Often injustice lies in what you aren’t doing, not only in what you are doing.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Often injustice lies in what you aren’t doing, not only in what you are doing.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
It was bound to happen eventually. Hollywood needs to give us cautionary tales. I watched the trailer for an upcoming movie called “Civil War.” The scenario is a “fascist” president in his third term (probably named Donald Tromp, Ronald Trump or something else equally subtle) is fighting a war to recapture nineteen states that have seceded including the Western Alliance (or something like that) consisting of California and Texas. As an aside, the guy playing the president sounds exactly like Mike Pence.
The heroes of the movie are three intrepid “reporters” who travel across the country and witness the horror of Middle America in all its racist something or other. In the trailer we see white men with guns interrogating some seemingly Hispanic people and when told that they are Americans the guys with guns say, “But what kind of Americans?” And then it looks they’re going to shoot them. And there is lots of footage of jets and tanks attacking New York City and monuments in DC blowing up and I think it looks like the invaders breach the White House.
The Democrats are attempting to take Trump off the ballot. What a perfect time to have a movie showing what will happen if a fascist president is allowed to run for president.
My favorite part of the trailer is near the end where the intrepid female reporter says, “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a message home saying, “Don’t do this.” And yet, here we are.” So even during a movie where the country is engulfed in war and the outcome should be the story we have “Karen” lecturing us about how we didn’t listen to the girl boss who knew best.
So really my only question about all this is how the hell did California and Texas form an alliance. Are they commies or good guys? Is it run by Gavin Newsome or Ron Paul?
Honestly, I’ll bet this movie will be incredibly annoying. All the people we are supposed to applaud will be urban dwelling, latte sipping progressives and all the people we’re meant to boo will be white red state Americans. I assume, at the end, once Donald Trump is dragged from the White House and burned at the stake, all of the seceding states will come to their senses and unanimously re-elect Barack Obama or some other BIPoC woman as president and we’ll finally reach nirvana.
Wouldn’t it be something if we could have a civil war movie where the bad guys were the people who were trying to destroy America for real? The Summer of George rioting wasn’t exactly a civil war but it came really close. It was akin to the Visigoths burning and pillaging the Roman Empire.
I’d pay some money to see a civil war movie where Joe Biden declares war on Texas and then gets his head handed to him. I mean that makes some kind of sense. I could see Texas just plain getting fed up with an immigrant invasion and putting a stop to it even in the face of federal intervention. I’d love to see a movie where Washington calls out troops to force Texans to allow illegal aliens in and the troops revolt and join the Texans. Now that I’d pay to see.
I guess I should wait until April and see what the actual plot turns out to be but I’d bet small change that I’ve just more or less spelled it out. It’s a warning against Trump as dictator for life. Please spare me this drama.
If die I must, let me die drinking in an Inn.
Walter Map
The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock four hundred and three years ago we are told. And those Puritans risked all to escape from the England of religious persecution. Now it may be that the persecution was based on the annoyingness of the Puritans. We won’t debate that. Suffice it to say they wanted a place of their own where they were free; free to persecute unto death, whomever they chose, in peace.
And they succeeded fabulously. From humble beginnings they spread across the continent and now in every jurisdiction where they were overrepresented; New England, the Middle Atlantic States, the Great Lakes Region and the Pacific Coast they torture anyone who disagrees with their whims. And they have even set up a coalition that allows them to torture the other areas of the United States by means of federal legislation and executive branch administrative rulings. They are indeed very organized and very effective at making other people miserable. It is their whole reason for existence.
And yet, even now as rioting and thuggery turn the streets of once great metropolises into anarchic hellscapes, the greater part of the geographic area of the United States is still a wonderland of modern life. For the most part we have the advantages of the electric age where appliances and machines provide us with multiples of a horsepower at our fingertips to do everything from transport us to a job located a week’s walk from our home to cutting up a fallen tree in a tiny fraction of the time it would take us with a hand saw. We heat our homes and cool them using chemical energy derived from carbon-based fuels and we eat food that is kept sanitary by refrigeration.
Now undoubtedly things have begun to degrade. The electric grid crashes enormously more often than it did even twenty years ago. The powers that be want a lot of this cheap and convenient power to go away. But even now with infrastructure degrading around us, our lives are immeasurably easier than our ancestors living a hundred and fifty years ago. As galling as are all of the lies we are told about why our standard of living has to be lowered, it’s probably true that even after they take away fossil fuels from most of us, the United States will still be more pleasant a home than the majority of the rest of the planet.
One can only imagine what it would be like, living in the Congo or Egypt or Pakistan. Even Mexico or Brazil would be many times less safe or comfortable. So maybe leaving here would not make sense. Maybe we cannot be modern day pilgrims leaving the place of bondage for a land of opportunity. Unless we can find that promised land right here in the United States.
As much as the busybody Puritans use every power at their disposal to rule over us, maybe we can undermine their control locally and even regionally. And with the modern abilities to network and organize people across great distances maybe we can produce coalitions of our own and pool resource and regain a large part of the control over our lives that the Puritans have taken away.
For instance, Joe Biden attempted to instate regulations to force cleaning equipment (dishwashers and clothes washers) to work with extremely low amounts of water. This is supposedly environmentally friendly but what it does is ensure that these devices will work poorly. And I assume that companies that do not adhere to these standards will be fined or their leadership will be liable to arrest by the environmental police of one stripe or another. The solution to this is to have the red states provide safe havens for manufacturers who produce non-conforming equipment. And thus, this equipment could be manufactured and sold within these states. And similarly for other companies and products that the federal government is attacking. A major case will be gasoline powered cars. California has legislated a ban on new gas-cars after 2030, I think. If Joe Biden is re-elected something similar will be attempted nationally. That would be a perfect time for a coalition of red states to champion fossil fuel devices of all kinds and draw a distinction between free states and slave states. Le the free states enjoy all the benefits of cheap power while the slave states try to cut their lawns with battery powered mowers and travel around in their battery powered clown cars. That is until they stall out.
So maybe we can all become pilgrims within our Scatter-Shot States of America and attempt to wring a free and prosperous life despite the worst efforts of the Puritans to make us as miserable as themselves. It may be our last best hope at happiness.
FAUSTUS – You too, as I perceive from this, are not ignorant of love.
FORTUNATUS – ’Tis a universal evil. We have all been mad once.
Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus
So here I am in the ems. And next up (almost) is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Yes that Marcus Aurelius. And really, I’m a big fan. Holding back the fall of the Roman Empire for almost twenty years is nothing to sneeze at. I guess he does have to take a hit for being Commodus’ father and all. I mean he really should have had him put down before he passed but it’s tough for a father to be objective about his kids.
And I like a lot of his quotes. They are quite enlightened. But I think sometimes he goes too far. For instance:
“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.”
“Your destruction will mean its end as well“? What the hell!
I mean he was a military man. How about fighting against both the endurable and the unendurable? Can’t we ever push things out of fate’s hands?
Well, anyway, he’s going to donate several weeks of quotes to the site so I’m grateful. But I think there should be a limit to just how much silent resignation even a stoic has to exhibit. Now I know he was basically an Italian so I can’t claim an exemption based on my lineage. But I can tell you over the last eighteen centuries there has been a precipitous fall off in stoic tendencies among his descendants. Most Italians like nothing better than to complain loud and long about just about everything happening around us. You might say it’s our defining behavior.
I’ll end by saying I’m glad I didn’t have him for a boss. He probably would have continuously lectured me in soothing terms to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and eventually I would have gone mad and murdered him.
Well anyway, his first quote will be January 14th (showing up the night of Saturday, January 13th).
And he really should have made Russell Crowe emperor. It would have solved a bunch of problems.
So, I read today that we lost that fat tub of lard, Chris Christie. He finally dropped out. And probably the only reason he dropped out was to give Nikki Haley a better shot at making it close in New Hampshire. Well, if there’s a candidate I dislike more than Chris Christie it’s Nikki Haley. In fact, I despise Haley more than Christie by whole orders of magnitude. Christie is just an annoying gadfly. He’s on an anti-Trump crusade because it’s the only way he could think of to even reach the debate stage.
But Haley is an honest to goodness GOPE RINO. She believes in endless neocon war, unlimited illegal immigration, woke evil like transgender pediatric surgery and anything else that progressive Republicans tell her she should believe in. Listening to her explain why we need to be involved in multiple wars makes my skin crawl.
Currently the plan is for Haley to either win or come close in New Hampshire by means of unaffiliated voters switching their party affiliation to Republican and voting for her. Then when the South Carolina primary rolls around the hope is that she will have generated enough excitement from New Hampshire to win. And you never know. Stranger things have happened.
So, if she manages to win one or both of those states, she hopes to stay in the race all the way to the convention. Well, I tend to doubt she can make much of a showing. But what she’s really hoping is to be the last man standing if Trump gets disqualified by the Republican National Committee and then be appointed the nominee. Basically, she is JEB II. No, I take that back, she is Mitt Romney 2.0. One thing I am sure of. If Haley is on the ballot, she won’t be getting my vote. I’ll either stay home or vote for Biden as a protest vote. I despise her even more than Biden and you know how I feel about him.
So here we have the Republican Party doing everything they can to eliminate the candidate that has been polling over 60% for months. It’s demonstrably clear that they have no interest in adopting any of the clear policy preferences of the great majority of the Republican voters. All they want is to force the generic GOPE candidate on their voters and if they can’t do that they’d prefer to lose.
I understand that in the short term the Republican Party is the vehicle we are forced to vote for to provide the lesser of two evils. But a time has to come soon when a successor party must begin to form around populist candidates who won’t owe allegiance to the donors and lobbyists.
It would be an enormous thrill to have a party where everything it stood for was anathema to the Bushes, the Obamas and the Clintons. Where Nikki Haley, Mike Pence or Chris Christie would be booed off the stage if they dared show their faces. If I could name it maybe I’d call it the Normal People’s Party. Or maybe we could call it the God and Guns Party. Since these are all the things that Barack Obama hated about America.
But in the meantime, just look and listen to Nikki Haley and know exactly what the Republican Party is all about.