist self-hatred this week. This particular Leftist self-hatred is one that uniquely hurts the economy and even the prospects of the survival of humanity, so it’s par for the course for the most malignant philosophy ever to exist, outside of Taco Tuesday.

What spurred this was a note from a friend that suggested a post. I knew where I wanted to go with it, since I had seen a graphic (from Nature Communications® which is a part of Nature™ the magazine, LINK) that surprised me. I mean, knowing what I know about Leftists, it really shouldn’t have, but what got my attention is how starkly it shows the divide in the philosophies of Right and Left. It’s presented pretty weirdly, so I’ll help out a bit on the interpretation since I’m a trained professional.

The graph is shown as a bullseye. Why? I think the researchers might have been drunk and had a bullseye graph generator, so they decided between shots of tequila that they’d use the damn thing since the University had paid for it anyway. They then got the grad students to enter the data for free, and, boom, paper complete.

I remember watching a PBS® show on how fish swim. They shocked a fish by putting an electrode up its behind so they could photograph it. Who put the electrodes up the fish butts? Grad students.

The concentric circles in the graph are pretty simple, though, and the innermost are the things closest to an individual. The rings get rather more distant as they go outwards until they get rather silly:

All of your immediate family.
All of your extended family.
All of your closest friends.
All of your friends (including distant).
All of your acquaintances.
All people you have ever met.
All people in your country.
All people on your continent.
All people on all continents (apparently, screw those guys on islands, they suck anyway).
All mammals (finally got the people on the islands and astronauts covered).
All amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds.
All animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae.
All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.
All things in existence.

So, that’s the scale – what things are the most important to you? For me, this is an easy answer. I like the things that closer to me better, and I could see my feelings about this covered very well under the title listed for “Conservatives”.

Is it just me, or does this graph look very, umm, happy?

In general, I like the people that are close to me more. Yes, I care about Americans more than I care about people in Tannu Tuva, or people in Tanganyika, or even those pitiful island people. I generally care more about my kids than yours, and I generally like all people better than rocks, though there are some exceptions that I make for ex-spouses and members of Antifa®. Heck the entire meme below is encapsulated in the graph above:

Now if that isn’t what’s on his headstone, it sure should be.

Okay, that explains the Right, and how we generally feel according to statistics. What about the Left?

Why did they pick 45°?

Whoa, that’s amazingly different! Lefties are really focused over to the end, with only a minor preference for humans and a lesser preference for people closer to them. The perception of the granola-eating surrender chimp as the model for Leftism is once again validated. They like these things best:

All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.

Rocks are more important to them than their parents. And if their parents are as disappointed in them as I’m guessing they are, I can see why. They hate themselves, so they hate the things that are closest to them. You can see it when they throw themselves in front of cars when they protest, they have never won anything in life, so the only way they can win, they feel, is to have transferred virtue from their death. “See, I told you I was a good person, but you never believed me!” Thus, the victim Olympics where they compete based on victim status. “Well, Bob, he stuck the victim status, but he wobbled on the virtue signal, and the blind gay judge with AIDs from Ethiopia gave him a 7.3.”

I wonder how many upvotes they got on Reddit®?

To be clear, I’m not sure I would like alien lifeforms at all unless they grilled well, and I think I would be just fine if an entire planet of intelligent, bloodthirsty cannibal lizard-people was wiped out, even in a slow and agonizing way, just to make sure that my family had slightly more comfortable air conditioning. But enough about the people who are related to George Soros.

I’m not kidding. I can come up with entire species that I’d love to see wiped from existence, and I’d start with mosquitos, gnats, wasps, and vegans. Vegans especially, because they eat what my food eats, and that’s just selfish.

To be clear, I love the environment. I love hiking, I love nature, I love hunting, I love trees. The reason I love them is simple: they exist to by enjoyed by Man. If Man doesn’t exist? None of these mean anything to me. There are millions of cows alive on Earth right now. Because we want to make cows happy? No, because cows make us happy, especially when done medium rare with a nice crust. To be clear, I think “nature” has no intrinsic value outside of what it can provide to Man. But I love nature, because it’s awesome to man.

The Moon? Just rock without people. And Soviet Russian ships that landed. A crash is a landing, right?

Oddly, because of these heat maps, people on the Right go out to work to care for the people they know and their country. Why was the Right the primary source of military recruits? Because we like our nation more than we like other nations, and since we are focused on those around us, we’re fiercely individualistic, and focused on family and friends. Why? We like our families and friends, and if they’re loyal to us, we’re more than loyal to them.

When the chips were down and you needed help, would you rather have a friend on the Right, or one on the Left?

Thought so.

People on the Left, though, end up in the traditional Leftist positions, in academia, or, in government. I’ll perhaps discuss in some future post a bit more on Leftism and academia if there’s interest. For today, let’s focus on government.

The idea of government, at least as outlined in the Constitution, is simple, “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. Note, even in the Constitution it talks about “ourselves and our posterity” and doesn’t mention the slave-pirate amoebas from the planet Melkor-7 or trees.

Wait, tell me about the slave girls again?

The people who gravitated to government over time, however, like control. And that control includes enforcing their morals (which rate rocks above people). And in 2023, those are the folks in charge of policy. They like people who live elsewhere more than they like citizens of their own country, and the like clinging vines more than they like their second cousin. Depending on the second cousin, I might agree, but the point remains: they hate humanity.

Rather than environmental policy being about how to best work and preserve the environment for people, environmental policy is now viewed as either one of state control, or the idea that we’ll preserve a beetle that isn’t that much different than millions of other beetles rather than try to provide a future habitat for our grandchildren, or Keith Richards, whichever lives longer. None of these policies have humans in mind.

Right now, I drive a huge pickup truck. I might have bought a smaller pickup, but they can’t be sold because of fuel-efficiency standards – only my massive, hulking pickup with an interior bigger than my first apartment can be sold legally because huge pickups don’t have to meet car standards, but little ones do. That’s also why sedans and station wagons disappeared and massive “sport utility vehicles” replaced them – a consequence of bad environmental policy. I like using less gasoline, but .gov says I have to use more.

Hmmm.

Mussolini was lucky. On his last day he got to hang out with his friends.

Other examples of this are things like nuclear power. The Left has always hated nuclear power because it was something only First World societies could afford, and the thing the Left hates more than themselves is a winner. How can we drag them back down? Oh, yeah, we can make power so expensive and unreliable that no one can afford it.

The biggest question facing humanity in 2023 is energy. Is an energy crisis coming? It certainly is. Will the regulations that the Leftists who like rocks better than their parents put into place make sense for people? Unlikely, since the civilization of humans isn’t on their radar.

To be fair, since we’ve already demonstrated the self-hatred of humanity, it’s pretty simple to note that these consequences that put all of humanity at risk, might not be unintentional at all.

Is Leftism a death cult?

Not if you’re a rock. Otherwise, yeah.

Global Warming Is For Losers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are illegals in Sweden known as “artificial Swedeners”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never let a cat run your nuclear power plant.

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

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

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

Leftists oppose it:

“Environmentalists” don’t understand it:

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

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

The Great Rollover

“Like I told my last wife, I says, “Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I tried to buy a hamburger with cheese, but they wanted cash instead.

Yellow Freight® shut down. They had been around for 99 years, starting business way back in time when Bernie Sanders was trying to ruin Austro-Hungarian Empire or Bulgaria or wherever he came from.

Yellow Freight© was an old company and 30,000 people lost their jobs. What went on? Well, Yellow© borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars emergency ‘rona bucks. When they went bankrupt, they had an outstanding loan balance (backstopped by you and I) of $729.2 million. During the two and a half years that they’d had the loan, they’d paid down $54.8 million in interest. They’d also paid down $230 in principle.

Not $230 million. Not $230 thousand. $230, so I’m guessing their strategy was to pay it off at $10 a month, which would ensure that they’d pay off the loan in roughly the year 6,079,523.

Oddly, no one would take a risk on refinancing a company that had such powerhouse earnings, and so all of the people who used to have pensions with Yellow™ found out that their pension value would be paid out at the same rate as the loan was being paid out, and it’s pretty hard to split $10 among 30,000 people each month.

I hate to point fingers, but whatever executive thought orange was yellow just might be at fault.

Most of the 30,000 folks from Yellow Freight© will find another job – truckers are still in demand, and other companies have picked up the slack so far.

This isn’t the first. Just like the banks who had money in Treasury paper took a hit (Silicon Valley Bank®, I’d be looking at you if you were still here) because the “super-safe” bonds making 1% were worth a lot less when interest rates went up to 4%. The FDIC™ requires the banks that they insure to report data. It’s kinda scary when the FDIC© uses the X® (the social media company formerly known as Prince) to notify banks (and the American public) that banks might be in trouble again.

I guess no one is making them account for their problems?

The same thing is, perhaps, happening to the dollar itself – today lost its AAA bond rating from Fitch™ and is now producing AA bonds. Still a good rating, but it’s a big hit from “nearly perfect plus has nuclear missiles” and the first step to becoming a “drunk wine aunt country that can’t afford to take vacations”, like Uzbekistan.

As I’ve written before, it’s awesome to have “the reserve currency”, since that means you can print all the cash you want and spend it on things like iPods™ from China, Hello Kitty™ slippers from Bangladesh, and tequila from Mexico (what’s known as a “Hunter Biden Saturday Morning Special”). Losing it means a loss of that ability, and all of a sudden you have to work for all of that stuff rather than just printing cash.

Hunter Biden’s credit card company called him about suspicious activity. Seems that someone made a payment.

That’s difficult, because there’s always competition in having the reserve currency. One competitor, of course, is precious metals. Another is land. My father-in-law liked to say, “if it blows up, at least you still have the hole.” After the debt ceiling deal (translation: spend as much as you want until after the general election), the debt shot up, climbing $1.8 trillion in just two months. I mean, that’s a crazy number, we don’t even give that much to Zelenskyy in a year!

I know mortgage payments are going up, but just try telling a homeless person how lucky they are.

Eventually that has an effect on all assets. Although Darth Powell doesn’t exactly have the understanding of how home prices work, it is closer to say that at the same payment at a 7% mortgage rate, you can afford a heck of a lot less home than you can afford at 2.7%. Unless wages go up or BlackRock© decides to buy houses because they ran out of illegal aliens to import this month.

Or, if the bankers get absolute control over who uses what cash and when. That’s the goal. Will that happen if things are going well, and we’re surrounded by prosperity?

Of course not. In order to get control, the idea is chaos, uncertainty, war, and mayhem. If you’re old enough, how do the 2020s compare to the 1980s? The 1990s? The 2000s? In nearly every way that doesn’t involve ludicrously cheap televisions, each of those decades was objectively better. I’ve noted before that Peak USA probably hit somewhere before I was born to when I was a little kid.

Why do central bankers never travel together? They’re a bunch of loan wolves.

I’m normally a fan of the idea of ineptitude being responsible for at least being some contributing factor to the problems that we have, but when I look at the gross mismanagement of the economy for decades it almost seems like it’s planned.

But I’m sure I’ll hear Bernie lecturing us all that socialism and more government is the way out from the balcony of one of his three houses soon enough. After all, it’s worked out pretty well for him, what with him never having had an actual job and all.

You know, this costs money, but I’m just thinking of the joy of all of those people in India when they get unexpected packages.

Making Leftists Radical: Compassion, Internet Cats, and Feminists With No Sense of Humor

“It’s mercy, compassion, and forgiveness I lack. Not rationality.” – Kill Bill, Volume 1

That’s awake, not “woke.”

Repost from 2019 . . .

Here’s a fable:

There was a little girl going to school in Japan. Near her place in the classroom there was a cocoon that the teacher had brought in to illustrate the life cycle of the butterfly, and it was hanging right next to her every day. For a whole week, nothing had happened, but then she noticed the cocoon shaking. She could see that the caterpillar had completed its transformation.

What bothered the girl so very much was that the butterfly was struggling to get out of the cocoon. Finally, exhausting all of the patience that a seven year old has, she helped the butterfly by ever so gently tearing open the cocoon so it could get free.

To her surprise, rather than flying, the butterfly fell out of the cocoon and onto the floor of the school room. She gasped.

The teacher walked over and looked at the butterfly helplessly writhing on the floor. It was clear the butterfly would never be able to fly.

“Did you help the butterfly out of the cocoon?”

The little girl, through eyes that were filling with tears, nodded.

The teacher explained, “It is only through struggling to get out of the cocoon that the butterfly gets enough strength to fly.”

This is one of my favorite stories. I can’t recall where I originally heard or read it.

I’d often tell that story to people that reported to me when they were facing a particularly difficult time at work. I’m sure it just made some of them mad – they wanted me to solve their problems. I refused, perhaps giving them hints on places they should look to find the answer.

One of my goals was to get the work done for the company, sure. But I also wanted to take the time to get the person developed – for me that was a moral imperative. My biggest goal was that everyone who reported to me became a more capable person – and I knew that didn’t happen without the struggle. Oh sure, I could have told Ted where the fire extinguisher was, but that would have deprived him of the struggle to find it. And one of his eyebrows finally did grow back.

That’s how I mostly have used the story, to show the importance of struggle. But there’s another and perhaps more central moral to this story:

misplaced compassion kills.

The Mrs. recently found an article that really, for me, answered the question about why the Left is turning so radical, so quickly. The article is by Zach Goldberg, and you can find it here (LINK), although he takes the data in a different direction than I do for his article. Goldberg has an interesting Twitter® feed (LINK) as well. The graphs in this post are mostly from either the article or his Twitter© feed.

It’s always nice when ¡Science!® is able to provide an insight on the problems of the world. I started with the story about compassion. When psychologists do studies of Leftists, they find that Leftists score higher in compassion than the norm – a lot higher. Well, some Leftists.

Karl Marx had only a very short career as a clown at children’s parties. After he was fired, he insisted that true children’s parties had never been tried.

Does that mean that people on the Right don’t care? Not at all. The data shows that people on the Right give more to charity and also volunteer more hours, so it’s clear that people on the Right care. But they don’t get all mushy and aren’t dominated by their feelings.

It turns out there are differences as well among Leftists based on race. One major bias that almost all people from all time have had is in-group preference. You like your family more than your brother’s family. You like your cousin better than you like your neighbor. You like people in your town more than people who live in the next town over – that’s why Friday night high school football games are so big in small towns.

This makes sense at almost every point in history – it’s rare for you to be living in France and think “Wow, that German flag flying the Eiffel Tower is such a neat thing to see.” In-group bias is normal. It’s why Americans rooted for team U.S.A. in the Women’s World Cup® even though soccer is a vastly inferior game to tic-tac-toe.

Thankfully I’ve reached the “Dad’s asleep in the recliner” stage when the Monopoly® board comes out.

White leftists, however, have somehow become biased against . . . white people. It’s like being born a guy and not liking that you were born a guy . . . oh. Nevermind.

As you can see, there is exactly one group that detests itself and prefers other groups.

But this isn’t the norm. And this isn’t how the Left has been for years. Data shows quite nicely that they didn’t used to be this way – as late as 2010, 20% of white Leftists thought that increasing border security was a good idea. 2018? Less than 5%.

It’s clear the Left has become more radical and the Right has (more or less) remained the same.

Republicans have stayed pretty steady on the border. Not so with white liberals.

What happened in 2010?

Twitter® and Facebook©.

Who would have thought that Leftist extremism starts with Grandma posting cat memes on Facebook®?

The user bases of these social networks took off in 2010. There is one thing that social networks want – your attention. They best way to get that attention? Show you content that creates an emotional response. Cats and babies are great – they make people laugh and go “aww.” But to a Leftist, to keep their attention – show them things that create outrage by violating their sense of compassion.

I hear her next initiative will be to forgive all the Electoral College student loan debt.

The Twitter®, Facebook©, and YouTube™ video suggestion algorithms have become the Democrat® brand. Social media is a particularly useful programming device. These algorithms are used every day to pull the Left farther Left. Why does this impact white Leftists in particular? They spend more time on social media than the rest of the Left. But they’re enough – white leftists are about 25% of the electorate. And they do have money. And they hate the Right.

Through this lens, the reasons for the bans become clear – even though the algorithm mutes voices on the Right, the most effective voices must be silenced. Arguments counter to the narrative have to be stopped. As has recently become quite clear – the Left owns social media and will clear out clear, articulate voices on the Right given any excuse. The chance is too great that these voices will interfere with the programming. An example:

Portlandia is funny, and there are more bookstore clips that are even funnier – this was just the most “safe for work” one I could find.

Portlandia was a series on IFC® for 8 seasons. It mocked (fairly gently) the Leftist culture of Portland. It’s certain that the stars and most of the writers of the show are of the Left. But the things that the show made fun of can no longer be made fun of. Feminism was often the butt of good-natured jokes, but the feminist bookstore that several skits were shot in broke ties with the show after they decided they didn’t want to be made fun of – at all. What had been funny even to the Left in 2010 was by 2016 unacceptable. Feminism could no longer be a laughing matter, nor could any other Leftist narrative.

In 2019, Portland has lost its sense of humor and replaced it with outrage. Antifa regularly assembles a mob of hundreds to shut down any speech it disagrees with through violence. Their compassion drives them to shed blood, but it doesn’t stop there. This same compassion compels the Left to want to give every illegal alien free health care, and a quick pathway to citizenship. In turn, that drives the 144,000 illegals to want to come here – and that was just in June of 2019. That’s a 10,000 person Caravan every other day.

All of this is caused by misplaced compassion, programmed by social media via algorithms. Certainly it’s all a coincidence, right? It’s not like large corporations owned and run by Leftists would have a political motive, right?

Aliens: The Fakest Thing Ever?

“Crazy people can be very persuasive.” – The X-Files

Do werewolves live in warehouses?

I’ve enjoyed Scott Adams for years – the first time I saw his strips were on office photocopypasta in the 1990s where his brand of humor really hit home with folks at the place I was working. So, he’s an awesome cartoonist, and very funny. We’d say things like, “Dilbert’s just like me!” but then realize that we were in color and three dimensional.

Adams also picked Trump as a walk-in winner in 2016 way ahead of the crowd, but was dead wrong on the ‘Rona and the Vaxx®, so he’s not an oracle or a cult leader. But he does have interesting thoughts and I like reading him, and his podcast, while not good as mine, seems to have attracted a slightly larger audience.

So, when he tossed these Tweets® (or are they Xeets™ now??) up I thought I’d share them. Here are the rest:

I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by UFOs (the old name before they got fancy and started calling them UAPs) since I was a kid. I’ve been following the unfolding story since the “Tic-Tac®” videos came out in 2017 because any version of an answer for what was observed was interesting. Either the United States had amazing tech beyond anything, .gov is faking it, or it was something that fell into that big bucket of “aliens and demons and interdimensional beings – oh, my!”

Scott presents the idea that this subject is being brought up at the very moment that lots (and I mean a record number) of other things are brewing in the news:

We live in a nation at the brink of civil conflict,
White House Resident Joe Biden is facing a presidential scandal, with amazing evidence, that is the biggest since Watergate,
We might be seeing a soft coup against Biden right now as the Left wants to jettison him for someone else,
(Not anyone else, since no one wants Kamala),
Adding a janitor at Mar-A-Largo© to the list of people who are indicted along with Trump because he helped move boxes (really),
Hunter seems to have lost more cocaine,
Prices for luxuries like food have jumped, and are set to jump again as the Ukraine Conflict enters day 5,000, and
Payments for interest on the national debt are starting to be higher than Johnny Depp.

What’s the difference between Hunter Biden and his prostitutes? His prostitutes probably pay at least some taxes.

Is there something to distract us from? Yup.

Everything.

Why? Because that list above isn’t even close to being complete.

This is the danger. Scott describes it as a secret war, but I’m not sure that there are even two sides, since the FBI, CIA, and most other (but not all) organizations are tied back to supporting the Left.

I bought my ex a big diamond ring. She said, “Thanks, but we really need a new car.” Me: “But they don’t sell fake cars.”

So, is all this fake, the biggest and fakest thing ever?

I don’t know. It would make sense that it was. The Soviets Russians seem to have their “it’s all a lie” face on and China’s doing, well, whatever it is that China does when no one’s watching. Maybe hate-eating a box of Twinkies®?

And as we see all of the shiny, sparkly news going on, keep in mind the important things – your faith, your family, and your friends. There’s a lot of news that we get that we simply cannot do anything with, that for many of us is nothing more than a signal of what’s going on in the greater world.

We need to come together, find like-minded folks who share your values, and be ready for the changes that are coming in the world, because if they’re using aliens to distract us, well, they must be very scared indeed.

I’m glad that Hillary didn’t win, because then so many people would have moved to Benghazi, because at least there she’d leave them alone.

Don’t let it make you fret, and certainly don’t let it control your mood.

Because Scott is right from the standpoint that we have to keep living our lives, yet keep an eye out for the real story.

So enjoy that kitten while you can – they grow up so fast.

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

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

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

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

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

“What causes poverty?”

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

But why is that a stupid question?

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

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

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

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

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

The Wolf is always at the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if we change out our People?

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

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

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

Wonder if we’ll learn this time around?

FBI: Time To Break It Up And Put Them On Trial

“We’re gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess.” – Die Hard

The Mrs. is a lot like an FBI agent. She never asks a question she doesn’t already know the answer to.

When I was just a wee Wilder, I began to doubt the government.

I was fairly young when I heard about the secret files that J. Edgar kept on powerful people in order so that he could maintain his perch atop the FBI® that he had created. Hoover had spent decades developing not only a United States Police Force, but the aptly-named Hoover sucked up all the data on people that he could. Hoover likely gave favors to hundreds of people by not sharing their dirty secrets so that he could maintain his perch. It was so bad that I think Hoover even invented the Memory Foam® mattress so he could blackmail people.

Hoover also was a genius at self-promotion. He made the “G-Men” a meme in the 1930s, trying to set up a propaganda campaign to convince the American public that the FBI®, instead of being an unnecessary internal police and propaganda forum, was instead just like Superman™ – the paragon of truth, justice, and the American way®. Oddly, both of those ideas are fiction.

Superman® challenged Chuck Norris to a fight. Loser had to wear their underwear on the outside.

Instead, the agents have spent their time illegally wiretapping (over 7,000 times by 1985, who knows how many more now) American civilians. The FBI© was more than happy to also jump in and get involved in:

the ATF© created quagmire in Waco,
entrapment of the innocent Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge and the murder of several people in his family,
failure to investigate the massive Chinese investments in financing Bill Clinton in 1996 (ever wonder how they got all that access??),
having an agent (Robert Hanssen) who was utterly in the pocket of the Soviets and, later, Russia,
editing Wikipedia® to make the FBI™ look better,
covering-up the Hillary Clinton® e-mail scandal,
warrants to tap Trump’s campaign,
Andrew McCabe,
Pete Strzok, who never should have gotten a clearance based on the number of consecutive consonants in his last name without a vowel,
using personal data (DMV photos) for a vast database,
“losing” Hunter Biden’s laptop,
despite having certainty that the Hunter Biden laptop data was 100% real, contained evidence of multiple crimes, and misled and intentionally tried to suppress laptop information by lying that it was hacked, despite knowing that it wasn’t.

Everything in italics above is from the last 10 years. This is another reason not to trust Italians, I guess. But in the last decade it’s almost all extremely partisan in nature, showing that the FBI™ could probably just be renamed the Grand Enforcement, Support, Tyranny and Police Organization (GESTaPO) of the Democratic Party. As the Leftists keep whining, they want to safeguard “Our Democracy”. Sounds very good until you being to understand that “Our” doesn’t include you or me.

In a moment of clarity, the FBI decided to dedicate themselves to the mission of fighting crime. Just kidding.

I do know that FBI® has done some good things in the past, especially when it came to rooting out commies after World War II. Say what you want about Hoover, but he did hate commies. But as it stands here in 2023, the FBI© has become a liability for anyone who is actually interested in freedom.

The problem comes from breaking the Constitution. The idea of Federalism is that we don’t have parallel laws, we have a single set of laws. If the state regulates insurance or regulates mustache length, why should the Feds do it, too? Well, what about kidnapping? That’s one that can cross state lines, right?

The Lindbergh kidnapping case led to a law that let the FBI® look into kidnappings.

Did you know you can fit 34 bananas in a kangaroo pouch? Also? I have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

The big idea was to look at crimes and figure out how to get involved. It turns out, the Federal government which was intentionally small because the Founding Fathers mainly just wanted to be left alone to mostly do what they wanted, as long as it didn’t violate state, county or city law. Federal law? There were a few back in the day (see: Whiskey Rebellion) but most laws were local. Murder someone and have it be a Federal issue?

Not going to happen.

Well, back in 1787 it wasn’t going to happen. But after decades of creeping laws encouraged by propaganda, the FBI™ only strengthened with time. Like a camel with a nose under the tent, the FBI© now looks into (spins wheel) things they don’t like (not illegal things, mind you, just things the FBI© didn’t like) said on the Internet.

My puns aren’t listed as a war crime. Yet.

The last example is real – the FBI worked with social networks and Internet companies to stop the spread of information that would be damaging to the Democratic party.

The FBI® is now a fully partisan appendage of state power. It always existed to support itself, but now it explicitly exists to support parties and politicians instead of the American people.

The fact that this doesn’t surprise anyone is perhaps the most telling thing about where we are as a people. The FBI™ is shown to be institutionally corrupt at the highest and lowest levels and (probably) irretrievably partisan for the Left and . . . no one is surprised.

Hmm, wonder why I’m getting all these hits from Washington and Langley?

How Feminism Is Destroying The West, One Virgin At A Time

“Wait a minute. Connie Swail? Don’t you mean The Virgin Connie Swail?” – Dragnet (1987)

I slept with a rich girl who was a bit of a tramp once. Got lobsters.

I’ve had several posts about how sex and economics are intertwined more tightly than a bachelor weekend at Bill Clinton’s place. It is one of the more misunderstood parts of what is slowly destroying the family in the West. This, in turn, will gradually destroy the economics of the West. Without the culture of the West, the West effectively disappears.

This post will be pretty heavy on pictures and memes, almost all of which are as-found.

Let’s take a step back to 1776. I would love to do that in reality, and (in future posts) we’ll look to see how close we are to that. But back to the people that were there the first time. They were, mostly, pretty young. Sure, there were old dogs like Ben Franklin, but Jefferson was only 33. Madison, who would steer the Constitution to completion just over a decade later, was only 25.

Man, John Marshall must have had a hard 20 years on him.

Men were young (even though, yes, the paintings above weren’t done in 1776), yet doing amazing and important things. George Washington was 57 years old at his inauguration, which is astonishing since our likely presidential candidates in 2024 will be a combined 741 years old.

Back then, most men could find a woman and get married, sometimes once or twice (when wife 1.0 died in childbirth). This led to a certain stability, combined with the family economic structure. In this case, most families were Corporate Families – everybody worked, and everybody pitched in to keep things going. The reason that schools had spring breaks wasn’t to go to drink tequila in Cancun and go “woo” but to help plant. Summers were off to work the farm. And fall breaks were necessary for the harvest.

Kids were small farm implements, which is why families had lots of them. Divorces: uncommon. Religion: common.

Sadly, not a bikini graph.

In my lifetime, the Wilder Family has generally always existed in the tan area, including great-grandparents with a male breadwinner, though Great-grandpa and great-grandma McWilder ran an inn near a railroad where they only rarely killed and ate unsuspecting guests.

The golden age of the Male Breadwinner model was between 1900 and somewhere between 1960 and 1970. I’d note that around 1920 when women got the right to vote that the decline in Male Bread started, though it really began in earnest at the Great Depression.

At least Canada knows the score.

During World War II, there was a need for female labor as many men were given multi-year European and Pacific Island vacations. When the war was over, the decline continued at the same pace as the dual income model became the norm.

Until feminism and Leftism infected society at large leading to the steepest decline in stable family economic structures. This predated the economic decline of the United States, which I date to 1970-1973. Gee, I wonder if they could be related?

Now, Dual-Earner is the predominant economic model, with Female Breadwinner starting to make itself known.

New York Times Headline, 2025: Fathers’ Day: Women and Minorities Most Impacted.

Are there any economic or societal consequences to this change in the economic composition of the family? Why, yes. It’s killing society. It’s killing the kids.

The kids even have a name for it: No Girlfriend, No Work. There are other names, such as No Heir, No Work. It seems that young men have become utterly uninvested in society because they don’t have a girlfriend, nor the prospects of one. Things like Tinder® haven’t helped. As noted below, one young man was on Tinder® 3 and a half years. Nearly 40,000 swipes. 2 matches. Zero dates.

What? What’s going on?

In their youth, women are all fighting over the smallest number of men, the 9’s and 10’s. Since on a slow night, a 9 man will hook up with a 5, the 5 now thinks she’s worthy of at least a 9. Consider a 5 man?

No way.

This is not unique. This is not cultural. This is built into the innate preference of women to date up for offspring, and men to create as many offspring as they can. Here’s an example out of China (LINK) where an (American) teacher gave varying treats to a mixed class of boys and girls. On the first day, the girls got to pick first, and picked the best treats. The girls shared only with the two most popular boys, ignoring all of the rest. On the second day, the boys got to pick first, randomly. The treats were randomly distributed among the boys, so the girls interacted with all of the boys and everyone was happier.

When women pick, the distribution is (at least) skewed like the graph below, if not more skewed.

Most 22-year-old girls can have an 8+, if it’s 2am and the 8+ is drunk enough.

What are the results? Virginity in boys (not girls) is rising. Dating is going down among people who should definitely be dating.

As difficult as that is for guys, women use it as a golden ticket (again, in their early 20s) for fun and prizes:

But when these same women hit their thirties, the game is over. The 9s and 10s are either married to 9s and 10s, or they’re dating 22-year-olds. Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leo’s max age for dating is 25. And he’ll get 25-year-old 9s and 10s until he’s 75. Look at Al Pacino, who can barely walk:

I’m sure they’re super compatible, since she was born when he was only 53.

The woman who was in dozens if not hundreds of relationships in her 20s with the hottest of men will only settle in her mid to late thirties with a man who meets her qualifications. Those men who would have met those qualifications, being fit, making great money?

They’re married. They have kids, and that 5 (or less than 5) would rather be a drunken wine aunt then settle. Women use youth, beauty, and relative chastity to capture worthy men. If those are wasted on huge numbers of Chads? Off to the wine and cat farm with an empty womb. And the military will fight for that “right”, too.

I’m old enough to remember when the military was supposed to kill foreign enemies, not American babies.

Just like most things, this has a very, very simple solution. To be clear, the solution will be implemented when the circumstances require it. Oddly, the women will be happier, too. And we can finally stop listening to women complain about body shaming.

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families. I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then. Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it. The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings. They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner. The big difference was in flexibility. If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is. The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income. That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency. The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes. To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value. So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down. I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live. Ouch. One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason. I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad. This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction? Yeah. But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge.

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments. Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still. But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency. This is another one. It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades. There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith. Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot. In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income. But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence. This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control. When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent. This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one. I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades. It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man. The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution? Resilience.

Dispatches From The Culture War

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the smartest nun called Nun the Wiser?

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

Remember when Russia wanted to join NATO? Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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