“Don’t eat the eggs. We put LSD in the eggs.” – The Men Who Stare At Goats
I never trust a goose journalist – too much propa-gander.
This is a Lame Repost, didn’t have time to finish the longer post I’m working on.
Aesop (no, not our modern one who appears to have just emerged from his self-imposed technological monkdom by solving the riddle of Aesop’s Cables– LINK) was a storyteller who died in 564 B.C. This was long enough ago that the Greeks had yet to find the drug that stops the aging process: hemlock. To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”
But one of my favorite of Aesop’s stories is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
The story is very simple, though when I was a kid they tarted it out so that it was fifteen minutes long and they could keep us shut up while the film ran so our teachers could take smoke breaks. The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg involves a farmer and his wife. They have a goose. Each day, the goose lays a golden egg. I know this sounds like the details found on page 347 of Joe Biden’s economic plan, but bear with me.
11 year old me thought that was amazing!
In Greek mythology, Chiron was a half-horse, half-human doctor. I guess he was the Centaur for Disease Control.
Current day me?
I’d sell the goose to a private equity fund for $3 billion dollars and buy myself an island and then start a podcast where I drink bourbon every week with Elon Musk and lie to our wives about when we were going to come home. We could call it Manhattans With Musk®. Elon and I would just sit back and laugh as the private equity fund clones the goose and then crashes the gold market with goose clone gold.
Or maybe the cloning process doesn’t work and the private equity fund then has 45,000 cloned geese that lay eggs made out of whatever fake metal the Chinese use (Chinesium®?) to make all those tiny metal statues of Bandersnatch Combersnoot. I mean Blandercrab Clambakehatch. Blendersnout Clumberbake? Oh, yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, that I bought on Ebay® after too many Manhattans.
Okay, this is actually a chocolate statue of Bunderslam Camberthatch. We had a dog that weighed six pounds and ate a one pound bag of chocolate. Killed him. 14 years later.
But back to Aesop.
In Aesop’s story, the stupid farmers couldn’t cope with getting a single, solid gold goose egg each day. Nope.
An aside: How much would a golden goose egg be worth?
The answer, at $1900 per ounce gold, is $176,640. (For those of you playing our home game: remember to convert to troy ounces.)
So, yeah, these greedy Greek peasants couldn’t just wait and have $176,640 a day show up out of the goose’s butt. So?
They killed it.
What do the Irish call fool’s gold? Shamrock.
Yes. They killed it. And when they took their pudgy stupid fingers and looked for gold? They found nothing but Greek goose guts. Oops! Instead of having a creature that slowly made them immensely wealthy, they ended up with whatever it is you eat that’s made out of goose. Pâté de foie gras? It’s okay if you want your goose . . . de-livered.
I bring this up, because that’s what’s happening to Western Civilization. I mean, not being made into pâté, but having the goose that gave Western Civilization our prosperity is being killed.
And it really is happening.
Right now.
The wonderful and amazing thing about Western Civilization is that it has produced, by far, the greatest amount of prosperity and wealth ever seen in the history of mankind. Heck, North Korea loves western rock: Sweet Child In A Mine is one of their favorite songs. They love the Guns, but said we can keep the Roses. Regardless, there has never in the history of the world been a group as amazing as Western Civilization has been.
Ever.
Nearly every invention that’s worth mentioning has been invented by Western Civilization. Nearly all the wealth that’s been produced in the world, has been produced through ideas started in Western Civilization.
So, we all win, right?
Well, no.
I’ve heard (years ago) propaganda that claimed that every culture is equally valid. This is, of course, a Big Lie®. I’m not saying that people who live in mud huts who really know how to wok a dog must move to the suburbs and eat McDonalds®. Certainly not! If people wish to live in mud huts and eat cât-e de foie gras? That’s fine – I sincerely hope that they enjoy it. Nah, I don’t – just kitten.
But they have no right to move to the suburbs in Minnesota and have people pay for their every need.
Cannibals never eat entitled kids – they always taste spoiled.
But in 2020, the idea that everyone on Earth is, somehow, entitled to live in a society that they had exactly no part in creating? Sure! Let’s call it a right. They devastated their home country, so why not let them do that in Minneapolis, too?
As near as I can figure it out, the only answer as to why this happens is Leftism. Leftism is fixated on creating a world where equality of outcome is the biggest goal. That means that no person on Earth should have anything more than any other.
Except, of course, for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaires like Bill Gates and important people in Washington D.C. like the guy who writes the tax code. I sincerely hope that Leonardo DiCaprio never gets injured in a car accident on a Star Wars® movie – I would hate it if he were Han DiCaprio.
The answer is always famine.
But to a Leftist, a murderer in prison is due the same physical comforts and opportunities as an upstanding member of the community that has worked 2500 hour years for decades and saved their money for retirement. Of course, the irony is that when everyone has the right to move to the United States, it ends with no one having any rights at all. Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and that guy who writes the tax code.
This is the reality of Leftism in the West: Leftists feel that prosperity comes from (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) luck. Except when they win, in which case it was completely deserved. Leftists believe that since prosperity is unequally distributed, they can just redistribute it at will because prosperity isn’t earned.
This is the same idea that led to walls around the communist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: People are the property of the state. Differences in outcomes aren’t the result of cultural differences. Differences in outcomes must be a mistake, right?
According to Leftists, yes.
As I write these words, the West is facing a crossroads in every single Western country. The idea corrupting it is simple and insidious: that Western achievement is based on nothing but theft and lies, and that all men on Earth should be able to move to Western countries because everyone on Earth is owed the same lifestyle as people in Western countries have.
Used with permission.
This, my friends, is killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg as Aesop described over 2,500 years ago. The major theme of Leftism in 2020 is that cultures that exists on a pre-technological level, and that the residents of said culture should have the right to not only live in, but live in and direct the cultures of Western culture.
For whatever reason, the cultures of many nations have failed to produce a society that is capable of producing Western Civilization levels of comfort and wealth. It’s beyond this post to describe why that is. I’m sure that a culture producing wealth and prosperity is all random. Speaking of random, what’s the difference between a Leftist and a random word generator? Sometimes the random word generator tells the truth.
But hey, at least we’ll still have hemlock.
Right?
ZH ran an interesting article on this topic just yesterday.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/beware-kamala-harris-neo-marxist-idea
The main inventions of Western Civ that gave rise to all the rest were The Scientific Revolution, The Age of Enlightenment and The Industrial Revolution. The first two depended on Mental Outlook. The last depends on Abundant Cheap Hydrocarbons.
Equity of outcome vs equality of opportunity / socialism vs capitalism / immigrants vs ‘Murica are all basically arguments over mental outlook.
But never forget that Abundant Cheap Hydrocarbons are in fact the true Golden Egg that keeps Western Civ going. When those are at last depleted in the very near future, our Goose is Cooked.
https://www.voronoiapp.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.voronoiapp.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fvoronoi-Visualizing-the-Scale-of-Global-Fossil-Fuel-Production-20240510130548.webp&w=1080&q=75
The USA and Canada have enough known coal reserves to keep the lights on for 2,000 years.
We have enough uranium and other fissiles to keep the lights on until the sun burns out, as long as we keep recycling them (like even the French are smart enough to do) instead of throwing them away after the first use, as mandated by peanut-head Carter.
I was behind a truck yesterday that had a window decal which said….”This truck runs on beer and stripper glitter”. So apparently we’ve got more to fall back on than just coal reserves.
Hahahaha – stripper glitter!
Totally agree with your main points. There’s a LOT of coal still out there, and we have the technology to stretch nuclear resources forever. The problem is I believe we lack the social will to effectively use ther resources.
Existing coal mines will be exhausted in the next 20 years. Good luck getting the permits to open vast new underground mines.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/coal/how-much-coal-is-left.php
Current US nuclear fuel use is insane. After 6 months in a power reactor, fuel rods have radioactive waste buildup that gets them moved to an on-site swimming pool to sit for years and cool off both thermally and radiologically. Nobody has the guts to move them by rail or interstate highway to a reprocessing plant that has never been built (or for that matter to the Yucca Flat permanent disposal site, which has). Such a plant would mean embracing civilian production of mass quantities of nuke bomb plutonium, and the US has nixed this so we can be a shining example to deter other nations from going this route, which as you note only the French have done.
Nukewaste and weapon proliferation concerns remain insurmountable barriers to what is technically possible with nukepower. IMHO.
Of course, anything is possible in the field of dreams. For example, Oklo has a plan to do train-borne fuel recycling to produce rods for their 0.015-0.050 GWe small modular reactors (SMRs) that look like they are housed in an Aspen ski lodge instead of a concrete containment dome. Their hip female narrator uses the word “transuranic” a lot to avoid using the scary “plutonium” word. SMRs are all the rage to power The Upcoming AI Revolution. Hey, Oklo just got $15 million with an M from the Feds, so you KNOW its gonna happen – just look at all the SLS rockets NASA has launched for a development investment of $12 billion with a B! It would take 20 – 65 Oklo SMRs to replace a single average 1.000 GW commercial nuclear powerplant now in operation. When you scatter nuclear tech like that all over from hell and breakfast, what could possibly go wrong?
https://oklo.com/about/default.aspx
Yes. Time for nuclear is now.
Just your reminder that the founder & then-Admiral in charge of the U.S. navy heard that Carter was running for president, he asked “Who the —- is this guy?”
Carter was such a mediocrity in the nuclear navy that Rickover never let him stand a watch on a live pile.
He was a spireful mutant avant la lettre.
But we have Solar!
Technological civilization (at scale) requires energy. The time to leapfrog up is now.
I recently mentioned this problem elsewhere and someone told me I should do a crowdfund. Since I’ve started it, I should see it through.
If you can help, I’d appreciate it.
https://gofund.me/98c2f4ad
We’re over the goal. If you contributed, thank you. Anything over the amount I named is going to the Cajun Navy.
Looks like a happy Thanksgiving is incoming!
These people are just flat out evil. They’re sold on the premise we peons/deplorables will be eliminated (Helene & Milton are stair-steps toward that goal), and they’ll become Masters of the Universe.
Fat chance.
The problem is not that they’ll fail. The problem is how many millions of us will they kill on the way to failing this time.
My over/under is a population decrease of 200 million before we finally win. But only if it kicks off soon.
They are.
Last Saturday, a car with a flat tire pull up at a nearby curb. I slender female college student (volleyball player, I was to find out) got out, looked at the damage, and sighed. Then she went to the trunk, pulled out the tools and the spare, and started changing the tire. I offered that I would not assume she needed help, but if she did, I’d be nearby. She did ask for advice about the proper placement of the jack, but did the rest herself. As she worked, a middle-aged man strolled by on his way to a football game. “Nice work,” he said, “my kids wouldn’t have any idea how to do that.” Judging by her fitness, facial features, and trace of a accent, I believe that the woman was a Chinese visitor. And that, my friends, is a very bad sign for the rest of us.
Lathechuck
A very bad sign.
Communism never ends in famine.
It starts there.
It ends in the Cauçescus dragged out and stood up against a wall, protesting their innocence right up until the detachment leader says “Fire!”.
(Personally, I think they should have executed them inside a crowded movie house.
One, because more witnesses tends to lessen the future urge of anyone else to repeat the behavior.
Two, because yelling “Fire!” inside a crowded movie theater would make a monkey out of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and who doesn’t like a great historical prank like that??)
https://i.imgur.com/mmJuDIL.png
Hahahaha – I love point 2.