“Except lawnmowers don’t have turn signals.” – Psych
It’s obvious that guy never read the script.
Today I welded up a riding lawnmower deck.
It was the first time in years that I’d had the garage clean enough to get whatever tool I wanted without conducting a gymnastics routine worthy of a gold medal – and I didn’t even have a Soviet Commissar that was getting ready to shoot my family.
My garage had been so chaotic that it could have been the White House press corps falling all over themselves explaining why President * intended to lose a fight with gravity going up Air Force One. But that’s another story. I’m sure Snopes® has already debunked that President * fell down, and instead called it “Mostly False” because he obviously fell up the stairs.
Back to welding up the mower deck:
My welding is really, really bad – it looks like toddlers played with molten metal, but without all of the emergency room visits. Regardless, the mower deck seemed more stable when I was done. Pugsley pronounced the mower “fixed” and was happy. If the crack in the mower deck stays fixed it will be due to luck and not my Civil War surgeon-level skill at welding.
You can imagine my glee when my kids had splinters. “Fetch me the hacksaw. . .”
Fixing the mower deck was important for several reasons. First, it showed Pugsley that when something is broken, if we think we can fix it, we should at least try. There have been a couple of times that this has backfired on me like the time I burned out a wiring harness on a Nissan Altima™ installing a stereo. Likewise, I try to tell The Mrs. that if she wouldn’t have stopped me from drilling that hole in my skull, my plan really would have worked.
Second, it showed Pugsley that our destiny is in our hands. Sure, that’s not always exactly true. Those dinosaurs munching on dino cabbage on the Yucatan peninsula certainly were having a legendarily bad day when the meteorite blazed them into future motor oil and plastics for making G.I. Genderless® action figures.
But most of the time, it really is true. We make our own destiny. Our choices, our courage, our virtue, and our tenacity are much greater indicators of our futures than any outside force. That’s a message I want etched in Pugsley’s mind. Of course, I might regret that if he chooses my nursing home – he might choose the Ayn Rand Retirement Villa®, where their motto is: “We only feed you if you have the will to get to the dining room.”
Just like Schrödinger, I should probably have an open casket. You know, to be sure.
Third, we don’t give up. If we fail, we try again. I fully imagine my preschool-level welds will have been just like bear porridge: too hot or too cold and not at all just right.
That’s okay. Another message to Pugsley is that we’ll try again. Honestly, these were very bad welds, but they were the best welds I’ve ever made. They may hold, but I doubt it. I think the metal will crack so badly that Pugsley will claim he was from a broken home.
Then? I’ll weld it again.
One of the reasons I engage in these adventures is that I want to inoculate Pugsley against Leftism. Fixing a mower deck is a small part of that, but still, those messages remain.
How will this inoculate Pugsley? The Left’s main reason for living is being a victim. The Narrative of the Left is always, everywhere, the same:
- They Are The Victims
This is the first tenet of Leftism. Everywhere, always, the Left is the victim class. Can I prove it? Sure.
Look at any protest. Ever see a Leftist throw themselves in front of, say, a semi-truck? They want to die. They hate themselves. They look to the world and see how utterly wretched they are, and they hate the world that made them with a religious fervor. If they can’t die, they want to see the world burn.
There is no redemption for them.
I was going to go as a suicide victim for Halloween, but I decided to go as Jeffery Epstein instead.
- They Seek To Convert By Creating Envy
Not everyone can be a True Leftist. Many are converted by creating a culture of envy. Envy is a powerful Evil. Why?
Envy makes a person want what others have. Did the other people earn it? In many cases, certainly not. Trust fund kids didn’t earn the right to drive a Lamborghini®. And lots of people who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year don’t work nearly as hard as the people who fix the streets or flip burgers.
Looks like COVID inoculation day in a Red State.
That’s a fertile ground for Envy, since in many cases there is only a minimal relationship between happiness and money. When Envy takes over, however, I’ve seen teams tear themselves apart because a single team member convinced everyone that The Man was taking advantage of them.
In 2021, I also see Leftists upset because other people get better jobs. I mean, why wouldn’t someone with a degree in Medieval Albanian Poetry not be making $234,000 a year two years after college? I mean, they were so smart in understanding what Murgatroid the Great meant when he said, “Oh, my headache ist such embiggened by a trough of wine thy previous night.”
- They Seek To Divide The Country By Making A Country Meaningless
What is a country? A country is made by people born there from parents who were born there from grandparents who were born there. There, I’ve said it. If a person’s lineage isn’t at least that deep?
They’re not really American. Oh, sure, we’ve welcomed them, but unless they’d name their son Brandon or their daughter Kayla (both names I detest) they’re not really American.
If they have a second passport? Not American. Their loyalty is divided.
Being a part of a country means something.
The Left seeks to make it mean nothing. The Left thinks we should take care of a child 15,000 miles away the same way that we would take care of one in our hometown. Certainly, I understand that, but, really, doesn’t that kid have parents and a government? I am compassionate – but I care a lot more for the people in my town than for people who aren’t.
In Chicago, you ignore both.
The Left wants an endless stream of refugees into the United States. Why? So everything that made the United States great becomes the average of countries that were so awful that people came here instead of staying there.
- The End Goal: To Gain Power.
Aesop rightly pointed out that this is the end goal in the comments a few weeks ago. And, he’s right. Leftists can’t gain control of the country unless they subvert the things that made the United States wonderful. This is also true of the West in general.
They must create enough anger, distrust, and division as possible. In this crisis, they imagine that they will step into power. This worked in France. In Russia. In China. In Venezuela.
The goal is that this will work in the West the same way it worked all over the world.
To make this happen, the values and beliefs of the Right have to go: they become politically incorrect in a storm of feigned weakness and victimhood. If you’ve seen pictures of Antifa®, one thing is amazingly obvious: they’re physically weak.
I’m sure he’s planning to be the poet in the collective farm. Or maybe make special bracelets for the farmworkers.
People who lift weights are more likely to become . . . Right wing. Lifting a weight removes illusions – it’s me against the weight. The man isn’t holding me back. No outside force is oppressing me. And, lo and behold, the people who are lifting will help you.
But only if asked. They won’t come out and suggest a thing. It’s you versus the Iron. They’ll help, but the know, deep down inside, it’s your struggle, not theirs.
So, it’s that simple. Learn strength.
And, teach strength. Teach responsibility.
I’m sorry. I meant weak bedwetters.
That’s why Pugsley and I welded the mower deck. We’re responsible. We can try to fix it. And we won’t give up.
If you want an antidote to the Left, you won’t get much better than that. Lift weights. Be responsible for your own life and your own surroundings.
While I’d like to be able to weld better, but as you can see, fixing the deck a dozen times might provide a much better result.
Almost as much fun as amateur welding is splitting wood (with a wedge and hammer, not a hydraulic machine). I had some fun with that last Saturday. The chain saw cut the trunk of an unwanted pear tree into a cylinder roughly a foot in diameter by a foot long, but I needed quick-burning campfire wood. I’d picked up a wedge and 12 lb. hammer at a garage sale (just in case I needed it, some day, maybe when the gas and electric heat was out with no schedule to be restored, as if that could ever happen…) So, it was time to teach them to work together.
The last time I split wood was about 40 years ago, and it was softwood, I could stick an axe into it, and then bang the wood with the axe stuck in it on the ground until it split. The last time I’d swung a sledgehammer was about 30 years ago, breaking up some old concrete. Accuracy was not a requirement on that job.
So, I picked a likely spot on the log to start the splitting, tapped the wedge in just far enough to hold still, raised the hammer high over my head, and brought it swiftly down somewhere near the wedge, just close enough to knock the wedge off into the grass. The wood was not split.
I put the wedge back into the wood, raised the hammer, and brought it down on the corner of the wedge, which scampered back into the grass. “I hope nobody is watching this,” I thought, “but if they are, they’ll see that I don’t give up easily.”
I put the wedge back into the wood, raised the hammer just a foot, and brought it down square on the wedge. The wood did not split. The wedge toppled over.
I put the wedge back into the wood, raised the hammer about two feet, and brought it back down. The wedge toppled over, but there was a new crack in the wood.
With practice, I was able to combine accuracy and power, and it turned out that some parts of the log were easier to split than the part that I started with.
…
An hour later, I had a stack of nicely split firewood. Along the way, I’d had to use a crowbar to free the wedge, totally embedded within the wood but without separating the small piece from the main body. And I’d used the axe to finish some splits that the wedge started. Next time will be easier, and next time, I’ll be more confident.
The wood, by the way, will be donated to my church, which has found that gathering around a fire is a pleasant substitute for indoor worship during pandemic restrictions.
If you did not break the head off the sledge hammer handle, you did well enough. I still have the broken handle as a reminder of my early attempts. My aim has improved.
Funny you should mention that… I had loaned the wedge and hammer to my 24-year old son for one of his social engagements, and the handle came back broken. I pointed out to him the smudge of wedge paint at the broken point. “I see what you did there.” And then I put a new handle in (but I still have the old one, too). You never know when an old hammer handle will come in handy.
I mostly used my sledge hammer to make holes for hugelkultur. I hope to be up for that again this year. Very satisfying.
I spent enough time with a hammer and a wedge that I’m fairly accurate, though my misses are . . . spectacular.
Not to get too ‘Blut und Boden’ but this reminds me of the importance of precision in language. We often use words like nation and state interchangeably but they are not the same. A state is just a political entity which is why we can have people with nothing in common joined by political bonds no matter how much they dislike each other. A nation? To quote Sam Francis:
“Every real nation is a ‘people of a common blood’ and ‘descended from the same ancestors.’ A nation — from the Latin word meaning ‘to be born’ — can have no other meaning. A nation is a community defined primarily by a common blood, and it is only on the basis of a common blood that its population becomes a people.”
In a lot of significant ways we are now a nation without a state and the state we are living in is actively opposing us and seeking to replace us, all as part of the plan of the Left to establish their Utopian dream that will totally work this time.
And that is why I tried to use country. The whole nation discussion is another (longer) post . . . . You very accurately point out that there is a huge difference between a nation and a country. And an empire.
Yes, leftists are all those things you mention, while we on the other side are not. But there is one additional trait in which we differ, left vs. right. Leftists are cowards who do nothing as individuals. Those on the right tend to be go-it-alone types. Fiercely independent. When a leftist identifies a problem in his life, its not just his problem, its your problem, too. The guy on the right realizes that he muffed up somewhere and tries (quietly) to fix things, himself.
The left is intolerant of dissent, however minor, and very vocal in their intolerance. Think clowders of screeching alleycats. We on the right tend to smolder in silence until conditions demand action. Think taciturn Saxons, slow to hate, but fierce when provoked. This trait of stoicism works against us in modern times where s/he who whines loudest wins in the social sphere.
When conditions become sufficiently intolerable, we on the right will finally band together, at least for a time. We will not claim victimhood. We will not voice outrage or cite wounded feelings. We certainly will not appeal to Big Brother government for succor. Some will take savage glee in setting things aright, but most will view it as unfortunate necessity. The battle lines are drawn, and we did not draw them. Lock and load, my friends. The time grows near.
True. The classic example from Dr Tocqueville of people who wait for Le Bureau des Arbres Sur La Rue versus Americans still hold true today. Your way is blocked by a dead fall on the road and “spot the real American” is on.
Indeed – they are the termites. But termites do a LOT of damage.
“Likewise, I try to tell The Mrs. that if she wouldn’t have stopped me from drilling that hole in my skull, my plan really would have worked.”
Trephining actually works in some cases, don’t give up on the theory. Some day you might have swelling of the brain due to getting too close to a mammoth while trying to spear it, or have demons that need to get out.
++
“…people who use wrapping paper for money and whose religion commands them to follow people with strange hats.”
Why do you hate Catholics? 🙁
++
Seriously though…
Don’t underestimate Leftists. They are weak, and feminized, but they are willing to fight. Or at least to yell at you until another member is ready to jump you from behind, or you try to get away to get to your job, when they jump you from behind in numbers. This violence in pursuit of power will only escalate. They may be bad at violence, but they are willing to engage in it. If 1 side is always on the defensive, the other side will eventually win given enough time.
Compare the fantasies of the Left with those of the Right, knowing that visualization precedes actualization:
The Left fantasizes about actions. Actions such as punching nazis, spitting on evil white people, burning down cities. Then they do it.
The Right fantasizes about other people taking action to save them. Coloreds suddenly voting in the majority for the Republicans. For the Republicans to suddenly start fighting. For Democrats to become ashamed of their actions and start fighting fair. And the end-game fantasy: cops will come to take their guns, so finally they can fight without the need to leave their EZchair. Of course this assumes the Left is dumb enough to seize guns rather than slowly strangle ownership, and it assumes that the Left cares about the lives of cops.
Summary:
The Left is weak individually, but so are fire ants. Neither comes at you 1 vs. 1
Very true. Don’t discount the danger, and don’t discount the commitment. A True Leftist will stay that way until they die.
And there lies the only solution.
Or we wait for the cats and wine to do the trick.
Satanic Marxists are out to burn it all down better by any means necessary.
There is no plan after that besides enrichment and retribution.
A huge vacuum opened in Alaska as comrade kommissar Blinken got smacked down by the CCP.
Our external enemies are licking their chops in anticipation and the fifth column of traitors is happy with that arrangement.
Those who cannot create get busy destroying.
They are. And where Trump negotiated from strength, Biden is, um, you know the thing.
And the Chinese know the thing, too.
Good stuff, as always.
One nitpick: I believe that should be “first tenet”, not “first tenant”. I know you’re just trying to keep us on our toes, Sensei.
D’oh!!!!! I saw this when I couldn’t edit. Thank you!
I’ll fix it tomorrow. (PEBCAK – Problem Exists Between Couch And Keyboard)
Welding is something I’ve never done. The Missus’ cousin’s husband does a lot of welding. I should go hang out with him for a few days, just to familiarize myself with the skill.
I’ll need to add that to my Man-List.
In 10 minutes you’ll be far better than I ever will be. I’m self-taught. Ugly, ugly welds.
Edited by JW: Thank you!!!!