With The Left, Their First Enemy Is Truth

“I’ve heard the truth, Mulder. Now what I want are the answers.” – The X Files

My favorite conspiracy theory: everything is going to be okay.

One feature of the Soviet Union was the constant propaganda that was used against the Soviet citizens, they called it PTSD – Post-Tsarism Socialism Disorder. Of course, they used propaganda externally, but most of their efforts in controlling reality were focused internally. Everyone was expected to sing the praises of the government when they knew that they were nothing but lies. This wasn’t a bug, but a feature.

Imagine: being required to deny the very truth of a matter, just so one could continue to live in society. Imagine: having to parrot the lines of official government in order to maintain what little income you had to make it from day to day. It’s almost a bad as working at CNN®.

I often blog about Truth. I believe that there isn’t “your truth” and “my truth” but there is an objective, verifiable Truth in almost every case. Physics (except for some weird quantum events) demands it. For instance, if I put my left foot in a sock, no matter where in the universe it exists, the other sock becomes the right sock.

Bears don’t wear socks. They prefer bear foot.

But Leftism demands that you reject Truth. Leftism demands, on the most basic premise, that Truth be the very first thing sacrificed. Compliance with this is required on a daily basis. Otherwise? You weren’t Politically Correct. They even had Politically Correct comedians – no matter if they were funny or not you were supposed to laugh.

That’s the origin of the phrase Politically Correct: the Soviets. They’d use that to remind each other that truth belonged to the state. Truth that didn’t follow the state’s dictates? Politically Incorrect, and those people didn’t last very long.

Why was Political Correctness important?

Every day, citizens had to be reminded that they were controlled. Not only controlled, the citizens had to be humiliated. This is the course of history: conquerors had to remove the will to fight of the vanquished. How better than to break their will than to remind them every day of their humiliation?

Break the primacy of the family. Take children from the family and raise them with the values of the state. Let everyone know that, at any minute, they could be made an enemy of the state. It’s so bad in that the football team in D.C. had to change their name out of shame. Now they just go by “the Redskins” so their name is less offensive.

But Italians don’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s not religious. They just don’t like any witnesses.

But when the Soviets took over, that’s what the Soviets did. They lied. They encouraged children to betray their family. They came in the middle of the night with armed secret police to enforce arbitrary laws with (more or less) impunity.

Many Soviet citizens were fine with this. I (personally) can’t imagine why, but I think there’s some fraction of the population who has as their primary operating mode, “go along and get along.” They’d be fine with whoever was in charge, as long as they told them what to do. They’d rather lick a boot than complain about their entire culture being destroyed, value by value.

Guess who isn’t getting a new laptop for Christmas this year? Hunter Biden.

What are we seeing today?

A similar victory lap from the Left in the United States is taking place right now:

  • LGBTQRSTUV positivity. It’s June, which used to be known as, “June.” But now it’s known as Pride Month. Pride used to be a sin. Now? Pride has been used as an excuse to cram children too young to read as “Trans” kids.
  • An “election” that had more anomalies than Joe Biden’s latest Alzheimer’s test is demanded to be taken seriously. Why? That’s why.
  • “Laws” and a “border” that are, at best theoretical constructs. As in Alice in Wonderland, laws are what the rulers say they are. And laws can change from day to day, and person to person. Borders? We don’t need no steenking borders.
  • A definition of being “American” that includes all people living in the world right now, and probably any intergalactic beings as well, as long as they can be counted on to vote for the Leftist candidate. I’m sure the Arcturans need to be treated as refugees, too.
  • The primary prerequisite to being in the military isn’t that you’d have honor, duty, and service to country as goals. Can you put the current policy of the current administration at the top of your agenda?

Every day this is what people see. The news articles are filled with one humiliation after another.

The idea is simple. Values must be turned on their head, especially the most cherished ones. In our society, what has come to be regarded as the highest value is our children. Therefore, the values we had built up the most have to be destroyed.

When the Greeks sacked Troy, the children of the leader, Priam, were all killed. All of them. That’s what conquerors do to the conquered. One thing is certain in this world – not a trace of Priam’s DNA survives. The Greeks made sure of that. The Greeks devastated everything that was Troy, and left it a burning hulk that was lost to history except in the songs of the Greeks for thousands of years until a weird German found them while searching for the Indiana Jones set.

My body is like a temple. One that the Romans destroyed 2,500 years ago.

That’s what the winners do. They pull down the statues of those they beat. They eradicate their history, or make the losers out to be the bad guys. And, finally, they have the children of those they beat forget the faces of their fathers and emulate the values of the winners.

This century has been unusual, in that the Revolution has been (more or less) a bloodless one. The idea of actual warfare has been replace by the subversion of culture and the inversion of values.

I had hoped for a long time that the idea of a cultural swing back to the Right would show up. It has not. Trump was one attempt at such a swing, and the lasting value of his administration approaches, well, zero. “Cthulhu swims slowly, but he only swims Left.” Almost – not all – but almost all of the changes in values during my lifetime have been a ratchet, and a Leftward ratchet. *Click* – a Leftist point has been won.

No, we can’t turn that clock back, because, (for instance) Rowe Vs. Wade is now settled law. The ratchet has clicked. According to the Left, it simply can’t turn back.

If H.P. Lovecraft got rid of cable, would he sign up for Cthulhu?

But we have examples of societies that have explicitly rejected the Leftist ratchet by pulling so hard that the gears stripped, and have turned back. The best examples are Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. If you ever want to find people that hate Leftism, wander off to Poland or Hungary.

The reason that I’m not a pessimist is that we, humanity, have beaten the horrors of Leftism every time it has arisen. The battles haven’t been short, and they have numbered in decades of oppression and hundreds of millions of lives.

The propaganda is strong out there. It’s in television. It’s in the news media. It’s in the schools.

Don’t give up.

Keep the fire of Truth alive.

Blogger Versus Evil

Jack Burton:  “Great.  Walls are probably three feet thick, welded shut from the outside, and covered with brick by now.”

Wang Chi:  “Don’t give up, Jack.”

Jack Burton:  “Okay, I won’t Wang.  Let’s just chew our way out of here.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Never make a deal to buy a guitar from the Devil.  There are always strings attached.

The Exorcist is a feel-good movie.  Well, at least it is for me.

I wanted to watch it when I was an especially wee Wilder, but for whatever reason, Ma and Pa Wilder felt that exposing a first grader to that particular film would be considered a war crime.  I don’t remember how old I was when I finally saw it, but as I recall it was rented on a VHS tape.

By the time I’d seen it, I’d already been exposed to much more brutal horror:  Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Norman Lear sitcoms.  I’ll say this about reading horror – the things I conjured in my mind while tearing through the pages of The Stand were far scarier than anything I’d ever seen in a movie.

But I made a pretty bold statement:  The Exorcist is a feel-good movie, so I guess you’re gonna make me back it up.  Thankfully, I have that not only on my authority, but on the authority of the author of The Exorcist.  William Peter Blatty summed up the reason I like horror films with this very simple quote:

“My logic was simple:  if demons are real, why not angels? If angels are real, why not souls? And if souls are real, what about your own soul?”

Blatty even described The Exorcist as his ministry – it seems he’s religious.  Who would have expected that?

What don’t demons wear hairpieces?  Because there would be Hell toupee. 

Much of what we see in the world we explain through simple materialism.  But when I read novels where the demons are mere humans, well, (with the exception of Hannibal Lechter) I’m generally let down when the Scooby Doo® ending explains away the supernatural mystery at the heart of the story.  Mr. Blatty’s quote describes exactly why.

“If demons are real, why not angels.”

Now I know that several readers are atheists.  As I’ve pointed out before, this blog is sort-of a litmus test.  People that are the kind of atheist that just hates God will generally not opt-in to reading this blog for any length of time.  I have no idea why, but they just don’t.  Actual, rational atheists that don’t turn rabid when the supernatural is discussed don’t seem to mind.

Maybe they look at it like I look at the WWE®:  they can watch it and be amused, even though they’re certain it’s not real.  They especially like it when Hulk Hogan® hits me in the head with a chair.

Where did Randy “Macho Man” Savage™ work out?  The Slim-Jim©.

Regardless, I think most readers here share the same view of Evil (or even evil) in this world.  It’s visible in the raw naked lust for power that we have seen repeated again and again from the Left.  It’s also visible in their unbridled joy at the destruction of Truth, Beauty, and Society.

The Left revels in the Lie, the inversion of Truth, the inversion of Beauty:

  • Billions of dollars in damage in Minneapolis is a “peaceful protest” while a march on the Capitol is, according to President* Biden: “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
  • They demand, using free speech, to restrict the free speech of those that offend them.
  • The Left demands you look at what is obviously a man, and claim it to be a woman.

It’s simple, really:  everything that’s Bad is presented as good.  And everything Good?  Well, it’s Bad.  How dare you think self-restraint and hard work is virtuous?

Sniff.  “Smells like fraud.”

Let’s look at how a simple Good thing like a married man and woman having a baby is turned on its head:

  • What about the woman’s career?
  • Why not live the childfree life?
  • Why have the baby at all?
  • There are too many people on the planet already.

The last argument is especially Evil, because when the propaganda works, the headlines then sing out:  “since we’re not having enough babies, we need to import multitudes to grow our economy.”  “Meet the New Americans.”

It’s fun to use this technique on Leftists.  I can recall a Twitter® exchange with a Leftist where I Tweeted™ that I opposed immigration to the United States on the grounds that people in the United States had the highest carbon footprint, so by bringing in more people into the United States they were destroying the planet.

Brain lock ensued when they couldn’t deal with the conflict between their two opposing beliefs.  It’s fun to come up with these couplets to invert the Evil right back at them, though, in the end, there is no conversion for a True Believer outside of a gentle helicopter ride.  They have given in to the Evil.  They’ll avoid the conversation.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:  three ways to dispose of a dead Leftist.

It is especially difficult for parents of children:  what is innocent is sexualized.  A first-grade boy isn’t old enough to decide what he should eat on a regular basis – why would the world think that he should be turned into a she?

It’s all around us, every day.  It’s sold to us in media, it’s in the news, it’s everywhere.

And it’s attacking the Values of what we all know, deep inside ourselves, to be True and Good.  That which is Good, True and Beautiful hasn’t changed within the lifetime of mankind on this planet, but when you’re confronted with people trying to sell that which is a Lie as the Truth?

You can be sure those people are Evil.

Not to say that people on the Right are immune to that – far from it.  Eaton Rapids Joe has a great little story to that effect here (LINK).

To be clear, the ultimate aim of the propaganda of Evil is simple:  to make Good people feel despair.

Why despair?  Despair is the opposite of hope.  It is the opposite of Truth.  It is the opposite of Beauty.  Despair is Evil.

And when propaganda wins?  Evil wins.

H.P. Lovecraft was tormented by doubt all of his life.  Imagine if he hadn’t slept in despair bedroom.

But that’s not what happened in The Exorcist.  Father Karras, who had lingering doubts and was on the verge of Despair, conquered it.

Because he conquered Despair, Father Karras conquered Evil.

When you feel Despair, know that’s nothing more than Evil.  And you can conquer it, too.

Yeah, I told you that The Exorcist was a feel-good story.  And I was right.

———————————————

Extra Meme and Tagline, because I made one too many:

In other news, the 2024 election will be postponed until they find the results in Biden’s desk.

Money Is Not The Only Form Of Wealth

“Well, as I said, time has no meaning here. So if you leave, you can go anywhere, any time.” – Star Trek:  Generations

What do you call a rogue sheep with a machine gun?  Lambo.

When I lived in Houston, my job was all consuming.  It’s been my theory that people move to Houston for one reason:  to work.  The climate is difficult.  The freeways are often lines of cars creeping along like Joe Biden in an elementary school.  One upside is that there can’t be a (Some) Black Lives Matter® protest because the Houston Astros© always steal their signs.

When I was a Temporary Texan, my life was consumed by work – and it was stressful work.  Each day brought a new crisis we had to solve.  It got so bad that   I left home early to avoid the traffic, so I got to work early.  I left work late to avoid the traffic, so I got home late.  A fourteen-hour day wasn’t uncommon.  I put blood, sweat, and tears into that job, so it was good that I wasn’t working at a restaurant.

The last time I went out for dinner, I asked the waiter how they prepared the chicken for frying.  “Nothing special.  We just tell them they’re going to die.”

For many weeks, I was gone every hour that baby Pugsley was awake during a weekday.  I would, however, catch up with The Mrs. when I got home.  That was a priority.  We knew what we were getting into when we made the move from Alaska.  Moving to Houston was, for us, entirely about work.  I should have known during the job interview that something was up:  they asked if I could perform under pressure, but I told them I only knew Bohemian Rhapsody.

Most (not all!) weekends I was able to keep the work at bay.  I’d sleep in on Saturday, and then we’d do something as a family.  By Saturday night I felt, “normal” but by Sunday afternoon I’d realize that I’d have to go back in to work on Monday and repeat the whole thing again.  That made me feel pretty gloomy – it felt like time was slipping away.

This was how Sunday evening felt when I worked in Houston.

One Sunday night, however, I was getting my things ready for the next day.  I was looking for my dress shoes (I was in an office that required them at that time) and couldn’t find them.  Since I always took them off at the same place, that confused me.

After looking in all the logical places, the only choice then was to look in all of the illogical places.  When you live alone, everything is pretty findable.  When you have a wife, things move around on their own.  When you have children under seven?  The toilet gets clogged with decorative clam shell soaps that The Mrs. bought.

So, when I found my shoes under Pugsley’s bed, I wasn’t really surprised.

I was, however, touched.  As near as we can figure, Pugsley had come to the conclusion that I only wore those shoes when I was gone all day.  As near as his Gerber®-addled mind could conceive, if I didn’t have the shoes, I could spend every day at home with him.

Not bad.  And I was touched.

I tried to buy running shoes the other day – but the only ones I saw were stationary.

One of the ideas of wealth is money.  And I was in Houston, like everyone else, to make money.

But there’s another idea of wealth:  time.

There are a group of people who are driven by playing that game and devote themselves exclusively to their business.  That makes sense.  The world needs people who are single-minded in wanting to change it.

Most people have read about people like Edison who never slept more than seven minutes a night and spent most of his life at work while making a fortune, and Elon Musk who famously slept in the factory to get car production worked out.  And Musk and Edison both have another thing in common:  they both got rich off of Tesla.

Meanwhile, the GPS is saying:  “Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . “

If that’s what they choose?  Fine.  The idea of spending time on their passion for business is exactly that – a choice.  Just like having a finite supply of money gives you a set of choices of what you can do in life, there is another budget – a finite number of hours.

And that is life.  Life is made up of those hours that we use.  Just as inflation eats away at the value of money, distraction eats away at the value of life.

What kind of distraction?

Well, pointless things – think Twitter® and most of Facebook™.  I was on Twitter© a while back, and found it was good at exactly one thing:  making me irritated.

I even take this aversion to not wasting the hours and minutes of my life unless it was a conscious decision to absurd levels.  For several years of my life, I ate something I didn’t like all that much for lunch because there was no line.

I hate the idea of waiting five minutes of my life when I don’t to.  This still applies even if I waste those five minutes on something unproductive.  For a long time, I avoided history – I just couldn’t see a future in it.

I’m reading a book about the history of lubricating oils and bearings.  Best non-friction book I’ve ever read.

But now society is built on creating and feeding distraction to people – the more distraction that’s consumed, the greater the profit level for these companies.  And these are not even distractions that make us feel better – but distractions that in many cases just consume time.

I’m not sure that the idea of a “balanced” life is one that exists in reality.  A human life is built up in phases.  The long languid summers of youth give up to days that are packed with all the trappings of a family and work and the fullness of life.  When my youngest, Pugsley, heads out into the world, who knows what I’ll do with the time?

Perhaps I’ll spend it finding places to hide his shoes.

The Way The Constitution Dies

This is a repost, but one that has some meaning to me on the start of Memorial Day weekend.  Please, all of you be safe.

point4

Soldiers heading towards Omaha Beach.

When I was in grade school the teachers spoke of the Constitution with reverence.  As second graders, we listened as the teacher told the story of how it was written and the freedoms it guaranteed us and the responsibilities that it demanded of us.  My grade school teachers were all married women, and they loved America.  It was a small town, and the teachers had grown up in the area.  Some of them had taught their own children and their own grandchildren in the same school where the chalkboard dust, lead paint dust, water from lead-soldered pipes, and asbestos floor tiles soaked into my skin daily.  Even the early reader books were taped together with yellowing cellophane tape at the bindings, and most of the books had been printed decades before.  I got to See Spot Run like legions of boys before me, running my fingers over the same dog-eared pages that had been read for years, young mouths quietly sounding out the words.

And these boys before me, who had sat in the same desks, drew beginning math on the same blackboards, pulling chalk from the same worn, wooden tray that I did, got paddled in the same principal’s office that I did.  They had traveled the world to strange places that their teachers never named when they opened the geography books during the time they spent in second grade.  These were places with foreign names like Guadalcanal.  Bastogne.  Chosin Reservoir.  Da Nang.

One of these boys in particular, a blonde haired young Ranger, was barely eighteen when he was shot climbing the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc on the sixth of June, 1944.  His sister was a friend of my father.  As a young boy that Ranger sat in that same room, learning the same math that I would later learn, though he was doing it decades before I was born.  He sat in that same classroom just a few short years before he was buried in Normandy in late spring at the age of 18.  No member of his family could afford to visit his grave until over fifty years had passed and his sister walked to his grave and touched its cold marble stone and ran her fingers over his name.  Despite that, the young Ranger isn’t lonely – he is surrounded by 9,387 of his comrades who died during the invasion of France.

Rangers climbing Pointe du Hoc.

The teachers, those mothers, in the distant past had taught the children the value of patriotism.  The value of the Constitution.  The belief that freedom was a great gift from both God and our forefathers and was an idea and an ideal worth fighting for was taught to them in school and in church.  Those boys who traveled far wearing Army green, Navy blue, the camouflage of the Marines, and eventually Air Force blue were mainly the sons of farmers, used to hard work that started early in the morning and sometimes went too far into the night when the cows were calving.  The things that they were told that were true were God, freedom, family, and country and that you always had to work hard for these things, and sometimes you had to fight for them.  And sometimes die for them.

Even the cartoons as I was growing up were infused with patriotism:

Corny?  Yes.  

The school was torn down some time ago – I don’t know when.  A bond issue was finally passed, and a new school was built.  There aren’t many more students than when I went there, but there are new classrooms.  These new schools are gleaming with whiteboards and new furniture and new books, and from the pictures you can see that the kids look a lot like the kids from when I went there; but the connection with 100 years of history went when the building was torn down.

Change is inevitable, but the one thing that my teachers taught us was that the Constitution was a rock, something special, something that every American had shared for hundreds of years.  It was important, and it protected us, and protected our freedom.

I believed that, the way the boys that live forever on Pointe du Hoc did.

rangers

Ladders used to scale Pointe du Hoc.

Today, however, the population of the United States is at least 14% foreign born, but I’d bet that number undercounts illegal aliens.  Second generation Americans, people born here of immigrants, account for at least 10% of the population.  A quarter of the population of this country simply has no connection to anything American.  10% were born here, but were raised in a household that had little to no connection to anything American.

I was working in Houston on one particular job, often late into the night.  The cleaning crew came in after 8 PM, and I was often still there.  I’d taken Spanish in school, and would share a sentence or two with the very nice cleaning woman who came by.  She spoke no English.  One day I asked her, in Spanish, “Why don’t you learn English?”  I realized that this nice person would have no chance to move up, no way to take part in the economic miracle that is the United States without English.

“Es muy dificil.”  It’s too difficult.

The cleaning woman is very nice, but has no connection in any meaningful way to the United States.  I’m sure she’s had children by now as 21% of children in the United States have foreign-born mothers.  Her children likewise have had no part in building this country and have no reverence for the principles of its founding, or the sacrifices made along the way to create freedom.  This is similar to me if I moved to say, England, or Denmark.  I love England.  I love Denmark.  I’m ethnically related to those areas and admire both cultures.

If I moved to England I’d always be the Yankee.  Or Amerikansk in Denmark.  My kids, even if I had kids there, wouldn’t be English.  They wouldn’t be Danish.  They’d be the “kids of that American that lives here.”  Maybe if my kids were born there, and then worked hard to assimilate away from the American attitudes and culture of their parents, then they one day the kids they had would be considered English or Danish.  I’m an American, a product of American culture and no citizenship documents will ever change that.

25% of the people in the United States, however, simply aren’t American by any sort of rational criteria.  One out of four – an amazing number and a number that is going to grow based on current trends and census data, perhaps to one in three by 2060.  The United States has never had such high numbers of foreign born in history.

As these numbers grow, the electorate changes to an electorate that has no history of a representative democracy – most people coming to the United States are from places where elections are not free and fair, and in many cases the politicians from those countries are so corrupt to make Illinois look like a Boy Scout® camp.  These are also places where constitutions are meant not for the people, but for the state, and are changed out with stunning regularity, often accompanied by firing squads and atrocity.  They expect better here, but they also are ready-made for the politicians that promise them the world.

The political class, however, is excellent at creating and playing on resentment in new immigrants with no history of good government.  Division is the strength of these politicians.  “Why do these people have a say as to who is an American?”  “Abolish ICE.”  “You deserve free education, free healthcare, free housing, free food.”  “Living wage for all.”  “Common sense gun laws.”  Thankfully, native language broadcasting is available to all of these new residents and new citizens so that they can avoid assimilation into the culture.

These residents also don’t have teachers that teach that the United States is good, that the Constitution is a meaningful document – times have changed and that just isn’t the “woke” take.  They don’t get any of this from their family, either.  Their family simply doesn’t know anything about freedom and the Constitution in most cases, and probably wouldn’t care if they did.  It’s a document that foreigners put together – it is not part of their history at all.

Pointe du Hoc, after it had been taken.

As I said, I had faith in the Constitution.  It was a great wall that both defined and constricted government, but in recent decades “rights” have been made up from layer after layer of interpretation that have nothing to do with the original text.  On the other hand, rights that are written about clearly in plain language are somehow interpreted to be so limited that they hardly exist at all.  But there are still some protections that exist, as long as there’s a majority of five to four.  Change that number?  Watch those liberties evaporate as Justices that admire the constitution of South Africa, the one that’s being interpreted to allow the theft of land, become a majority.

If we have politicians that actively create divisions between Americans with a heritage of limited government and an increasing number of people for whom the history of the United States means nothing, the Constitution won’t mean anything.  It will be a speed bump for those who have no connection to it and who have no love of it.  The Constitution in the hands of those who hate the limitations it puts on them will, in the long run, provide no safety at all as it is interpreted away, as the press revolts against it, and as the newly imported electorate ignores it.

And what meaning will the blonde Ranger of Pointe du Hoc have then?

Truth: Never Give Up

“And remember, I’m offering the truth, nothing more.” – The Matrix

What is the first foreign language lesson given to French troops?  “I surrender,” in German.

I remember walking down a very big hill.  Big, in this case, was over 14,000 feet (28,000 meters) in height.  When I convinced my friends to climb it with me, they were skeptical.  14,000 feet is, by most accounts, a pretty tall hill.  And this particular one didn’t have a gift shop at the top.

Going up was actually easy.  We even smoked a cigar back at our 12,000 foot (37 liter) basecamp after we climbed it.  I tossed three beers in the glacier by our tents, but by the time we got back from the summit, one had frozen and cracked open.  So, the three of us shared two beers.  We each had our own cigar.  I even Googled® how to light a cigar, and 43,800,000 matches.

That’s a lot of matches, which surprised me.  Normally it takes me one or two.

We then slept after our trip, and spent the night at our basecamp.  I’ve never had a meal as exquisite as the dehydrated chili-mac that I had that night.  Our basecamp was so high that boiling water wasn’t very hot at all.  And bugs?  Not a problem.  No mosquito can fly in air that thin.  Really.

Normally, when you’ve climbed one of the tallest mountains in North America, you think, “Well, going down is easy, as long as it’s not over a cliff.”

That was what I thought.

I would tell more cliff jokes, but most of them are pretty edgy.

I climbed the hill in running shoes.  It’s easy going up in those.

But down?  That’s a different story.  For me, the downhill part was the hardest.  Those running shoes were loose enough that each time I stepped down on that path, they slipped.  Maybe a quarter of an inch (57 kilojoules).  Maybe even an eighth of an inch (34 megaergs).  But it slipped.

The problem with a foot slipping on the inside of a shoe is that it builds up heat.  The heat was absorbed by the sole of my foot (I’m assuming a metric foot is a hand?) and built up.

Halfway down the mountain, my feet really, really hurt.  Pain focused my mind on the following thoughts:

  • Owwww, my feet hurt!
  • I never give up.
  • Owwww, my feet hurt!

When we got back to the Jeep® that originally took us to the trailhead, I gratefully tossed my backpack in.  We then bounced down the hill, and then zoomed across the flatland to the place we were staying.  If there’s anything as fine as having climbed a mountain and then feeling the wind in your hair (I had it then) as you scoot on a highway at 70 miles per hour (230 km/min), I don’t know what it is.

I heard that 98% of Jeeps® that have ever been made are on the road today!  The other 2% made it home.

When I got back to where we were staying, I pulled my shoes off.  When I peeled my socks off, the bottom skin of both feet came off.

Stop!

It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.  I had a blister that covered the entire part of both of my feet.  When I, um, removed it, a slight breeze felt like a hurricane filled with stainless steel scouring pads.  Again, a beer or two helped dampen the pain.

The good news?

My feet got better.

I’m telling you that not giving up has consequences.  And most of the consequences are good, especially for pride.

My friends on the trip asked me this:  “Why didn’t you let us carry your pack?”

My response was simple:  “I carried it up, I’m carrying it down.”

Congress has a new sign hanging up by their copy of the Constitution:  Not Responsible For Lost Or Stolen Articles.

Responsibility is like that.  Once you own it, putting it down is much harder than picking it up in the first place.  And giving up?  Once you do that, it becomes a habit.

I speak, of course, of where the Right stands.

We’re not winning here in 2021.

  • The courts appear to be an extra arm of the Left.
  • The troops are being culled – if you have a belief to the Right of Ché Guévérrå, well, out you go.
  • Opinions on the Internet? They had better be the correct ones or they’ll never see the light of day.

So?

Ask me if I care if my opinions are unpopular with Google®, Coca-Cola™, Chick-fil-a™, or Nike©.

I do not.

The Truth doesn’t cease being the Truth because it’s mocked or because corporate HR departments blame it for (spins wheel) just being so damn pretty.  The Truth always remains the Truth.

I guess there is a Colonel of truth to what he says?

I am, thankfully, of an age and status where I don’t ever think I’ll have to lie to anyone, ever, again in my life.  The Mrs.?  I told her when we met that I’d never lie to her, and I haven’t, which is why she never, ever, asks if those pants make her butt look big.  Is it the pants, or is it the butt?

Never ask a question you don’t want to hear a Truthful answer to.

Everyone has the ability to have these superpowers:

  • Never Give Up
  • Always Tell The Truth
  • To Thine Own Self Be True

Okay, I got the last bullet point from Gilligan’s Island.  Really.  There was an episode where they did a musical version of Hamlet, which was my first encounter with the Bard.

There was an earthquake during the production.  It was quite the Shakesperience.

But the biggest sin of all is this one:  giving up.

The Boy texted me that Fox News® has lost over 50% of their web traffic since the election.  That sounds like despair.  And despair is giving up.

Me?

I’m not done.  Why should I be?  The one thing I could do to betray myself, and to betray everything I believe in?  Is to give up.  That would be giving up on me, and giving up on you.

I can’t abide by that.

Corporate powers may try to silence me, and may temporarily lower my traffic.

That won’t stop the signal.

And if I fall?  A dozen others will take my place.  Truth will win.  It may make a thousand years, and billions of lives, but Truth will win.

Does gravity care if you believe in it?  It does not.  Neither does the Truth.

Which is why I won’t give up.  And which is why the Truth will always win.

The Biggest Lie Of The Left: Guns

“It’s ridiculous. Invisible? Whoever heard of anyone being invisible? Unless, of course, you have the ring of power.” – Soap

I told Pugsley the other day to sign my name for a note for school.  At least he’ll be in practice.

I once heard some psychologist (I think it was a psychologist, it was a very long time ago) on a television show say:  “Children are naturally truthful.”

With that one statement, I knew that the psychologist had no children.  As a child, I was a horrible liar.  My lies were horrible in every sense of the word.  I told lies that couldn’t possibly be true based on laws of physics that even I knew at my age.  And I told them in ways that weren’t convincing even to casual observers.  As a parent?  Oh, my, I assumed anything any of my kids told me before the age of ten was a lie.

I do recall telling one other little kid that I could turn invisible – I think I was five.

Why?  I have no idea.  But if you tell someone that you can turn invisible, eventually they’re gonna want to see some sort of proof, even if they’re five.

Now, however, our politicians and media are teaming up to tell a lie that’s just as stupid as my “I can turn invisible” lie.  That lie is this:

Mass shooters with AR-15 weapons are a national problem.

Well, no, they’re not.  At all.

Last year, about 364 people in the United States were killed with “long guns” – rifles.  More people have died from vaccinations than have died from AR-15 style weapons this year.  More people died falling out of bed (450) and over 2,500 left-handed folks die using right-handed items incorrectly.

People who are left-handed score higher on standardized tests than people who died as infants.

Yes.  More people die from being left-handed than from the dreaded “assault” weapon.

The odd obsession of the Left (not the left-handed) to take assault weapons, in particular, has long fascinated me.  Here is a gun that is provably twenty times safer than doctors with bad handwriting scrawling out prescriptions in what appears (to me) to be some sort of script that only a retarded (yes, I’m taking it back) chimpanzee with shakes from palsy could produce.

Honestly, for a device produced to expel a projectile at around 3,000 feet per second, the AR-15 is about the safest invention ever.  It’s like the ten million or so AR-15 shoot Nerf® darts if they only manage to kill 364 people a year.  So what’s the deal?

Let’s dissect the idea:  what really scares the Left about guns?

  • First, most gun deaths are Leftists shooting other Leftists.

Washington, D.C., had 920 people shot last year.  95% of the people in Washington, D.C. are Leftists.  People shooting each other isn’t a problem for the people on the Right, it’s just Leftists shooting each other.  People on the Left don’t understand why people on the Right aren’t upset.

Well, it’s because we’re not killing people and we’re not being killed.  Duh.

In fact, if you took lawful gun owners on the Right and their homicide rate (using guns) it would be among the lowest in the world for any country, including those that ban guns outright.  The gun homicide rate of people on the Right is similar to people on Mars, and Elon Musk hasn’t killed anyone recently.

People on the Right don’t shoot each other.  Generally, the only time people on the Right shoot people on the Left is when the people on the Left are trying to kill people on the Right.  Sure, you can come up with a few oddball examples where somebody on the Right shoots someone, but they are really the “man bites dog” stories because they are so unusual.

People on the Left killing each other?  That’s what you call “Friday” in Chicago.

What did the German say when he went into the French bread store?  “Gluten tag!”

So, when the latest shooter (FedEx shooter in Indianapolis) showed up, the Left pounced.  It was and is the man bites dog story that they’ll use to prove their lie.

To prove the point:  the Left was ecstatic when the Boulder killer showed up.  They were even more thrilled when it appeared that he had an AR-15.  Then reality hit.  When the killer proved to be an “intersectional” member of two of the Left’s worshipped classes – an immigrant and a Muslim, the Left was quite sad.

How to get out of their lie?   Blame it all on unfounded claims of “white supremacy” for the killing of nine white people.  If that’s white supremacy, the guy, just maybe, is doing it wrong.  Now if the goal was to kill white people in Boulder, well, he got that part just right.

NPR® had a lovely story:  “Why Boulder Is Trying To Keep The Focus On The Victims And Not The Shooter.”  See, if it’s a Muslim, they can’t even call him what he is – a killer.  This was all so that the story could be properly memory-holed.  It was the story they were looking for, but just the wrong killer.

Betcha $5 that NPR™ doesn’t run a similar story about Indianapolis.

Now, after half a dozen fizzled attempts to get the narrative they were looking for (someone who wasn’t a Leftist shooting other Leftists), they found it.

  • Second, individuals with guns scare Leftists, because Leftists love the State.

Leftists love statist solutions.  To them, the State is power.  It’s power for their ideas.  Leftists don’t see a world where they can go and create and change things they don’t like.  Nope.  Leftists see a world where the State has to exist to right all of the wrongs that have been done to them.

Go and create a business that serves thousands or millions of people?  Or wait for the State to forcibly take money from other people to give to you as reparations for a crime that occurred decades or even hundreds of years in the past?

Are the hieroglyphs in the pyramid hard to read because they’re encrypted?

The second one seems ever so much more fun.

But people forget that the Second Amendment was specifically written to prevent tyranny that the People wouldn’t put up with.  An armed populace are citizens.  An unarmed populace are subjects.  A stoned populace are Oregonians.

Leftists want subjects, not citizens.  Leftist want masses who vote for collectivist politicians so they can take power, and never let it go.

People on the Right?  Mainly they just want to be left alone.

  • Finally, Leftists politicians are scared because armed citizens limit what they can do.

January 6, 2021 was quite a surprise:  a group of people petitioned their government for redress.  Was there violence?  Yes.  Was it less than nearly any of the 2020 Some Black Lives Matter protest?  Certainly.  Damage was minimal.  The only death due to violence was one girl in a red hat who was shot by a cop.

That wasn’t the damage.

The damage was to the minds of the elite.  They realized that, as I’ve said before, the governance of an armed nation requires the consent of the governed.

Prior to this, the biggest fear of Congress was chlamydia.

I’ll take a second to make an aside.  People keep talking about “majority rule” as if there is some sort of magical win that comes from 50% plus one vote.  Let me ask a fairly simple question:  if a law or rule is so repugnant that 20% of the country finds it intolerable, is that a good law?

Probably not.

Here, however, the elite have figured out Wilder’s Law:  20% of the people, if armed, can stop 100% of the laws, if they are committed enough.  And it scares the elite to death.  An armed populace always scares tyrants.

My prediction is fairly simple:  Americans will continue to own guns.  Lots of them.  Legally or not.

The Left lies like a group of five-year-olds.  They say that “assault weapons” are a problem.

They’re not.  Provably not.  The left is lying.

Okay, if I really was invisible for a day?  I’d kick a mime nearly to death.

Children are not naturally truthful.  And neither is the Left.  And the Left is certainly not invisible, even when they try to convince you they are.

Welcome To Being An Outsider

“Now, I didn’t start it, but be sure as Hell I mean to see it through.” – Shooter

If you boil a clown you get laughing stock.

We’re Outsiders.

Well, not all of us.  But when you look at the system, most of the people reading this post are Outsiders.

I happen to live in a place filled with Outsiders.  Here in Modern Mayberry, you’re ten a hundred times as likely to see a Gadsden flag on a flagpole as a Bernie® bumper sticker.  Besides the Bernie supporters around here have now all been kicked out by their roommates, you know, “Mom and Dad”.

That’s why it’s Modern Mayberry.

It’s not paradise.  There are some thefts.  There are some drugs of the most destructive kind.  There’s even a hipster who was an outdoorsman before it was cool – you’d call him a homeless guy.

But yet . . .

People here still remember the United States that was, or at least the United States we remembered from our dreams.  One where the Constitution was the rule.  One where the dream wasn’t one of dependence on handouts.  One where you could ignore it when the government called you at home – you could let freedom ring.

A friend of mine used his stimulus check to buy baby chickens.  Money for nothing and the chicks for free.

Tonight I drove home along Main Street, and I saw people out and about.  In one block I saw six people that I personally knew, and most of them made it off the sidewalk in time.

Yet all of us in Modern Mayberry are really Outsiders, and I think that we know that.  And I think we cherish it, just like the EpiPen® my friend gave me as he was dying – I know I’ll always cherish it.

I watch the news stories of places that seem alien to me.  I know that California in 1980 was overwhelmingly what we now call a Red state.  Now?  It’s alien even to many that were born there.

The politics that created what would have been one of the most prosperous nations in the world have given way to politics that has made California one of the most impoverished states in the United States.  I know Gavin Newsom tried to fight poverty, but he kept losing.  Homeless people can be deceptively strong when you try to wrestle them.

Sure, I’d love to have California back.  I’d love to have Disneyland® back and the American Dream Vacation™, too, with bonus points for stops at the Grand Canyon and Uncle Eddie’s place.  But the beliefs that I believe most readers here have aren’t shared by most voters in California in 2021.

There was a person who saw the California ban coming:  No-Straw-Domus.

I don’t blame the native Californians – they voted against this insanity again and again, but were overruled from activist benches.  We know what sort of trash is on the benches, but what is on the table for the United States?

  • Individual Rights – these are being replaced by group rights. Reparations for crimes committed nearly two hundred years ago?  By the descendants of people who moved here from Germany in 1880?
  • Freedom of Choice – this is being replaced by coercion, explicit and implicit. Want to do business?  You can have whatever opinion you want – as long as it’s the right one.
  • Due Process – this is being replaced by guilt by inference. Red flag laws, anyone?
  • Right to Keep and Bear Arms – this is being replaced by the right of approved people to potentially be allowed to purchase a limited number of weapons and keep them locked in a safe at home. As long as we know the weapons are kitten-safe.

Propaganda for collectivism has long been in the offing.  For all of my life the programming has been in place to change attitudes to accept this – Leftists have monopolized the major networks since I was a kid.  Society has changed in ways that promote collectivism.  People move from location to location or live in monolithic cities or sterile suburbs that actively discourage people from acting together in the spirit of real community.

What is it replaced with?  City governments.  Homeowners’ Associations. Neither of those build community – those are, in larger cities, the expression of power and control.  The Mayor of Chicago holds more power than governors of many states.  That’s not any semblance of community – when is the last time you heard of anyone holding up Chicago for the face of election fairness?

What part of the mayor of Chicago weighs the most?  The scales.

That’s the downside.  But it gets better from here.

The first part of winning as an Outsider comes from knowing that you are an Outsider.  There is power in being an outsider – it only took a dozen Outsiders to eventually change the entire Roman Empire from people who worshiped Funko Pop® figurines to Christians.  Well, a dozen people and a few years.

Ideas are powerful.

Likewise, Outsiders are powerful.  Once a person realizes that they’re an Outsider, entire routes open to them.  This is a special type of freedom:

  • Freedom from the system. The system was built not to reward me, but to keep me in line, to keep me fearful.  To keep me compliant.  Recognizing that is everything.
  • Freedom from caring about the opinions of the world. Do I care about what France thinks about me?  Do I care about what Google® thinks about me?  Most (not all, but most) of the people whose opinions matter to me know it, and they all have excellent posture and dental hygiene.
  • Freedom to set my own goals. What is it that I value?  What is it that I want to accomplish?  This is mine, and mine alone.  Oh, wait, except for trash day.  I have to remember trash day.
  • Freedom to not apologize. When I make a mistake and I agree I’ve made a mistake, I own up to it, proudly.  When I don’t, I don’t apologize.  And I won’t.  Especially not for the bad jokes.
  • Freedom to change the world. And I will.  I’m going to keep going so I can inject my ideas so deeply into the Outsider psyche that the mRNA shot from Pfizer® will seem like a non-invasive procedure.

Kamala Harris is very concerned about COVID.  She heard that super-spreaders were the problem.

One piece of the puzzle, interestingly enough, came to me from crappy Star Wars® movie, The Force Awakens™.  The movie was horrible.  One thing that I couldn’t figure out was why, after killing the Emperor®, that the Rebels™ were . . . the Resistance©?

The movie was awful, partially because it was poorly written and choked with social justice.  But it revealed the mind of the Left in ways that I hadn’t realized before:

  • The Left wanted to identify with the Resistance© because they rely on powerlessness. Powerlessness is necessary to recruit Leftists – the core of Leftism is self-hate.
  • The Left is about power, but it refuses to admit it has it. That’s why Leftist professors from Leftist colleges complain about insufficient Leftism from Leftist politicians and Leftist media.  And vice versa – it becomes self-reinforcing.

Leftists rely on powerlessness as a route to power.  It is their foundational myth; it is their unifying element.  They are downtrodden, even as they control every major corporation.  They are disenfranchised, even though they control nearly every major media outlet – if there’s a cure for that, it’s unTweetable.

Twitter® is like a Leftist bank account – after you enter the wrong opinion five times, you’re locked out.

Given all of that, why am I so happy?

Because I’m free.  I’m free of my illusions.  I’m free to be an Outsider.

I’ll enjoy seeing the Gadsden flag tomorrow.  After all, there were another group of Outsiders a few years ago who seemed to like that flag.

And you remember where the Gadsden flag first flew?

On a pole.

When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets.

“Have you paid your dues, Jack?  Yes, sir.  The check is in the mail.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Note to regular readers:  This post took a rather strange turn, as they sometimes do.  I had the topic picked, and then started writing, and found that the subject and evening led to a very atypical post.  I’m going to leave this one as it is.  I fully expect Monday’s post to be more of the usual stuff.

One of my favorite quotes was from the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, “When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets.”  I read that line when I was 19 or so.  I found it in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.  It was displayed in a little indy book store and it was one of those times that it seemed like the book found me, and not the other way around – it was the first thing I saw when I walked into the store.

The book store?  That store stayed in business for about two months.  The problem was that the store only had (and I’m not exaggerating) about three dozen different books.  Looking back on it, I doubt that when the bookstore closed down that all the bills were paid – the landlord really should have seen that coming.

I thought about that phrase when I moved to Alaska with The Mrs.  Moving to Alaska isn’t like moving from one state to another down in the Lower 48.  The only real way out is by plane, and you’re not going unless you planned it.  Were all my bills paid?

I made sure they were.  Pa Wilder was quite old by that time.  Before leaving for Alaska, I was quite clear in knowing that it was possible that when we moved was the last time I would ever see him alive.  I made it a point then to tell him everything I needed to tell him, to share everything I could.  I wanted him to be at peace, and I wanted to be at peace, too.

Prepping is for more than economic collapse.

Thankfully, Pa lived more than a decade after when we moved.  He even visited us in Alaska and finally down into Houston when we moved back to the continental United States.

In my mind, there’s a part of me that always sees him in his prime.  That was back when I was 12 and Pa was the father that would work 50 hours a week at the bank.  Then Pa would come home and work my brother John (yes, that’s his name, our parents were classically uncreative) and me for 20 hours over the long summer weekend days hauling and stacking firewood for the cold winter nights up at the compound on Wilder Mountain.

When I thought of him, I always remembered that impossibly tall and competent man of my youth.  When he visited Alaska I was fully six inches taller than him, and the strong arms that had swung a sledgehammer in a mighty arc to split wood with a steel wedge were now thin with age, his walk hesitant and slow.

But he was still dad.

One thing I always did, however, was try to leave each conversation with him as a complete conversation, a capstone if you will.  I wanted to make sure that absolutely every time I talked to him I was leaving nothing unsaid.  I wanted to make sure he knew exactly what I felt.

Pa Wilder lived twenty-five years longer than he expected.  But around the time I was moving to Alaska, I could sense a change in him.  The emails that he wrote gradually developed grammatical and spelling errors.  This was a change.  Previously, Pa had been as precise as an English-teaching nun in grammar and spelling.

It was a sign.  Pa was declining.

Over time, the decline increased.  I can still recall the last time I talked to him and he recognized me.  After spending two days with him, he finally looked at me and said, “You’re John, aren’t you.”

Beyond that, we had some pleasant times, but I could tell that he didn’t recognize me.  One time he looked at me and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m your son, John.”

There was not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

When word came from my brother that Pa Wilder had passed (this was years and years ago) The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley, and I went to his funeral.  As The Mrs. and I had a private moment between all of the orchestrated family events, she asked me, “Is there anything you need to share?  Are you doing alright?”

To be clear – I did miss and do miss Pa.  But I had made sure that everything that I ever needed to say to him had been said.  My conscience was clear.  I know that, whenever he had a clear moment, he knew that I loved him.  And I knew he loved me.

I had no unresolved issues.

It’s one thing to read the phrase, “When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets,” and another to understand it as time passes and wisdom increases.  When Pa Wilder passed, I understood it.  I looked deep into myself and understood that all the bills were paid.  I had no regrets.

The Mrs. had a different experience entirely with the passing of her father several months ago.  Due to COVID restrictions, he had spent the last months of his life with absolutely no physical contact, no presence of his family.  He had been recovering from surgery in a nursing home, and never recovered enough to be discharged.

For month after month, he spent his time alone, with nothing but phone calls from those he loved.

The Mrs. was very upset about this.  Heck, The Mrs. is still upset about this – the process of paying those last bills was cruelly interrupted.  She had more things to say to him – and I understand that.  There are things I’d dearly like to say to Ma Wilder, but that ship lifted too early, and now those bills can never be paid, at least not in full.

I try now to make each meeting, each contact with those around me that I love one where they know exactly where they stand with me, and vice versa.  The idea of continuing my life with those bills, or leaving those bills with someone else isn’t something I want.

To be very clear:  what brought this topic to mind wasn’t anything in particular, just the thought that this has been a helpful philosophy for me.  I do know that the future is uncertain, so I try to live my life so I don’t have those regrets, and try to manage my relationships so that there’s never anything left unsaid.

The check is in the mail.

Courage: The Biggest Present A Parent Can Give

“Now, be careful, Fry. And if you kill anyone, make sure to eat their heart to gain their courage. Their rich, tasty courage.” – Futurama

The French never go on holidays, only retreats.

The biggest pleasure of being a father is the education of my children.  This opportunity varies.  Pugsley and The Boy are the sons of an increasingly rare commodity in 2021:  they are children of an intact family.

The Boy and Pugsley are the children of me and my wife, The Mrs.  That’s rare because many, many children are raised by families that are broken or blended in 2021.  Or, raised in a home with no natural parent.

Like me, an adopted kid.

I was fortunate.  Even though I was adopted, my parents, Ma and Pa Wilder, were a common front.  Pa Wilder knew he could enforce discipline with the same effect as Ma Wilder.  That’s an aside, but it’s important.  Men learn how to be men from their fathers.  No matter how brave and stunning a Mom is, no Mother is, or ever will be, a Father.

The plus side?  Every bag of chips is family-sized if you’re adopted.

So I feel especially good that I’ve had the opportunity to raise my boys with the full backing and support of The Mrs.   The idea that Pugsley could play me against The Mrs.?  Or vice versa?

That would never happen.

Even if The Mrs. and I were diametrically opposed, the idea that we would overrule each other in front of a kid?  Nope.  There was no way that The Mrs. and I could be split.  Even if we disagreed – that disagreement would be kept to ourselves until we had a knife fight to determine who was right.

What, you don’t do trial by combat at your house?  If you’re a first timer, make sure you have a suture kit available.  They’re cheap, and neither The Mrs. or I go for the eyes, so we have that going for us.

Raising boys isn’t easy – the only thing it’s easier than is raising girls.  From my experience, every boy passes through a gate – a gate where they engage in a fight with their father.  This gate is narrow.

With each of my boys, the fight was one I considered existential:  to make them men worthy of being called a man is a process.  And it consists of fighting the impulses that are natural to a boy.  Every 12 year old considers themselves the wisest man since Solomon, and considers their father the dullest man since Mr. Bean®.

Why couldn’t Helen Keller drive?  Because she was a woman.

I have thought about it, and the most important message have I fought (in some cases for years) to put into the skulls of my sons is simple:

  • That courage is important.
  • That courage is useless unless in service of virtue.
  • That virtue is useless unless in service of a Higher Good.

I know, I’ve tossed around several posts about virtue that don’t explicitly state that a Higher Good is important.  Virtue is important.  But virtue must have a Higher Good to be, well, Virtue.  (Atheists that are regular readers have a Wilder Exemption Card – you’re not Evil like the other ones.)

Tonight, Pugsley and I sat in the hot tub at Stately Wilder Manor.  Pugsley is currently in the mindset where he would love to own a Mustang® Shelby© 350 or a Lamborghini™ Huracán Performante®.  Thus, he has discovered Top Gear™/Grand Tour©.  These are shows that are hosted by three British guys:  Richard Hammond, James May, Jeremy Clarkson.

A hammer has lots of uses:  it can pay for a taxi ride, a dinner, or a can of Monster® energy drink from 7-11©.

Jeremy Clarkson is the big, brash guy.  He’s also an amazing presenter.  For reasons that will become apparent if you watch it (and you should) Mr. Clarkson put together a documentary on the Victoria Cross.

It’s here.

The idea of watching men be courageous is important.  It’s perhaps more important now than at any time in our history, because there has been an attempt to systematically erase courage.

Why?

The answer is simple.  Courage is an individual action.  The idea that individuals have a place in society is the anathema of the Left.  It’s the anathema of Globalism.  Everyone is a simple cog in the machinery of the world.  You exist only for the glory of the collective.

Leftists (and Globalists) feel the world doesn’t need or want individuals with courage.  The world needs individuals that do what they’re told, when they’re told to do it.  No other action is acceptable – only the action approved by the collective.  The convenience store clerk must be fired when they commit the crime of heroism to save a customer.  Individual heroism?  Courage fighting against evil?

Completely unacceptable.

I heard about this guy who donated a kidney and was a hero – so why is it that when I donate five I’m charged with a felony?

The world has, in many respects, moved away from individuals.  Have an adversary?  Hit them with missiles from a Predator® drone that is piloted by a guy sitting in a video game chair half a world away.  Where is the heroism in that?

There isn’t any.

Okay.  Maybe a little heroism. Just as much heroism as there is in properly filing documents associated with statistics of average foot size of Vietnam veterans from Vail or Valdez or Valdosta.  So, not much.

What’s required for heroism?  What’s required for courage?  This is especially irritating, since most definitions of courage floated on the Internet are filled with corporate weasel words.  It seems that properly filing a TPS® report when the temperature of the office was not exactly between 72°F and 74°F (2.3 kg and 3.7 dl) would qualify for the definition of modern courage.  Yes.  Everyone wants to live in a mall.

I got into a fight changing levels at a mall.  It escalated quickly.

Honestly, most of the definitions I find of courage on the Internet make me feel that the weasels that have tried to define it are the opposite of courageous.  They’re tepid things that promote the most mundane and boring of actions to the exalted level of “courage.”  Go to work and do your job?

You’re a hero.  You’re courageous.

I reject that.  I would say that courage requires these elements:

  • First:   Actions that are true heroism are done without regard to self.  One Victoria Cross nominee was denied the award because the plane he was piloting (while he was bleeding to death) would save him, too, if he landed it properly.
  • Second: Devotion to duty and those around you.  This, particularly, drives modern Leftists nuts.  The first devotion must be the Leftism, whatever that means on any particular day.  Devotion to a higher power?  Devotion to the people around you?
  • Third: Personal danger.  It may be as small as the idea of being embarrassed (for tiny amounts of courage), but for actual courage?  Let’s be real.  Standing up on a top of a hill when surrounded by 6,000 screaming enemies and throwing grenades until you run out?  That’s courageous.  The stuff that most people peddle today as courage . . . isn’t.

One definition had, “has to be scared.”  Nope.  Sorry.  Pissed off is close enough.  I imagine that 50% of the people we’d all agree are courageous were just plain mad.

There are lots of examples of people who showed great courage simply because they were angry.  They had lost friends.  They were unwilling to take one step back.  Fear isn’t an element of courage – fear is the enemy of courage.

“You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap?  There’s an animal kind of trick.  A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

That’s courage.  Bonus points if you can name the book.

The Mrs. said she wanted to spice up the bedroom.  I hope she likes paprika.

Here’s the big lie, the thing that they want you to believe:  the era of courage is over.  The ideas of individuals don’t matter.  The actions of individuals don’t matter.

As long as humanity survives, the actions of individuals will always matter.  As long as fathers teach sons, the era for courage isn’t over.

That’s why I play this game.  Courage matters.  Virtue matters.  A Higher Power matters.  Those are the things that make men.  That’s why I love this part of the game.  One way a man lives on are in the values he leaves to his sons.

Every time I have the opportunity to help my boys, I know I’m winning.

Always remember:  We’re not done.  This isn’t over.

Three Kinds Of Evil

“You’re semi-evil. You’re quasi-evil. You’re the margarine of evil. You’re the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough.” – Austin Powers

I heard that Kim Jong Un was evil because he had no Seoul.

Evil.

Several of my posts have been about Evil recently.  I use the capital E because, in my conception of the world, Evil is a force.  I know your mileage may vary, but I think that today’s post can benefit you regardless of your belief system.  Stick with me on this one.  I brought cookies and juice boxes for halftime.

Normally, I had thought of Evil (when I thought of it) as just plain Evil.  The idea that there were different kinds of Evil wasn’t something that I dwelled on.  Bad is bad, so why categorize it?  It’s like determining if Biden’s morning Depends™ is worse than his night time Depends© – he calls them both Executive Odors and then talks about Corn Pop.

Well, it turns out that for me, when I read about these categories it made Evil easier for me to see.  It also made the progression of Evil easier for me to understand.  And if I could better see Evil and understand Evil, I could anticipate Evil.  Most importantly, I could try to avoid personally being Evil.

And that’s why I thought this was worthy of a Friday post, where I normally write about health.  What could be healthier (for your mind, if not your soul) than not being Evil?

The first form of Evil is one that most often came to mind when I thought of Evil, and that is Luciferian Evil.  Describing this type of Evil is easy:  “If it feels good, do it.”

What feels like the United States but isn’t?  Washington, D.C.

If that sounds familiar, the entire decade of the 1960s and most of the 1970s was dedicated to exactly that phrase.  Regardless of social conviction, regardless of taboo, regardless of the impact upon society, the idea was to live for yourself.  How else would you explain disco music?

In theory, that’s a great idea.  (Not disco, but living for yourself.)  In practice, however, living only for yourself has an amazing cost.  I’ll admit that I know this because, at one phase of my life, I thought that this was just fine.

Oh, not in the way of stealing things, or breaking things, but in the realm of personal relationships.  Let’s just say I had a large number of girlfriends, some of whom may have had self-esteem issues.  We’ll leave it at that.

Doing what feels good at the expense of the context of a traditional relationship has consequences.  In the end, it feels empty.  Lust is never as good as love, though it was easier to find at 11:30 on a Friday night.

I don’t have a problem with low self-esteem, considering how awesome I am.

Living life just for pleasure ended up making me feel lonely and empty and nihilistic – the very partnership that a stable traditional marriage brings was what was avoided.  But, you know, it felt good.  That makes it okay.  Right?

Well, no.  That’s what makes it Evil.  When I gave that up?  Life became better.

The second type of Evil is more Evil than the first one.  Dr. Bruce Charlton (LINK) referenced it as Ahrimanic Evil*.  (Dark Brightness (LINK) had the excellent original post I read and the link to Charlton’s site.)

Ahrimanic Evil requires Luciferian Evil to open the door.  “If it feels good, do it” seems to lead to “everyone should follow the value system of the material world and globalist systems.  It’s for their own good.”  That coercion is Ahrimanic Evil.

Just as Luciferian Evil removes the spirituality out of sex, Ahrimanic Evil removes the virtue out of sacrifice for society.  If you’re against the soul-destroying, controlling, Chinese Social Credit system, what you’re really opposing is Ahrimanic Evil.

I hear that the unit of mass George Soros uses is the pentagram.

The soulless Yuppie of the 1980s became the architect of the Ahrimanic control structures of political correctness and cancel culture.  Ahrimanic Evil wants you to live in pods and eat bugs and take the vaccine.  Fun?  Not on this Evil.  It’s about the relentless and constant pursuit of material success.

It seems like, since 1990 or so, we’ve been living in a world based on materialism, denying the spiritual or natural component of human existence.  The libertine (not libertarian) excesses of the 1960s and 1970s gave way in the 1990s to full-on materialism.  If it’s good for the economy, it’s perfect.  Free trade, open borders?  Who cares about what the consequences are to society as long as the economic systems function?

I’ll admit, in the 1990s I was seduced by this model.  I worried more about economic systems than I did about the social structure of the United States.  Was I for NAFTA then?  Yeah.  What could go wrong?

A lot.  It looks like Ross Perot was right.  But during that time I was following the same model – I pursued my career as a top priority.  Yup, I’ve tried to put that Evil behind me, too.

Want it, buy it, forget it.

The last stage that Charlton mentions is Sorathic Evil.  It is the most evil of the three Evils.

Sorathic Evil requires the progress from Luciferian to Ahrimanic Evil in society.  In practice, you’d think that having a global police surveillance state was the worst thing you could think of.  You’ve seen all the films, right, and listened to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which was (sort of) an attack on the Ahrimanic Evil they saw coming.

But what is this final Evil?

Destruction.  Hate.  Spite.

You’d think that Evil would be happy with the image, in Orwell’s words with this: “imagine a boot stamping a human face forever.”  Total control, through the end of time.

Nope.  That’s not enough.  Sorathic Evil requires destruction.  And, I’ll admit that I felt that way once or twice.  It, like the lustfulness or materialism, is soul-destroying.  After I released feeling that way, I felt immediately better, like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

The end state of Sorathic Evil is despair.  It is envy.  It is the desire for the destruction of others for no other reason than you want them to be destroyed.  But as we have seen recently, the destruction of others is not enough:  Trump transgressed the Ahrimanic system, so Trump (and all who supported him) must be (in their minds) destroyed.

If it were just about justice, that would be simple enough – the absence of Trump was the win for the Left.  After Obama ceased to be President, I ceased to care about him.  Leftists, the current embodiment of Luciferian, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic Evil, want Trump and his supporters to suffer.  If we all changed to their viewpoint today, it would not be enough.

I interviewed to be a mime once – but I didn’t get the job.  Must have been something I said.

Imagine Cambodia times the Cultural Revolution times the Holodomor.  Squared.  That is the future the Left wants for us, and I’ll be writing about that for Monday’s post.  And that is the Evil we face.

What they fail to realize is that is the future that they will also get for themselves if they are successful.  There won’t be any Gender Studies Majors on the Central Committee.  The Left would line up the Leftist professors to be shot far faster than the Right ever would.

The only way to feed the Beast is to make people suffer.

I’m not going to say I’m a great person.  I regularly meet with and interact with people who are far better people than I will ever be.  I will say, I try.  But by having lived through and let go of these three types of Evil, I immediately felt better.

The other thing I’ve learned is that Good is stronger than Evil.  Good fills the void, while Evil only brings additional hunger.

We’re not done.

This isn’t over.

*(As far as the terms Charlton references, you don’t need to follow the rabbit trail as to where he got the names for the Evils and points I’m making in this post.  It gets a bit esoteric, and you can spend hours, days or weeks wandering down there, but Charlton points the way if you are interested.  Beware, it’s filled with esoteric weirdness.)