Bud Light: “You Never Go Full Bud Light.” Ben And Jerry’s: “Hold My Beer.”

“Lt. Uhura, you’ve interrupted my song. I’m sorry, but there’ll be no ice cream for you tonight.” – Star Trek, TOS

I hear that they’re going to release their famous, “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler” flavor.

I think I might have had Ben & Jerry’s® ice cream once, probably 20 years or more ago.  It was not especially memorable.  I think the flavor was something like, Kill Those Who Worship Jesus Crunch, but I sure couldn’t taste the hate.  It was more of a pistachio flavor.

I can certainly remember the first company that I said, “I’m not going to buy your stuff because you hate me”, and that was Levi Strauss & Co.© products, including anything made by Dockers™.  Why?  They committed to the abolition of private gun ownership sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s.  Although I hadn’t heard the phrase BFYTW, it was my BFYTW moment.  I resolved to not buy things from people who hated me.

Sadly, Levi’s® is still in business.

On Monday, I wrote about the Frankfurt School, a dedicated group of commies that dedicated their lives to destroying all that is good and wholesome in the world in order to replace it with soulless communism.  I imagine they were great at parties.  Monday’s post, rather, was about how there was a continual attack on the people of the West about their history.

The funny thing about being exposed to the idea that there are a group of people that hate America and all it stood for is that their power diminishes.  Yeah, subtle propaganda still works even when you know about it, but in 2023 the propaganda is so unsubtle as to be confused with a Brawndo® ad.

It’s got what plants crave:  it’s got electrolytes.

You can’t unsee the propaganda.  And, you’re soaking in that propaganda.  Here’s the latest two minutes hate, delivered right on time for your 4th of July pleasure by Ben & Jerry’s™:

Ben and Jerry saw an ice cream truck in their neighborhood and ran it down.  “What do you guys want?”  “Nothing, we just wanted to tell you we’re vegan.”

Yeah, you read that right.  They just Bug Lighted® themselves.  They were trying to

I wandered over to the Twitter® comment section on this, and it was bloodier than people being stuck between Hunter Biden and a pile of cocaine.  It was worse than that, even after you factor in the mass of venereal diseases that must be the only things holding Hunter’s underwear together.  After looking through them at length, I found zero comments supporting whatever Leftist social media genius that they left with the password on July 3.

But social media from large conglomerates like Unilever®, which owns Ben & Jerry’s©, don’t do anything that isn’t planned.  Bud Light’s® problems aren’t the result of some crazy person acting on their own.  And Ben & Jerry™ intended this.

The virtue signal Ben & Jerry® was trying to light was one where Mount Rushmore would be given back to the American Indians that owned it.  Of course, the American Indians who owned it killed a batch of previous American Indians to take it, and since the place around Mount Rushmore isn’t exactly the garden spot of the world, they were kicked out of a much nicer place.

It warmed my heart that some nice person asked the most relevant question:  “Hey, Ben & Jerry’s®, why don’t you start?”

To me it’s like what I want to say to the government when they want me to give up my guns.  “You first.”

The amazing part to me is that this has nothing at all to do with ice cream.  It’s about projecting the woke values of a company owned by faceless corporate overlords to erase the history of the United States.  It has nothing to do with ice cream, and everything to do with an agenda.  After you see it, you can’t unsee it.  I’ll just re-print the relevant Stonetoss:

Burgers?

Ben & Jerry’s©, and, by proxy their corporate overlords are selling hate.  The hate?  Against you.  To be clear, this should come as a zero surprise since Ben & Jerry® hate you and want to erase you and your forefathers from history because you’re inconvenient to a business model that wants to sell only to nupeeple who are perfect economic units.

Heck, if they’re bored, they’ll remove American Indians from their products just to make nupeeple:

Is Land O’ Lakes® saying, “Keep the land, get rid of the Indians”?

Me?  I’m hoping that Ben & Jerry’s® becomes Been Gone & Jerry’s©, an out of business ice cream company that was put out of business because it hated its customers and the country that made it.  Then they can have Wilder Ice Cream©.  Maybe I’ll make a flavor called Been Gone & Jerry’s™.  That one gets most of its flavor from vanilla and me taking pleasure from Ben & Jerry’s® failing.

France, Hot Mimes, And The Fate Of The West

“We’re from France.” – The Coneheads

I friend at work quit to become a mime.  Haven’t heard from him since.

I’ve written about the Frankfurt School before, but when I did a search on the site it came up with two results.  One in July 2021 (LINK), and another in July 2022 (LINK).  So, since it’s July 2023, it must be time to write about the Frankfurt School again.

The reason I keep coming back to them is that the story of the Frankfurt School is the story of a small group of committed Marxists that created lot of what is wrong in the world.  It’s shocking, right, that a group dedicated to destroying everything good in a nation might be the wrong sorts of people to let in?

I’m becoming convinced that the Frankfurt School created a big part of what’s wrong in France.  And Great Britain.  And Sweden.  And the United States.  And, well, all of Western Civilization.

Save the bees.  Plant the trees.  Deport refugees.

YouTube® recently suggested (a two-year-old video – LINK) about the Frankfurt School that brought me some new information – members of the Frankfort School had been involved in the process of taking postwar Germany and breaking the will of the German people by using the propaganda of Collective Guilt.  It was a surprise to me to learn that many of the main members of the Frankfurt School (at least Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer) worked directly for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.  Thankfully, the CIA never engages in schemes that make James Bond villains look sane.

Oops.

The fact that the OSS hired committed communists who were dedicated to the overthrow of the American Way of Life® can charitably be described as a “failure of background checks”, or less charitably be described as “the cure being worse than the disease”.

Collective Guilt really did a number on the Germans.  Over time and with repeated pressure, people who had done nothing wrong were made to feel guilt for things that they hadn’t done.  Over time, this made children who were born in Germany be ashamed of just being born German.  How bad is it?  Angela Merkel saw an aide holding a German flag after an election victory.  She took the flag from the aide and tossed it off camera.  Sure, Angie was raised in East Germany, but she certainly was aware that her voters wouldn’t have a problem with her hating Germany, since they hated it, too.

How do you get an art major to leave you alone?  Either pay for the pizza or give up the Sudetenland.

The Soviets took an entirely different approach in East Germany than the Frankfurt School did in West Germany:  “Be communist, take your steroids, don’t rock the boat, and we’re watching everything you do.”  Being German was okay, but being anything but a good communist was punishable by getting fewer potatoes for dinner.  The results of this?

The map above shows that in former East Germany, the AfD (Alternatives for Germany) party does very, very well,  The AfD platform includes crazy things like protecting sovereignty, Western identity, and that German culture is okay.  They’re against immigration, and don’t trust the EU.

Since the Germans have been so shamed, AfD, which has values that approximate the values of any functional nation, is continually investigated as an “extremist” group.

I’m certain the Frankfurt School was thrilled with the success of turning Germany into a nation that hates itself.  Why stop there, if your goal is to destroy Western Civilization and replace it with communism?  To a committed communist, every functioning Western nation that isn’t communist is fascist, and so why not target them with powerful psychological warfare?

In previous posts, I’ve covered the attempt to make the people in the United States feel Collective Guilt over slavery (gone nearly 180 years) with the 1619 Project™, a hate filled propaganda fest launched alongside the other efforts to destroy the United States.  All of them are from the same source – Black Lives Matter®, and illegal aliens are just part of the destabilization movement, attempts to create and exploit Collective Guilt.

How well has that worked on white people?  Unlike every healthy civilization, ever, white Lefties in the United States actually have the opposite of an in-group preference.  They actually like people from other groups rather than their own group.  Here’s a graph that shows why Leftists behave like they behave.  As I’ve said again and again, they hate themselves.

The same thing has happened to Great Britain.  They sent their ships around the world, and landed at desolate backwaters whose idea of high technology was a mud hut.  When the British left, they left roads, hospitals, and (at the time) functioning governments, and access to improvements that invariably increased the quality of life for billions.  For this, their Collective Guilt has been being called colonizers, and they’ve been made to feel shame if they don’t allow hordes of people who have no connection to Britain to come into their country and pull their statues down.

23% of the crew on the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were named Juan.  That’s nearly a three to Juan ratio.

France is much the same, with just different groups of aliens there.  The riots in France here in 2023 are about a serial criminal who got shot and died after doing the usual criminal stuff and endangering civilians.  The result is somewhat different than the George Floyd riots – the illegals (many of them are – France doesn’t have birthright citizenship) and “legal” rioters have guns, and have been using them, though to what extent is not clear.

France may very well be the end of the road for the Frankfurt School’s plans.  As the violence of the rioters makes a lie of the years of propaganda about the true nature of France and the true nature of the illegals, perhaps the conditioning will wear off.

Perhaps.

Steps Forward, Steps Backward, and The Long Road

“Not according to the recent Supreme Court case of bite versus me.” – House, M.D.

No one complained when I got into Buddhism and became a Buddhist.  No one complained when I got into Affirmative Action and became an activist.  But get into fashion?

Today the Supreme Court (it’s like regular court, but with sour cream and tomatoes) said that, under the Equal Protection clause, that discriminating against people (or even for people) based on race is against the Constitution.  I guess you could say that the Supreme Court has changed since Ginsberg passed away:  it’s now Ruth-less.

For the longest time, the courts were sort of ignored by the Right.  The judges appointed by the Right (when they were in power) were often horribly Leftist advocates of state power.  At some point, the Right started picking justices based on choosing people who actually weren’t horrible Leftists in disguise (looking at you, David Souter).  The Federalist Society® was the catalyst for this.  Of the current Supreme Court, six of the nine justices are current or former Federalist Society™ members.

Yes, this is a real Tweet® and not a parody account.

The vote to kill affirmative action on campuses was six to three.

That’s an important number because it shows that the Federalist Society©, founded 41 years ago, has now defined the Supreme Court and the judges that have been nominated.

This is a victory.

But it wasn’t easy, and the span of effort to get that victory took decades of effort.  When the Federalist Society™ was founded, the court system of the United States was an absolute shambles.  When the Leftists couldn’t pass legislation that let them do things they like to do, like killing moar babiez, the courts could be counted on to find a new right that was somehow stuck in the “penumbras and emanations” of previous rulings to let them do whatever was popular with the cool kids that week.

Think that’s what happened to the Titan?

What always bothered me was that they could take a simple phrase like, “shall not be infringed” and twist it through precedents and rulings and interpret it to mean, “shall be infringed whenever we feel like it, you stooge”.  The “you stooge” part wasn’t actually in the ruling, but it can be inferred through the “emanations and penumbras”.

Why did Roe v. Wade get struck down to allow states to make laws against baby killing?  Because of the Federalist Society™.  If you’re ever able to go buy a .50 caliber Ma Deuce at your local convenience store in full auto as God intended?  Thank the Federalist Society©.

I don’t remember Linda leading the Leftist Karen Brigade in the Amy Coney Barrett Insurrection . . . do you?

Another place where the Left has lost is on carry of weapons.  In 27 states you can take your favorite hand cannon and pop it right under your vest without a permit, and without asking anyone for permission.  It’s what’s called “Constitutional Carry”.  This didn’t happen by accident.  It took dedicated groups working locally through decades to get these laws passed.

That’s the key.  Victory isn’t won in an afternoon after a training montage where Luke© spends 22 minutes with Obi Wan® and learns the Force™.  Nope.  Victory is won by grinding it out, day after day, putting people in place.  Having conversations.  Convincing people that the idea of freedom is better than the idea of government control takes time.

Remember, it only works if you have goals.

One view is that, from the viewpoint of the Right, that there has been nothing but a long string of loss, and there is no way that we can every come back.

Clearly, that is wrong.  The grassroots pushback against the insanity of The Narrative can’t be stopped.  Why, exactly, do gays and transexuals and drag queens need access to our children?  That question is in the minds of enough people that celebration of Pride Month, 2023, was a bit limp.

I guess we’ll have to re-purpose the journalist machine, after a fair trial, of course.

Have we lost most university campuses?  Have we lost the military senior officer corps?  Have we lost the senior management in most Fortune® 500 companies?

Yup.  We’re still down in many places.  But Budweiser® is afraid now.  And we don’t have to destroy every company that goes woke.  There’s an old Chinese saying:  “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.”  We don’t have to destroy every company, but I’m certain that the distinct lack of Pride stolen rainbow colors in June on every damn corporate logo was a result of that Budweiser© chicken being plucked.

Where will the next victories come from?  They will come from places that passionate people have been working for decades.  It doesn’t require money, it requires work.  As the other saying goes, “The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago.  The second-best time is now.”

The seeds of our future victory are being planted right now in the heads of they youth.  They see the lies, greed, and envy that are the only things outside of Nancy Pelosi swimsuit pictures that the Left has to sell.  Today, removed from their menu, is the idea of Affirmative Action.  That idea is dead.

I know nobody wanted to see the swimsuit picture.  You’re welcome.

The battle is not over.  The Left is always better organized than the Right, but the Right has a wonderful thing on its side:  the Truth.  As I have always maintained, we will win.  And as I have also always maintained, the final victory won’t be tomorrow, or next week, or next year, though some events will certainly happen suddenly.

And the Supreme Court?  They can go out to dinner together again since Ginsberg died.  She used to steal food from people at diners – they called her Booth Raider Ginsberg.

One Problem? People Who Don’t Want To Solve The Problem.

“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices. Yes sir. Here’s an example. It’s a 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, for sixty-two ninety-nine. That price . . . is too high.” (shoots the car) – Used Cars

But I hear he does know Tae Kwon Dough.

I’m amused that something called the “Inflation Reduction Act” has the same initials as the Irish Republican Army, but at the same time is a lot more destructive than the IRA ever was.  The idea that solving inflation involves the government spending metric-Lizzo-Tons® of cash on boondoggles that will benefit Democratic donors is an idea that only someone with a child’s intellect could come up with, so at least we know what the Veep has been doing when she’s done with the construction paper for the day.

Here’s Brandon’s Tweet®:

I also hear he’s a fan of putting out fires by throwing more gasoline on them.

Don’t think this is a naked Leftist slush-pile for donors that will make Sam Bankman-Fraud’s scheme of taking American taxpayer dollars given to Ukraine and donating them after deposit to Leftist political schemes in the United States?  This is bigger by far.  And not only that, it’s being overseen by that paragon of virtue, John Podesta.

Yeah, that same John Podesta who on a scale of 1-10 for being creepy rates “Drag Queen Story Hour”.

As Podesta always says, “If you want you be a successful stalker, you must do the following.”

Green Energy isn’t about energy, it’s about the green.  And the particular green in question is money.  The alchemy that the Left wants to work is to give it to people and companies who give money to the Left.  Hakuna Matata, the Circle Of Politics!

How does it work?  Simple!  Pay taxes, have the Left direct the money to people who support the Left.  This is what they mean by “Our Democracy®” since the people involve in “Our©” don’t include you.  Or me.  They include people who support the Left, or can be bought to support the Left.  Green (remember, that means money laundering) energy company Solyndra™ received over $535,000,000 in loans from Obama, and produced nothing but accounting irregularities.

This was actually the subject of the 1994 Nobel Prize® in Economics.  I’m still waiting for one in blogging, and have my fingers crossed, but regardless, the idea was that if government could give everyone in the United States $1, it would be a much better deal for the political weasels to give three people $100 million.  This is also the basis for every decision made in Congress.

Cats are better than dogs.  Cats don’t work for the cops.

(Also, for the record, there is a Nobel Prize® for Literature, and if some nice reader would nominate me for a Nobel©, then I would be one of the very few nominated for both a Nobel™ and a Hugo®.  Winning?  Who cares, it’s an honor just to be nominated.)

The Nobel Prize™ was won by three dudes, one of which you might be familiar with:  Graham John Nash, who also wrote Teach Your Children Well was played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.  Sorry about the confusion.  I guess Graham is no Nash-trophysicist.

The result of this is a very, very unserious economy.  Green Energy in most cases just means, “La-la-la I’m not listening, I can’t hear you because my fingers are in my ears, so the laws of thermodynamics do not exist and if they do, Congress can pass a law to change those laws” energy.  Unserious.

I hear that there is now a way to make the turbine blades 99% recyclable (true!).  All you have to do is chop them up into small pieces and ship them down to Louisiana where more energy than was used to create the blades is used to recycle them!  What a win! (/sarcasm) 

AOC’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti even let the mask slip and noted that the real goal of Green Energy policy.  In his own words, according to Sam Ricketts, WaPo® reporter:  “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.  Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?  Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.”

The entire economy.  Why?  Because they don’t like you.  They want to funnel money to the people that give them the big shrimp parties, and give them money to put out ads so they can run again.  The thing that fuels Washington, D.C. isn’t electricity.  It is cash.  And shrimp.  And the quest for power – over you.

If we arrested all the corrupt politicians, who would we vote for in November of 2024?

The idea that solving the problems that we have with our economy is hard is laughable.  Solving those problems is trivial.  Really.  Why does no one do it?  Solving those problems is painful.

  • If solving them involves increasing the interest rates until the banks squeal, and some of them fail?
  • If solving them involves the destruction of entire portions of the economy only kept alive via corruption?
  • If solving them involves reducing the payments to those who could, but don’t contribute?
  • If solving them involves changing the rules so that people who game Wall Street rather than producing anything can’t rig the game?

Washington, D.C. won’t be for them, because they’d rather let a paper cut turn into an amputation than make any decision that will stop the shrimp parties with the beautiful people who are just rubbing their hands at the idea of an “Inflation Reduction Act”.

The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

Biden was in three states today – confusion, unconsciousness, and disorientation.

I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.

Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson.

His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.

There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch.

Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?”

When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.

The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.

It’s silly that people have been turning plants into burgers. Cows have been doing that forever.

I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow.

The material that you start with determines the end results.

In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.

It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Someone told me I should stop drinking, but then realized I shouldn’t listen to some drunk who talks to himself.

The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage.

An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant past.

Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?

None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around every since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.

I started growing herbs because I heard that thyme is money.

As the article notes, for a long time in the 20th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.

That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on . . . other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.

Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.

We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?

Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress.

Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.

Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there?

That’s Idiocracy in action.

Through A Glass, Darkly-or-You Can’t Die Without Scars

“How much can you know yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? I don’t wanna die without any scars.” – Fight Club

Bach used to be a composer.  I guess he’s now a decomposer.

I remember listening to the radio . . . you remember the radio, right?  That’s where people take a part of the Internet and send it out using big towers and as many watts (ounce-inches per fortnight in non-commie units) of power as is used in the The Mrs.’ hairdryer so that this faint amount of energy can be picked up by a metal strip and then amplified a zillion times so you can rock out while cruising Main.

Sorry for the digression.  I remember listening to the radio way back in the before time, and hearing a song that sounded pretty good.  The singer mumbled most of it, but the big, brassy chorus of Born in the U.S.A. was pretty strong.

Made me feel good, made me think that in 1985 we were ready to unite as America.  Then I finally made out the lyrics.  Hmmm.  After listening to them, I came to the (correct) conclusion that typical Leftist-Simp Bruce Springsteen was just another Leftist-Simp who made a bunch of money because he had a good chorus and everyone thought he was on America’s side.

I’ll leave you with this, “I’m embarrassed to be an American” – Bruce Springsteen, talking about Trump to Australians in 2016

I have not changed that position.  If you like him, fine.  You’re wrong.  Springsteen is a tool.

Another song like that was All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow.  When I first heard it, all I heard was they chorus, and figured it was some empty-headed pop song.  Meh.  I’ll skip it.

Then I listened to it.  Wow.  Deep.  I was shocked.  I thought it was vapid pop, but here was a song that had some soul, and talked about people drinking beer at noon on Tuesday in a bar because that’s all they have.  The lyrics . . . “And a happy couple enters the bar, dangerously close to one another” is shocking – it jarred me because these people were a contrast to the gloom and despair on display in the bar.

Another one that I just found out about was Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonny Tyler.  What’s it about?  Vampires that want to share more than blood (wink wink).  Honestly, I didn’t really care about this song ever, and still don’t, but like it a bit more now that I know that it’s just a bit weird.

Did she have to book a second ticket on the flight just for the hair?

Don’t even get me started on Squeeze Box by The Who® since when I heard it I was certain that it referred to a particularly musical family and even made the defense of the virtuousness of the song to a friend’s mother with all of the innocence of an entirely ignorant 10 year old who is smarter than he is experienced.

My Friend’s Mom:  “That song . . . is that song about . . . sex?”

Young John Wilder:  “No!  That song is about a family and the mother has a concertina, an instrument played by compressing air and passing it through a series of reeds to make a melody like an accordion.  She plays it and the house is filled with glorious music all night.”

My Friend’s Seventeen Year Old Sister, Butting In:  “No.  The song is totally about sex, Mom.”

Barbie?  If you’re reading this?  Yup, I got that one really wrong.

And don’t get me started on how badly I misunderstood Lola.  I’m ashamed to say that I was over 21 before I got that joke.  In my defense, that wasn’t a thing anywhere around Wilder Mountain, and the only burned-out old tranny I was familiar with was the one in my 1976 green GMC® truck.

Good news!  It just needed a new clutch.  Sometimes young drivers get a awkward and anxious and burn out clutch pads by popping the power too soon to the drive train.

I miss the days when working with a difficult tranny meant it was an automatic transmission.

Life, and experience, changes interpretation of events.  Like a song, an experience may have one meaning when young, but yet another experience when older.  The very experience of living life changes the message we get from those experiences.  All through life “we see through a glass, darkly”, but as we age, we see the world differently.

That is natural.  We age, we learn, we understand.  Our innocence is, especially in 2023, horribly brief.

Cell phones and the Internet bring knowledge to children long before they can really come to grips with what they are seeing.  In my age, a furtive glimpse at a Playboy® was how we gained forbidden knowledge.  In 2023, 10-year-olds know all about Lola and are even taught in class that what once was forbidden is now exalted – there’s even a month for pride, yet not even an afternoon set aside for humility, but I guess if you’re Hunter Biden there’s a 20-minute plea bargain case with the DOJ.

So, I read today Hunter didn’t pay taxes on over six million dollars, and deducted the amount he spent on whores as business expenses.  I wonder if he ever paid Lola?

Change is part of growing up.  I am certainly not the person I was at 18, nor the person I was at 38.  And wisdom has a price – innocence is free, but innocence is also harmless.  As we grow and learn, we learn what is worth passing on, and what is worth fighting for.

I also believe this one weird thing, that this knowledge is not without structure.  When I look back at the hard things, the difficult things, the things that seemed like a catastrophe at the time, all of those things led to better things as I grew up.  I just had to live through them to understand.

My life will probably never go back to the simpler days.  Like a character in a spy movie, I now know too much.  But I can still, on a summer day, roll down the window and listen to a song and sing too loudly as I drive.

But it certainly won’t be Bruce Springsteen.

He’s a tool.

Tucker Carlson And The Corrupt Biden Banana Republic

“Wow. Anybody watching must’ve thought this was a negative reality inversion.” – The Young Ones

Jenner might join the Marvel® movie universe – I hear they’re casting for ex-men.

I lost a job once, not because I didn’t do what my boss asked me to do, but because I wouldn’t tell him I thought just like he did.

When he asked me to do something that wasn’t illegal or immoral or fattening or didn’t violate my principles, I’d do it since that’s the definition of “boss”.  But no.  He wanted me to admit that my opinion was wrong.  I refused.

My opinion is mine.  I’ll do (mostly) what the boss says at work, but there is nothing that will make me give up my soul.  And telling him I agreed with him when I didn’t was a gulf I couldn’t cross, because my virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.

Why did Tucker Carlson get sidelined by Fox®?  I think it’s a business model.  I cut the cable some time ago, and hadn’t watched Fox News™ for quite a while, mainly because they seemed to be, like Sean Hannity, just a spear carrier for whatever the message is that he was supposed to carry that particular day – he never had an original idea, and his commentary was so between the lines that he was being the television equivalent of a Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy or a bucket of warm spit.

But since they fired Tucker?  Wow.  Maybe I just missed his evolution, but since he’s been at Tucker on Twitter™ he’s thrown out bomb after bomb, right on target with some of the most cogent and, dare I say, dangerous analysis of anyone with a major media voice.

I think Tucker is singlehandedly killing cable news, the MSNBCNN® model of cable news was long on the verge of death, and Tucker now has more views on a single Twitcast® than all of cable news, plus probably most television shows.  Combined.  That’s the power of the Truth.

What’s the difference between the FBI and the CIA?  Acronyms.  Plus, one killed JFK and the other killed MLK.

I had long talked about inversion.  It wasn’t me who coined that term, and it’s been long enough that I can’t remember where I first saw it – probably Vox Day was the one that brought it to my attention using the idea of Satanic Inversion – take a virtue, invert it, and glorify it.

It really defines a lot of what we see today.  My parents taught me that humility was a virtue.  The inversion?  Pride.  What is June?  Oh . . . an inversion.  My parents taught me that chastity was a virtue (to be fair, I did my best to actively not be chaste when I was in high school because drive-in movies were still a thing) but now the virtue is indulgence.  If it feels good, it must be right.

Certainly, there are no trails of childless women who pursued meaningless hookups in their 20s and then found that, their youth and innocence spent, that they were incapable of finding a decent man.

Oh, wait, that’s exactly what happened.

If those women did find a decent man, they were so addled by the mindless sex that they’d had that they were incapable of bonding into a proper relationship.  They found themselves doomed to single motherhood or the life of a lonely, bitter spinster or in a relationship where they might become bored in an afternoon and blow it up for the dream of a man that had dominated them when they were 22. 

I wonder what the bikini waxer will say to her when she’s sixty?

Virtues are virtues for a reason.  They matter, and when we toy with them, we toy with the very foundations of civilization itself.

When it comes to economics, the virtue was to save and be frugal and build.  Now?  The virtue is to be like BlackRock® and, well, say things like, “It’s not who the president is – it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president,” and “You’ve got $10,000?  You can buy a senator,” and, “War is real f*****g good for business.”  Don’t’ believe me?  Here it is in the words of someone who works for Blackrock™.

To be clear, BlackRock® has $9,000,000,000,000 in assets that they manage.  So, they can crush anyone they want to like a bug.  Don’t like something someone says?  With spare pocket change they can buy the company that person works at, and have them fired.

Which might explain Tucker’s recent free time.  In Tucker’s latest video, he talks about “inversion” of morality.  I have zero hubris to think he’s reading me, but the fact that the concept has made it to a person that can get 100,000,000 views a video means we’re winning.

And BlackRock® will loose a few hundred million on Fox™.  I think they have that in their couch cushions.

It also explains the reason that Tucker got sidelined.  Blackrock® owns 15.1% of Fox Corp.®, the parent of Fox News©.  If you want to buy a president, it makes sense to own the news.  They also own 12% of CNN™.  And 13% of Comcast™ which owns MSNBC®, NBC™, CNBC©, and Sky®.

BlackRock™ wants to own the media.  I mean, with $9 trillion they can control the media, own what Tucker says (if he works for them) and get all the war they want, because, in the words of their own employee, “War is real f*****g good for business.”

That?  That sounds exactly like an inversion of values to me.  Getting rid of Tucker had nothing to do with anything but this:  he was against war, which as probably really f*****g bad for business at parasite companies like BlackRock©, who produce nothing but profit from every misery on Earth while cloaking it in the preening moral finery of people who worship at the Leftist inversion values of “Environmental (Live in the pod, eat the bugs!), Social (Illegals are good for business!) and Governance (I get to choose the incompetent people on the board who never would have gotten a board seat without me).

We are faced with a world where the inversion of values is celebrated, and actual, real values and virtue are hated.

Case in point?  Hunter Biden.  Real people who are caught on camera with handguns doing crack do time – hard time in federal prisons.  Income tax issues?  Ditto – the one thing Uncle doesn’t like is shorting him on his part of the take, yet Hunter gets a pass.

He seems happy.  I wonder if he got childrens’ hair to sniff for Fathers’ Day?

But Hunter?  Hunter will keep selling his fake art for hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who allegedly want favors from his father after selling exactly zero alleged expertise to Ukrainians and Chinese for allegedly tens of millions of dollars that he allegedly funneled to “the big guy”.  Allegedly.

Thankfully, the media is all over this.

What?  They’re all owned by BlackRock™ who thinks “War is real f*****g good for business”?  And the media is silent about what is likely the biggest corruption scandal in the very history of the country?

Inversion.

The very wonderful thing about this is that it won’t stand.  It can’t stand.  Not because we’re powerful, but because the inversion of virtue brings, ultimately, the inversion of prosperity and success.

The way to prosper financially in this environment is to give over to the inversion and engage in all of the inverted virtues that firms like BlackRock™ take as their sacrament and holy scripture.

The success, though, is fleeting.  The cost is high.  Think Joe Biden looks at the perverted wasteland of his family and feels any pride?  Well, bad example, since Joe traded his metaphorical (and maybe literal) soul long ago and probably the strongest emotion he feels in 2023 is the desire to have his tapioca pudding at exactly 11:45AM.

Joe must be so proud.

But if I ascended the highest halls of power, and saw my progeny was as decadent and useless as Hunter, I would know that I had failed at my most fundamental duty as a father.  And if I looked at the country and saw the destruction I had created, I would know that I was a failure as a leader.  Despite all of my power, I would know that it would have profited me little to have gained the whole world, having lost my soul.

Looks like Tucker understands that, too.  He’s playing a game on the big stage, and naming those who are inverting everything of value, everything that has brought harmony and goodness to the country.  He could just sit in his basement with tens of millions of dollars, which is just what BlackRock© wants him to do, because that would be real f*****g good for business.

I guess Tucker decided he wouldn’t give up his soul.

So, Tucker decided he would fight.  Because virtue is more valuable than money.

Always.