Let’s Lay Siege To The Gods, Wilder Style

“We really shook the pillars of Heaven, didn’t we, Wang?” – Big Trouble in Little China

I guess Kurt and Flint, Michigan both ended up with a lead problem.

My high school freshman science teacher would, like many teachers, wander from the topic at hand.  There was some political situation or another going on.  Honestly, I don’t remember what it was, but the news was all atwitter:  “It’s a crisis!”

Yeah, we’ve seen that before.  It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a good way to bring in viewers.  So, my teacher made the comment:  “A crisis isn’t an ongoing situation.  A crisis is a moment in time when it all falls apart.  It’s an instant, not a month-long process.”

He is correct – that’s the historical meaning.  It was the turning point, not the turning week.  Now the most commonly used meaning is “a tough, lingering, situation”, which was what he was railing against.  If everything is a crisis, nothing is.

History tells us there are two things Gandhi never had for dinner:  breakfast and lunch.

I guess he had a point.  But, words really do change meanings over time.  “Awesome” used to describe the wrath of God.  Now?  It’s a teenage girl describing a photo filter on InstaTHOT®.

Marcus Aurelius, who is still dead, wrote the following:  “You get what you deserve.  Instead of being a good man today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.”

Hint:  rinse and repeat that a few times, and we all find out that tomorrow is a graveyard.

Tomorrow, really, is the enemy.  It takes that crisis as a point in time, and moves it to a tough situation.

The difference is big.  A tough situation is something you don’t like, but have to live with, like a hangover or being Kamala Harris’ husband.  A crisis is a here and now moment, where I’m staring myself in the mirror, and saying, “This has to change.  Not next week.  Not tomorrow.  Now.”

Every single change I was going to do “tomorrow” died on the vine.  They were failures.

The reason is that I wasn’t ready to change.

Ahh, that Teutonic humor always gets me!

What separates anyone from being a world class, well, anything?

The first is talent.  To be world class, you have to have talent.  So, if we’re talking about me being a world-class high jumper, well, I’m probably not going to do that because I can’t control gravity, at least as far as you know.  But if I do have the talent?

The next thing I need is dedication.  I need to work at it.  I need to push myself again and again.  I need to learn the 20% that gives me 80% competence, and then push to give the other 80% of the effort that makes me better.  A study done on world-class musicians, for instance, showed that they didn’t practice less than their less able counterparts because of their talent.

Nope, they consistently practiced more the better they were.

That dedication, though, starts with a moment in time, a decision.  A crisis, if you will.

What do you get when you cross a cow with a trout?  A suspension and an ethics investigation.

The decision to be world-class starts well before one gets to be world class.  It starts with the single-minded focus and dedication of a fanatical beginner, like a four-year-old who just found a bag of chocolate chips in the pantry.

And the beginner doesn’t wait to start tomorrow.

The beginner starts at the moment in time they decide that they’re going to devote themselves to becoming the best that they can be.  Then comes the hard work.  The sore muscles.  The aching brain.  The long plateau where even though there’s a lot of effort going on, there just doesn’t seem to be measurable progress.

But one foot still goes out in front of the other.  The long walk continues.

If Waldo® tries to bench press, will anyone spot him?

Eventually, those who follow this path fall into two camps.  The first are those who look to a moment in time.  Winning gold at the Olympics®.  Winning the Super Bowl©.  Achieving that goal.

Those people often fall apart.  They worked towards a goal.  And then made the goal.

And then what?

That’s the tough question.  Often, those people end up with a single question in their minds:  “Is that all there is?”

For those people, those focused on the goal, the answer is, “Yes, that’s all there is.  You can be forever known as the guy who scored four touchdowns for Polk High in the 1966 city championship game against Andrew Johnson High School.”  And then you can get married to Peg and sell shoes.

Sigmund Freud and Bill Cosby had one thing in common:  they both explored the unconscious.

The other choice, however, is to realize that the goal isn’t the goal.  The goal is the struggle.  The real payoff is the process of remaking yourself into something new and better.  The goal is to recreate yourself continually.  Chase the grind.

Another dead Roman, this time Seneca, wrote:  “I don’t complain about the lack of time.  What little I have will go far enough.  Today, this day, I will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about.  I will lay siege to the gods, and shake up the world.”

Huh.  Didn’t know that Seneca needed a co-writing credit on Big Trouble in Little China.

None of this, though starts tomorrow.  It starts now.  I can give the effort of someone who is world class right now, even though my performance isn’t yet world class.

We are either remaking ourselves better than we were, or we are dying.

Your choice.

But it won’t wait until tomorrow.

Stoics, A Bikini, Families, And The Truth

“First principles, Clarice, simplicity.  Read Marcus Aurelius.  Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself?  What is its nature?  What does he do, this man you seek?” – The Silence of the Lamb

Hey, where are your eyes going?  My philosophy is down below, buddy.

Marcus Aurelius, who is dead, wrote:  “Those obsessed with glory attach their well-being to the regard of others, those who love pleasure tie it to feelings, but the one with true understanding seeks it only in their own actions . . . “

Marcus wrote that in his book, Meditations, though I doubt that he referred to the book by that name.  More likely, he referred to it as “where the hell did I put my notebook?” when he talked about it at all.  Heck, since he was Caesar, Marcus probably had a guy whose only job was to schlep the book around while Marcus moved from place to place.  Probably his name was Antonius Carriumbookus, or something like that.

I quit my origami hobby last year.  Too much paperwork.

The quote from Marcus that I started this post begs some questions:  Why do we do the things we do?  What are our underlying motivations?

For me, I write these never-ending series of blog posts because I’m trying to think and learn, to uncover what’s really True.  Why?

So that I can share it, because knowledge exists to be shared.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are plenty of times I’ve started writing a post and found after research that my underlying premise was wrong.  Those are great days, because when I found out that I was wrong then, it helps me from not being wrong now.

This has led to changes in my thoughts as I chip away at the Truth.

One example is that I used to think that the atom of society was the individual, and that individual freedom was an unmitigated good.  I believe now that I was utterly incorrect.  Instead, I now believe that the atom of society is the family.

Why?  Because having humanity exist is a good thing.  Since people have stopped dividing like amoeba or engaging in the suspect practice of parthenogenesis after the Council of Trent in 1563, we’re stuck with the fact that only families can reproduce.  That, for those keeping score, requires a biological man and a biological woman.

My son got into Harvard™.  He said it was easy – they don’t lock the doors or anything.

Is the nuclear family of one man and one woman the only way?  What about harems, or societies where people exist in a constant smuck-fest with no fixed relationships?  Those generate children, after all.  A stable nuclear family, however, is superior because thousands of years of human practice shows that it clearly is the best way to create a stable, functioning society.

The implications of this are fairly big:  just as individuals give up freedoms to live in a society (i.e., you can’t just steal your neighbor’s PEZ™ for no reason unless you’re the government), individuals should also give up rights to support those stable nuclear families.

Whenever we’ve acted against that idea, society gets worse and laws restricting individual behavior are the direct consequence.  It’s an odd paradox:  giving up some individual freedoms (no-fault divorce, adultery without consequence) actually leads to a stronger and freer society with greater respect for things like property rights.

I’m not quite halfway through a book on Zeno’s Paradox.

I didn’t believe that consciously when I was in my twenties, but now I see it fairly clearly, and all the research and writing I’ve done has helped lead to that conclusion.

To be clear, it’s not what’s True, Beautiful, or Good that has changed, it’s merely that I get closer to understanding what’s True, Beautiful, and Good.  I’m the one that has to catch up.

So, that’s part of why I write.  Now why I publish?

That’s because people in the commentariat are far from shrinking violets, and will call me out if they think I’m wrong.  Rarely does anyone attack me personally, rather, it’s the idea that I’m presenting that gets engaged.  That’s invaluable, because it keeps me on my toes – I can’t tell you how often I put one wrong fact in the post, decide, “Meh, it’s 11:30PM, I’m pretty sure that’s right”, and then, boom, the first comment points out my error.

I love that.

I mean, I hate being wrong.  Everyone does.  But I love the chance to be right in the future.

The hard drive can’t be read, the screen is blue, I think I just deleted system32.

The other reason I publish this is to hold myself accountable by making a commitment.  Self-discipline is great and all, but I assure you I wouldn’t put the effort into writing all this just for it to sit on a hard drive somewhere.

I mean, why would I do that?

But since I see that some people come by and check it out, well, I don’t want to disappoint them.  Is that external?  Yeah, a little.

Next, there is also the fact that I like telling jokes.  I love it.  But I really don’t tell them for you, I tell them for me.  Scott Adams said something like:  “Tell six jokes.  If reader gets two, they’ll think you’re a genius.”  Since I like telling jokes, well, that’s why I do that.

OSHA made an OnlyFans™ account, because OSHA specializes in content that’s not safe for work.

Finally, I’m sure that blogging is cheaper than therapy.  I’m betting that’s why Marcus did it in the first place.  Here he was, the undisputed most powerful man on the planet, with the ability to crush entire nations at a whim, and yet he spent time writing in his book about what he thought the True, the Beautiful, and the Good were.

But, given all of the power Marcus had, I’d rather be John Wilder than Marcus Aurelius.

I mean, he’s dead.

What Does Winning Look Like?

“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk

If I use deodorant instead of mouthwash, when I talk will I have a weird Axe® scent?

I once had a boss that said to me, “John, what gets measured, gets managed.”  His point was that if we have details on what’s going on, that drives attention.  His corollary was, “So, be careful what you measure.”  The idea behind that was that if you spent your time focusing on the wrong things, you’d never achieve what you were really trying to do, sort of like an airline company hiring pilots based on diversity rather than on, well how good of a pilot they are.

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

Anyway, if you read the news, the main things that we measure are economic:

  • GDP Growth
  • Price of Eggs
  • Stock Market Level

These are mainly material things.  The nice thing about them is that they are very easy to measure.

Fun fact:  if you take the population of North Korea and cut them in half, they’ll die.

Does that mean that growth in GDP means we’re winning?

I’ll answer that question with another question:  Were people in the United States happier when our GDP was half, in real terms, what it is today?

I think that question is easy to answer:  we were happier then.

Let’s look at what constituted a normal life back then.  Did we have a society based on greater trust?  Yes, yes we did.  Kids were free-range, and long summer afternoons blurred into nighttime without ever stepping inside the house until Mom yelled “dinnertime” or when the porch light came on (that was my signal).

Doors were unlocked.  Cars were unlocked.  The words “porch” and “pirate” had never yet been combined.

There was also a greater presence.  People were where they were, mostly.  Sure, I’d be reading The Return of the King on the school bus as it winded down Wilder Mountain, but when I was doing something, I was doing it, not marking time until I checked my Snapchat™ feed.  People at dinner talked to each other, or if they weren’t talking to each other, there was a reason, not merely that they were distracted.

If I have a birthday party I’m going to have the Beacons of Gondor as a theme.  It’ll be lit.

And, yeah, there was a greater depth and complexity of thought that was driven by the input.  A book takes patience, it takes time, and it takes investment.  A Xeet™?  It takes 20 seconds, and that includes thinking about it.

We also thought differently.  When I have a problem now where I’m missing information, almost always the answer is just a few clicks away.  Back then, we really had to spend time trying to figure things out, and that created a greater depth of understanding about the problem.  It was also frustrating and took a lot of time, but it trained me on how to think through to find a solution.

There’s a tip you won’t find on YouTube™.

There was also a greater patience.  The first album I ever ordered was promised to arrive in . . . “4 to 6 weeks”.  Yes.  That’s right.  A month and a half.  There was no next-day Prime™ delivery.  I’d listen to Super Hits by Ronco™ when it showed up, and not a minute sooner.  The crush of the immediate didn’t exist, and gratification cycles were likewise adjusted.

Oh, sure, there were negatives, too.  I think that medicine is probably a bit better, especially if you base it on cost alone.  I’m pretty sure that polio sucked.  Lifespan is longer today (though I bet that’s 90% coming from kicking cigarettes).  And, with only the mainstream media, there was certainly a lot of Truth that could be hidden.  MKUltra, anyone?

And air conditioning.  I really like that.

But, outside of air conditioning, I don’t think being wealthier has made us even a little bit happier.

Pavlov rang a bell every time a he felt a breeze.  He called it air conditioning.

It hasn’t brought us together.  Although we’ve always had that, it wasn’t so visible because most people in Atlanta didn’t care what went on in the Puget Sound, and vice versa.  The shrinking of our horizons has magnified the visibility of our divide.

It hasn’t made us stronger.  As a whole, I think we are nationally as emotionally weak as we ever have been.  Part of that is the wealth.  If a person has lived their entire life in a mansion, any step down a cracked iPhone™ screen is a tragedy.  A person who lives in a box?  They shrug at a thunderstorm.

Is a flock of sheep falling downhill at lambslide?

Adversity breeds strength, and, collectively, the nation has been pampered to the point that they are brittle.  I think that is not true of my readers, because I’m guessing everyone here has seen some stuff.  I sense the character that adversity reveals in the replies.

So, if all I focus on is the GDP and growth and the price of eggs, then my life will be hollow and filled with an unquenchable thirst, because when it comes to money, there is never enough.

My advice?  Be careful what measures you value, because that’s what you’ll become.  You might even find that you’ve gained the whole world, yet lost yourself.

Is The Bottom 20% Killing America?

“Attention students, m’kay.  There will be a presentation by the special education department in the gymnasium Friday during lunch and recess, m’kay.” – South Park

If they make a show about the Biden Administration, will it be titled “House of Tards”?

In what will probably be one of the more controversial posts I put up, I figured it’s time to discuss the boat anchor on Western Civilization:  the bottom 20%.  It’s in response to seeing the X® up above, because it got me thinking of just how right the author is.

Let’s look at high schools, for instance.  When I was in high school, there was a room for the special ed kids (we called them speds) so impacted by genetic or environmental trauma that they were effectively never going to do much in society.  Think Down’s syndrome.  We didn’t have a lot of interaction with those kids, because they were so far down the rabbit hole of human cognition that they were operating, on their best day, at the level of a four- to eight-year-old.

The second set of low achievers were tossed into the school’s “alternative” program.  This, as far as I could see, consisted of coming to school and smoking cigarettes outside the alternative building.  I recall my AP Chemistry teacher glancing out the window and remarking to the eight students in class, “Oh, look, the alternative kids are out playing advanced volleyball.”

I recall this really cracking me up.

How does the Spanish Dr. Who greet people?  Buenos TARDIS.

When I was in high school, this wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is today.  To be a sped was a social stigma.  Not that we treated them poorly – far from it.  But the cheerleaders weren’t going to date the dude who was 4’2” and communicated in a series of grunts and hoots.

Today, there are roughly 7.5 million kids with learning disabilities so profound that they are required by federal law to have an Individual Education Plan, so, per one article that’s 15% of kids in schools (school being between the ages of 5 and 18 for most kids).  Most of these IEPs are not for gifted kids, rather they’re for people who can demonstrate disabilities.

I hear Michael J. Fox and his kids set up a parking lot just for disabled people.  Park n’ Sons.

Parents, especially low-income urban parents, love having their children on IEPs.  Why?  Having an IEP does quite a few things:

  • Bulletproofs the child from being flunked. It can be done, but it requires more paperwork than would be required to launch the Boeing® Starliner™ again.
  • Bulletproofs the child (mostly) from being suspended for behavior. Until they curb-stomp a teacher for taking away their Nintendo Switch® and are charged with a felony.  But, hey, the parents say, “He’s a good boy, he was on an IEP.”
  • Depending on the IEP, the current trend is to require that they be placed in classrooms with “normal” children, becoming a boat anchor on the rest of the class, dragging down progress. Think about having a class with Whoopi Goldberg in it.  But she’s violent.  It would be like that.
  • Depending on income, an IEP may make the family eligible for up to an extra $943 a month – tax free.   We give parents incentives to have children that have the impulse control of Diddy at an Epstein party.
  • Depending on the IEP, the school district may need to provide what counts as essentially free day care until the age of 22, thus providing an environment where free-range 22-year-olds can stalk kids as young as 13. Thankfully, I think most of the 22-year-olds are out killing people rather than stalking 13-year-olds.
  • Using Pennsylvania as a guide, having a student with an IEP costs between $5,000 and $77,000 more per year than having a “normal” kid.
  • Children with IEPs are often given more time for things like tests, and are excused from things like deadlines. This one ropes in the parents of low-performing children of GloboLeftist parents who want Rachel to get into Harvard®.

Yeah, you can see just this one program from just one federal law (the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, with the horrible acronym IDEA) has spawned trillions of dollars in direct spending, but has also destroyed the educational experiences for those left in the normie-tier classrooms.

If you win a pumpkin carving contest, is it a hollow victory?

In my experience, after I was out of the general education part of high school (think P.E. and Earth Science) I was in very few classes with any Special Ed kids – it’s not like they were going to sign up for Physics or Advanced Algebra.  I guess in 2024, Rachel might try to do that and her parents would berate the teacher with all of Rachel’s special needs, “Oh, did she not get a Hostess® Cupcake™ and an extra two hours to take the test?  She must have had a low blood sugar and been under stress that’s why she got 40% on the test, you monster!”

But in the classes I did share with special ed kids (P.E.), they were horribly disruptive.  In one case, one of the students – Down’s syndrome – managed to lock himself in an unused gym locker.  These lockers were big enough to hold a 4’2” kid if they hunkered down, since they were designed to hold football gear.  I’ll spare you the details, but I’m sure that coach went home that night going, “They don’t pay me enough to do this job.”

What would happen if we didn’t spend these misplaced compassion dollars into society?  First, the parents would have to foot the bill.

Tough, right?

Well, that’s life.

I’m oddly proud of that one.

Second, classrooms could eliminate students who wouldn’t or couldn’t behave.  Having a child lacking that much in control indicates that structured education won’t help them at all unless it’s enforced with an electric cattle prod.  That horrible law, IDEA, just turns school into a holding pen for unsocialized brutes.

Eliminating those disruptive “students” would allow the rest of the students to learn.  And, perhaps, just a few of those disruptive students with poor self-control with appropriate and judicious use of cattle prods might just learn some self-control.

Again, the parents could and should be held responsible, and if the kid is booted from school, lift child labor laws and allow them to work 40 hours.  Oh, and unless the child is profoundly (Down’s syndrome or worse) disabled?  No SSI benefits.  Did I say parents?  Yeah, let’s be real.  90% of these kids don’t have parents, just a parent.

This one misguided GloboLeftist program, IDEA, has probably cost the United States between $1.5 trillion (low end) to $3.3 trillion (median) over the last 20 years.  The result?

What’s the difference between a Taliban outpost and a Pakistani wedding?  I don’t know, man, I just fly the drone.

Our schools are in shambles, and our test scores are dropping, and the environment makes The Road Warrior look like a conversation between reasonable people.  All of this is for the lowest 20%.  Imagine how bad it would be if we had spent double that.

Certainly, there are kids that can do wonders with a little bit of additional help.  Dyslexia, for instance, is very treatable.  I mean, what would happen if famous dyslexics Whoopi Goldberg or Alyssa Milano could actually read?  They might not be the grifters that they are today.

But we can probably do that for less than $4,000 a year per kid.

This is only one example where the lowest 20% sets the rules for everyone.

  • Who are the people doing the crimes on the subways? I assure you, these are the crimes of the lowest 20%.  Why do we not have clean and affordable public transportation?  The lowest 20%.
  • Who are consuming the most public services? Yup, the same, and the perverse nature of our welfare system provides incentives for these people to have lots of children, which they often do via a revolving carousel of gene donors, who are also of the lowest 20%.
  • Who are doing the vast majority of murders? Eliminate the lowest 20% of the population from the statistics, and the United States would be the very safest nation on the planet.
  • The kid who shot up Parkland High School? I’ll bet a No Prize that he had an IEP, and was of the lowest 20%.

The solution is glaringly simple.

We have to stop coddling and funding the lowest 20%.  Period.  Social Darwinism only works if those who are exhibiting negative qualities face negative consequences.  People respond to incentives, and if your incentive is to produce a never-ending stream of children that get rewarded for having no impulse control, well, you’ll get what we see in the cities.

Did Darwin tell his children that they were adapted?

The good news is the same as I have been preaching forever:  bad times will winnow out this most artificial construction.  A society cannot long produce a feral fraction that creates a low-trust society.

This particular boat anchor won’t cause society to fail, but the anchor will surely be surprised when it is cut loose.

Are We Seeing A Crack In Leftist Control?

“By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Smoking will give you diseases, but it cures salmon.

The GloboLeftElite have long been planning the takeover of the United States.  It’s obvious that this is the case because their thinkers have been plotting the roadmap since, well, forever.  Antonio Gramsci was one such leader, and here’s a quote from him:

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

Gramsci may have been a (really) sub-60-inch-tall Albanian cripple who was in constant pain, born to a criminal father, but let’s let bygones be bygones.  This is nearly exactly what the GloboLeftElite did.  Their scholars left Europe ahead of certain German extended continental excursions in the 1930s, and many of them made their home in the United States.

Note, they didn’t all go to the socialist paradise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Nope.  The Soviets were too busy starving themselves, executing each other, and building GULAGs for fun and profit.

Instead, these “Socialists” wanted to come to a functional society that was producing wealth and wreck it.  Gramsci didn’t join them, because he died.  Based on the list of things that Antonio was suffering from at the time – spinal deformity, arteriosclerosis, pulmonary tuberculosis, high blood pressure, angina, gout, and acute gastric disorders – if he was a dog his name would have been “Lucky”.

The functional society that they wanted to wreck?  The United States.

If a deaf person goes to court, is it still called a “hearing”?

The United States during pre-WWII time wasn’t the same as Europe.  Europe had always been a class-driven society, and from conversations with friends it still is.  Moving from one class to another is difficult, unless you’re a family-wrecking divorced tramp like Meghan Markle.  In the United States, not so much, since we view Meghan as classless.

Many successful businesses were made by people of humble beginnings, and even our presidents didn’t all come from wealth.  Mobility was very possible and that was visible.  People could see that if they came up with a great idea, great wealth was available.  The ideas of class that had driven division in largely racially homogeneous Europe to create revolution didn’t work, so they had to work on other things.

They chose race and sex.  For whatever reason, our most prestigious colleges snapped up these horrible foreign commies – people like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and the like.  There are dozens more that infected the country at that time and given cushy jobs with nothing to do but try to create rot in our country.  Oh, wait, I just described Biden’s appointees.

What’s key to a good mailman joke?  The delivery.

And it worked.  Infiltration of the schools, especially the normal schools that taught teachers took a decade or two, and a decade or two later the teachers started their indoctrination work inside the school system – first slowly and covertly, then quickly and openly.

Christianity has flirted with this hardcore communism for years, but since commies don’t go to church, it has largely been thwarted, though the “send more refugees while we have lesbian pastors and free abortions during Passover” churches are slowly gaining ground, though there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for them.  So, Gramsci has had a harder road there.

The last on Gramsci’s list is the media.  That has been firmly in the hands of the GloboLeftElite for decades, shows like All in the Family and Maude were the first “in your face” move to take over television.  In 20 years we went from Lucy and Ricky not being able to share a bed . . . to Maude, who in a “comedy”, decided to kill her child because it wouldn’t be convenient to have one.

I’d go onto LGBTQ characters introduced in cartoons for young children, but that started, firmly, in 2013.  If I were a parent with small children, let’s just say they wouldn’t be watching Cartoon Network®.

To further this, more and more “mainstream” social media like Twitter™ and content aggregators like YouTube® turned the screws – cancelling people as innocuous as Stefan Molyneux, who just liked to talk about philosophy and preached that you shouldn’t spank your kids.  Obviously, he never met my kids.  Regardless, Molyneux was frozen out.

Chuck Norris invalidated the periodic table, because Norris only recognizes the element of surprise.

Recently, though, I sense a thaw when it comes to the media.  The biggest cause of this thaw is because the American public no longer believes in mainstream media, at all.  Depending on the poll, over 70% of Americans have little to no trust in mainstream media.  70%.  That means that only 30% give it any trust.  This is nearly an exact flip from 1972.  We now know when the mainstream media is lying:  when they’re talking.

This has led to a wholesale rejection of what the mainstream says.  Now, in many cases, like the Vaxx®, ignoring the mainstream was a good idea.  They have to admit it because the science is now in – the Vaxx™ has been shown to be worse than the ‘vid.

And that had to be shut down.  After COVID, after the George Floyd Mostly Peaceful Riots®, the idea that control of information was crucial became the mantra of the GloboLeftElite.  It still is.  Hillary Clinton said the quiet part out loud when she said, “. . . if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook® or Twitter© or X™ or Instagram® or TikTok©, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control . . . .”

All of those Clinton friends who killed themselves that never left notes . . . would it have killed them to write a few lines?

Yeah, she trots out the “it’s about the children” but Hillary’s version of the perfect world is the GloboLeftElite version of the perfect world.  They want a world ruled by their bureaucracy, managed by and for them where coloring outside of the lines really does go in your permanent record.

But, please.  The Earth is not flat.  You can prove that yourself with a car, 24 hours, a map, a protractor, and a Sharpie™.  I think this nonsense is a psyop to make anyone with a “conspiracy” theory sound unhinged, despite so many of those theories being found to be 100% founded in reality.

And enter Elon Musk.  I’ll admit that I didn’t think that much would change when he purchased Twitter™ and rebranded it X®.  Now, though, I go on X™ and regularly see memes that I’d only seen on /pol/ as produced by that hacker, 4chan.  (Mostly) free discourse is now allowed, out in the open.

/POL/ – it’s not just for breakfast anymore.

It is respectable once again to talk about ideas that had been cancelled, not because it’s fashionable, but because the ideas are True.  The biggest enemy of those that would lie is the Truth.  I left Twitter™ when it was kicking off people telling the Truth, and returned when it again (mostly) allowed the Truth.

Can you say anything on X®?  No.  But is it much, much closer?  Yes.

Gramsci won’t win and turn Socialism into a new religion, because at the heart of Socialism are lies meant for controlling man.  And Truth, along with Beauty and the Good, always wins.

And you can tell any short Albanian commie named Lucky that you meet that Wilder says so.

Propaganda: It’s Not Just For Diapers Anymore

“I’ll be taking these Huggies® and whatever cash you’ve got.” – Raising Arizona

A friend told me he could use his 3-D printer to make guns.  I didn’t brag:  I’ve had a Canon™ printer for years.

Movies are amazing tools.  Movies are the backbone of an entire American industry, but it’s a really small industry, with global box office revenues hitting a record of $42.5 billion before COVID.

Sure, $42.5 billion sounds like a lot of money, but Elon Musk paid $44 billion for X®.  One single pipeline, the Nordstream 2®, cost about $10 billion.  That’s just one pipeline:  natural gas pipeline construction spending was over $206 billion in 2020, so it’s roughly five times the size of the size of the movie business.

Yet we focus on movies, and focus on stars.  And Ben Affleck, for some reason.  Must be his insurance company.

But the reason that we focus on movies, of course, is the stories.

The stories have real power, because they’re watched and internalized.  Part of the point of propaganda is that, even if you’re aware of the attempt to manipulate you, you’re still impacted by it, though in a lesser format.  And movies, when we’re actually “shown” a story are much more powerful than reading a story.

But the NBC sitcom based on his life was shot before a live studio audience.

I think this is because reading requires the reader to function as a co-creator of the story:  you have to imagine the armies of Orcs headed to Helm’s Deep™, so as Tolkien writes the words, your part of the creation is imagining and modeling the characters, the setting, the smoke and fog and the arrows in flight.  Yes, books and stories and news are propaganda, too, but the visual is so much more effective, which is why they went to such great lengths to stage the drowned boy on a beach to make people feel a certain way so that millions of invaders could be let into Europe.

Large chunks of movies are pure propaganda.  I recall watching Raising Arizona right before I had a baby.  There’s a fairly humorous scene in the movie that involved Huggies™ diapers, so I bought Huggies© diapers to give them a try.  Huggies® diapers sucked and we moved on to Pampers©, but the propaganda worked.  And I knew it was propaganda.  I knew that Huggies™ had given money to be in the movie.

It wasn’t evil propaganda, but it was propaganda, nonetheless.

If I ever get old, I might quit lifting weights.  Don’t worry, I’ll put in my too weak notice first.

I’ve since developed another theory:  the bigger the lie that they’re attempting to force you to swallow, the more the propaganda, and the more it becomes vilified to have an opinion that differs even by the slightest degree from the lie.

You can probably think of examples, but I’ll start off with one of the biggest lies:

“Diversity is our strength.”

That’s just a horrible lie.  Would Japan be better off if 100,000 Haitians were dropped off in Tokyo tomorrow afternoon?

No!  Haitians have had over 200 years to try to improve Haiti, and it’s awful.  It’s not because of climate or natural resources:  the Dominican Republic is on the exact same island, and has a per capita GDP of $11,825.  Not great, but not horrible.  Haiti?  It’s an economic basketcase with a per capita GDP of $2,125.

Bringing Haitians to any country wouldn’t improve it, because the people who make Haiti the hellhole that it is are the Haitians.  Being on the Magic Dirt of Japan won’t change them.  Being on the Magic Dirt of the United States won’t change them, either.

“Ramen” – Scooby Doo® finishing a prayer.

On particular film that focused on this subversion was 2017’s Logan.  Yup, another superhero movie about the character Wolverine™, but this one ended with the immortal and indestructible mutant Wolverine© dying as an old man, and with his replacement mutants all being illegal aliens from Mexico.  Oh, and the cross that they put on his grave?  The end scene shows one of the mutants pushing it over so it’s an “X” and not a cross.

I’m not making this up.

According to the movie, diversity is not only our strength®, it’s inevitable.  Oh, and your Christian God?  We’ll mock Him as well.

The reality is that greater levels of diversity are correlated with greater levels of crime, lower levels of social trust, and lower productivity in a workplace.  For a “strength” I’m not sure what that “strength” is improving.  So, it has to be sold, again and again and again.

The propaganda machine has been in overload mode for decades on the “girls are just the same as boys” and the result has been a confused mass of children as the most impressionable youth are hit with that message and women are shown in action movies doing things no woman ever born on planet Earth would be capable of doing.

I guess one of Abraham Lincoln’s regrets was appointing Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court.

The really fortunate thing is that this latest propaganda has been a horrible mistake.  In the new rules, no woman can ever do anything wrong.  No woman can be forced to grow and change since they were perfect since birth.  No woman can be defeated by a man, ever.  It’s the revenge of the Girlboss©.

That makes for a really stupid story.  And Hollywood™ is finally figuring that out since people don’t go to see really stupid movies with stupid plots.

That’s to our advantage.  If people aren’t going to see the propaganda, well, they won’t be indoctrinated.

And, although I’m not firmly of the opinion that Elon is on our side, his purchase of X® gives him the ability to influence the propaganda that’s being forced on us 24/7/365 from every single location.  It allows people to react to The Narrative and mock it.

And that’s the key, because it’s not really The Narrative, it’s really The Narrative Against Truth.

The essence of a good meme is a few words and an emotional punch.  The reasons memes from the TradRight work much better than from the GloboLeftElite is simple:  our memes are based on Truth, not based on The Narrative.

It scared me when I asked the librarian where the conspiracy books were and she said, “They’re right behind you.”

And, no matter how much they fight us, their propaganda couldn’t make Huggies™ better than Pampers©.  And no matter how hard they push, their propaganda can’t make lies the Truth.

Think about what you cannot say, and ask:  “Why can’t I say that?”

Is There Room For Anything But Materialism?

“Our great war is a spiritual war.” – Fight Club

Does a llama think the end of the world is called the Alpacalypse?

Generally, around holidays, I let my remaining seven strands of hair down and allow a post or two to deviate a bit from the normal categories.  Why?  Because we live in a world where often unusual ideas will eventually be found to be true, and I like to ask, from time to time, “What if?”

Enjoy!

Just as the pendulum of society has oscillated to the GloboLeft position (and, is oscillating back to the TradRight as we speak) there has been an oscillation of the way people think about the world.

Now, I would suggest, Western Civilization is at another peak:  peak materialism.  By materialism, I mean not that people are into material goods (even though they are) but that the entire focus is that there is a material explanation for everything, including why Kamala Harris exists.

Ever notice that Tom Cruise has one tooth in the middle of his face?  Now you’ll never be able to unsee it.

This isn’t a revelation to anyone in the West, since this is what we’ve been dealing with for the majority of our lives.  We have a mechanistic determinism that says that everything has an explanation, and that those explanations are all based in some sort of material, physical, phenomenon.

I used to play rugby, back in the day (prop) and our coach would, during practice, say “bad luck!” when someone goofed up.  My immediate thought was, no, that wasn’t bad luck, the player goofed up.  But was I right?

Well, if the world had taken a slightly different turn, the ball a different bounce, the opponent a different line, maybe the decision the player made would have been the right one.  Perhaps, then, there is a place for luck.

What’s the difference between a teabag and the American Rugby World Cup team?  The teabag stays in the cup longer.

And I do believe in luck.  Part of is because my life has been an extraordinarily lucky one.  And, no, not the “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” definition, but “How is that stupid SOB so lucky?”

Okay, that’s a sample size of one, and the average scientist would say that’s just one data point, and not a series.  But, it’s not:  a series of improbable events in a single lifetime isn’t just one datapoint, it’s a series of them.

But what about actual studies that show phenomena that are far outside of the real of anything science can explain?

This one (LINK) shows that 90 experiments across 33 labs in 14 countries have shown that precognition exists.  What’s precognition?  That’s knowing the outcome of a future event, before the event occurs.

What kind of event?  Well, one study that I read used sensors on someone viewing a computer screen.  The screen would show random images, most of which were rather dull.  Occasionally, though, the screen would an emotionally charged picture – think nudity or an accident victim, meant to be a “shocking” picture.  The sensors recorded (in general) things like increased heartrate and increase blood pressure before the emotionally charged images showed up onscreen.

I went to a swimwear store and asked them if I could “Try on the bathing suit in the front window.”  They told me I’d have to use a changing room.

The subjects “knew” subconsciously that something was up and their bodies reacted.

Now, I can certainly come up with several ideas from quantum physics that might allow for this time-reversed phenomenon, you know, when effect happens before cause.  But people before, say 1900, would have just said that precognition was part of life – from the ancient Greeks to the prophecies of the Bible, precognition was just accepted as a part of reality – one that couldn’t be explained.

I’ve even had weird, precognitive dreams about odd events.  One time when I was in seventh grade, I awoke, laughing.  Why?  Because someone had stolen the lock off of my school locker, but left the valuable stuff inside.  I found it really humorous that someone would just steal the lock.

The next day?  After fourth period (the period immediately after I’d told my math teacher the humorous story) the lock was . . . gone.  My stuff?  There.

I can’t understand kids these days and their overwhelming Axe®-scents.

Certainly, it could be a coincidence.  But the odd perfection of the dream and the reality was jarring.  I’ve had other dreams that came true as well.  Most have been relatively boring things, and, certainly I’m not above calling them coincidences.

However, .gov, (in conjunction with the Stanford Research Institute) created a project for remote viewing – clairvoyance, where they created a program that produced (according to some sources) actionable information and according to at least one independent statistician were clearly 5-15% above random chance.

Those are just two examples of potential phenomena that exist outside of our ability to explain using purely material descriptions.  And, no, I’m not wedded to the idea that those phenomena exist, but that would certainly be the simplest explanation for several events in my life.  But, I am a committed Christian, so obviously I have the belief in things that have and always will be beyond the understanding of men.

And, again, before 1900 or so, the vast majority of people in all civilizations all over the world would have agreed that while there is the material plane of existence, but there is also the spiritual plane of existence, with as much (if not much more) relevance to our daily lives than the physical.

I like Chihuahuas, but not enough to eat a whole one.

One thing I’ve learned during my life, is to understand that there’s a lot that I’ll never understand, but that I do think that there is far, far more to our lives than just materialism.  Heck, if I had a dime for every time I thought about materialism, I could probably afford some Gucci™ socks.

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.

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.

The Internet Is Crappier. On Purpose.

“It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday.  Google™, even though you’ve enslaved half the world, you’re still a damn fine search engine.” – The Simpsons

I’ve had millions of hits, but none of them from Best Korea.

Today I had to spend an hour searching for PEZ® dispensers honoring the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial.  Amazingly, despite the time I spent looking, no one that I could find has made a PEZ™ dispenser to honor this historic moment.  To me, it was amazing that Amber’s lawyers worked so long and hard to prove that Depp was utterly innocent.

Google™ used to be better.  I remember it wasn’t a little better, it was a lot better than it is today.

To be fair, I’ve mainly stopped using Google© as my search engine of choice.  Besides being horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite shills, they also have futzed with their algorithm so much that when I do a search for common phrases that are pretty unique to my site, I don’t show up on the first two pages.

Go figure.  I mean, horrible, unethical, demonic, GloboLeftistElite?  I might be able to deal with that.  But kill my search results?

They’re dead to me.

The FBI recently announced that Hillary Clinton’s laundry did itself.

Search had long been skewed by Google®, but the autistic programmers that originally put it all together really took that “Don’t Be Evil©” original mission statement to heart.  They wanted to create great search results.  They even went as far as to make sure there was a firewall between their search people and their ad people so that search was preserved.

Oh, sure, they put their thumb down as hard as they could to get Hillary selected in 2016.  Heck, one researcher thought that over 3,000,000 votes were impacted by their search results, alone.  Hmmm, Donald Trump is put on trial for forking over $130,000 to a tramp via a shady lawyer (yeah, he has horrible taste in people) but Google™ subverts their entire search platform in favor of a candidate?

No crime here.  Move along, citizen.

Regardless, the search engine was still pretty good.  As the newfound desire of the GloboLeftElite to clamp down on speech, starting about 2017, Google™ seemed to shy away from that.  Again, the search results in 2017 were pretty good.

If Elon Musk really does send thousands of people to Mars, he’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

But around 2019, the ad executives at Google™ decided that, perhaps, the search results were too good.  You can read an article about that here (LINK).

The problem was that if the search engine were too good, that meant fewer searches.  Fewer searches meant fewer ads.  Fewer ads meant less money.  The paradox was, the better Google™ got at search, the less money they made from ads.

The result was the same as at most businesses when money meets principles:  money wins.  Google™ searches were “encrapulated” so that they were crappier.  More irrelevant sites should show up in a search.  Oh, and the ads?  They weren’t getting enough clicks.  Solution?  Make it less visible that they’re ads – make them look like legitimate search results.

But I did not know that the IRS now accepts Apple® gift cards!

Indian scammers *love* this, since now they can buy an ad, redirect people to their scam website, and get the scam going.

In a recent example, I did a search for a fairly unusual phrase, put quotes around it, and hit “go”.  My quotation marks around the exact phrase I was looking for were utterly ignored.  The results were . . . entirely encrapulated.

I finally remembered where the quote came from, a website that was now dark, but that someone had resurrected it elsewhere.  Boom, there it was, the exact phrase (it was an article title) and I was in business.  Google™, however, had ignored my “quotation marks” and my

-ignore

-results

-with

-these

-words and instead gave me a mishmash of crap that still included the trash I tried to weed out.

Now major search engines (Google©, Bing®, DuckDuckGo™) are giving only answers from the mainstream media, especially with certain topics – politics being one of them.  The beauty of the Internet, circa 2005, is that the mainstream media hadn’t figured it out, so great content with dissenting voices was given a huge platform.

If NPR™ started a metal band, would it be called, “All Things Dismembered”?

Remember when Google™ used to say, “About 1,242,400 matches”?  That’s gone.  Google™ has stopped showing the number of pages, no doubt after people figured out that only about 225 results are ever shown.

Of course, NBCNESPNPR© has a lot of money riding on being able to provide curated news to you for fun, profit, and control – so search engines censoring any idea that is contrary to The Message is their goal.  The major search engines seem to be on board with this.

This is also a major reason that comments are now dead on many websites, because giving the people who read the encrapified news are often embarrassed by that pesky Truth.  Why allow comments at CNN™, when someone can come and make The Message look silly with just a few words?

Pressure has been specifically put on several sites, including Unz™, where unregulated commentors have caused Big Search to blacklist them killing their traffic from search. Oops, BIPOClist them.  In the case of Zero Hedge™ (and The Federalist™), Google Ads™ were cancelled until they controlled their comments.

Yandex.com is better in many regards to Google©, even though it is Russian owned.  When I did a search on Google™ for “Civil War Weather Report” – I was buried so deep that I missed it as I went by – over thirty items in front of my pages, which have nearly that exact title.  On Yandex®?  I’m SEVEN of the top ten results, like I used to be back before 2020, when the big political censorship bug hit all of the major search engines.

What’s the difference between bigfoot and Amber Heard?  Johnny Depp never found bigfoot’s poop in his bed.

I guess that if I use Yandex© from time to time, well, then the FSB as well as the NSA will know that I’m searching for Amber Heard PEZ© dispensers.  I couldn’t find a set with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but I did find one set consisting of Jesus, Amber Heard, and Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer, Micheal Cohen?  I guess they were in a set because they all got nailed on the cross.

Well, to be fair, two of them were nailed on the cross-examination . . . .