Month: July 2024

Cultural Suicide

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As the glaciers of the last ice age were receding, the Neolithic Age gave way to the beginning of what we call human civilization.  And over the course of the last ten millennia human beings have slowly and painfully mastered various technologies and attempted to live in more and more complex social structures.  But along the road from cave man to knowledge worker there have been several examples of a dominant local culture imploding for no apparent reason.  When this happens the surrounding cultures usually take advantage of the vacuum created by the collapse and absorb the lands, peoples and resources that are up for grabs.  We may be about to experience just such an implosion.

Our society; western civilization, the first world, the global community, whatever you want to call it; has become delusional.  And this has been a top-down process.  The elites who inform the academic world, specifically the Ivy League colleges and fill the ranks of the top corporations and the federal bureaucracy have formulated a moral order that has given us the George Floyd riots, pediatric transgender medical malpractice, unrestricted third world immigration into the first world countries and the rest of the woke ideology that we are presently engulfed in.

But even though this was started by the elites it has now percolated through the entirety of the younger half of the population.  And the poison of this philosophy has done its job.  The culture at large believes in things that make no sense and if acted upon will undo our civilization.  This is what a culture committing suicide looks like.  Adopting the self-hatred that the woke ideology prescribes for Americans guarantees that our society will cease to exist as it formerly was.  We are already seeing the fruits of the DEI approach to corporations.  Boeing’s airliners and space ships are falling apart.  Airline pilots are no longer selected and judged base on their ability to fly planes but on their skin color and sex habits.  The same is happening with surgeons and judges.  And what we will find is that airplanes and heart surgery can no longer exist in a world where pilots and heart surgeons are unqualified.  After four or five airliners crash who is going to fly?  Who is going to get a coronary bypass surgery when the survival rate is 5%?

What I don’t know the answer to yet is how does this play out?  I am starting to see some evidence that in some jurisdictions people are rejecting the DEI model and all of its effects.  Several states have already written laws banning things like transgender surgery and treatments for minors.  Some colleges have pulled back from the abandonment of standards like SAT exams for admission and other means of selecting for qualified individuals.

Maybe we will see a rejection of all the dangerous and dysfunctional ideas that have flooded our world with unqualified individuals running the mechanisms of modern life.  Maybe we will pull back from the abyss and regain some semblance of sanity in how we regulate our world.  We should have some clues to this soon.  One of the signs I would be looking for in a population retreating from the abyss would be rejecting the woke leadership.  And rejecting Joe Biden would be the clearest sign of that.  Biden has embraced all of the woke agenda and this has affected most of the American people catastrophically.  If the electorate embraces Biden, then I’ll assume that societal collapse is what is baked into the cake at this point.  Well, why should we be any luckier than the Hittites and the Romans?  Anyway, if Biden is the winner stock up on canned food, bottled water and bullets.  You’ll probably need them.

Dementia Joe Has Left and Gone Away.  Hey, Hey, Hey.

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Come back Joe!  All is forgiven.  Who would have thought I’d be missing Joe Biden already?  Now that he is plummeting in the polls, he’s my favorite Democrat.  I think back to last week when he said, “We finally beat Medicaid!”  I mean, come on man!  That was pure gold.  We’ll never hear anything half that funny again.  I mean, sure Kamala has that, “What Can Be, Unburdened by What Has Been” gibberish.  And that’s hilarious but eventually after she’s said it a thousand times it just gets annoying.

But with Joe there are gems hidden around every twist and turn.  For an inexplicable reason Joe will lie that no soldiers died during his administration.  And yet, no one can forget the soldiers who were blown up by a suicide bomber during his chaotic rout out of Kabul.  No sane person would lie about something that important and that easy to refute.  This seems to hearken back to the Joe Biden who lied about his poor academic record and plagiarized other politicians’ speeches.  He’s saying something, anything, just to have a counterattack when some shortcoming in his record is exposed.  The debate on June 27th was a kill shot perpetrated on Joe Biden by Joe Biden.  Donald Trump goaded him with a litany of failures that Biden has presided over.  Inflation, uncontrolled immigration, skyrocketing crime; the list goes on and on.  But the correct response is not to get lost in the weeds trying to quote fake statistics from your fake experts.  Joe has no memory left and so all he did was prove that he’s suffering from memory loss.  He should have owned up to some of the problems and staked out a strategy for overcoming these problems in the future and shown some initiative.  By going the former route, he has compounded the appearance of dishonesty along with dementia.

Ah, good times.

But unfortunately, this wonderfully entertaining debate has killed the goose that lays the golden eggs.  Many people speculated that the early debate was intended to prove that Biden is too adle-pated to run for reelection while there is still time to replace him in the race.  If so, then mission accomplished.  All of the mainstream media have been shouting for the last seven days that Joe is a human vegetable.   And now the donors and even the Democratic lawmakers are starting to join in the chorus.  And what, up until now, has been a solid wall of denial is beginning to sound more like a desperate plea to allow Joe to prove that the debate was a fluke and that “sharp as a tack” Joe Biden will reassert himself.  Apparently, he’ll be going on a “competence tour.”  He has a meeting with the Democratic governors and an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC.

Well, there goes the show!  Now that the press has admitted that the emperor has no clothes, the governors will be shocked to learn that Biden is a simpering idiot.  And Stephanopoulos won’t be able to resist proving that the only thing Biden should be a candidate for is the memory floor at the nursing home.

Man, we’re gonna miss Joe Biden.  Donald Trump is never going to find a pushover as good as Joe is.  And from now on the Democrat he goes up against in the race will blame everything wrong with the country on Joe Biden’s mental problems instead of Democrat policy.

But regardless of what a great foil Biden makes in the 2024 race, I’m overjoyed to see him humiliated and tossed aside.  From everything I’ve read about him, he is an awful human being and deserves every bit of dishonor and rejection that comes his way.  What would make me happiest would be if Hunter cut a deal with prosecutors for leniency in exchange for revealing all the details of the “Big Guy’s” influence racket.  Exposing the truth of Scranton Joe for all the world to see is exactly what he deserves.  His lies and dishonesty are the sum total of his career and should be seen as his only legacy.

Bye Joe.

Guest Contributor – The Portly Politico – 03JUL2024 – Sid Meier’s Civilization Series Review

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Sid Meier’s Civilization Series Review

I decided to become a history teacher in the tenth grade after giving a presentation in an English class about water transportation in nineteenth-century America.  Why I was giving such a presentation in English is unclear–we were probably talking about Mark Twain–but that presentation gave me the teaching bug (and, apparently, a lifelong vow of poverty).

Even before that, though, history had captured my young imagination.  I grew up poring over atlases, textbooks, books, almanacs, encyclopedias, etc.  Part of what sparked this youthful interest was, of all things, video games, specifically the classic Sid Meier game Colonization, in which players colonized the New World and, ultimately, fought for independence.

Colonization, sadly, did not evolve significantly further as a series.  However, its inspiration, Civilization, now spans six installments, with a seventh on the way.  I vividly remember playing Civilization II on a cousin’s computer sometime in the 1990s, and I was hooked.  The first time I plopped a settler on a rickety trireme and dropped him successfully on a far-flung continent, I knew this was the game for me.

All of the Civilization games fall into the “4X” genre, in which players eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate (I suppose they could be called “4E” games, but that doesn’t sound quite as cool, does it?).  While not all Civilization games are created equal, each brought new innovations to the series that have, overall, improved and deepened the experience, while still being very accessible to new players.

My first exposure was to Civilization II, which I then received from my aunt that Christmas; I spent the rest of the day reading the 200-plus-page manual.  Civilization, the original installment, was already dated by that point, but I picked up a copy of its online-enabled version, CivNet, on a band trip in high school.  My neighborhood friend and I spent many hours playing “hotseat” games of CivNet, which had players taking turns at the same computer.  Later, that same friend and I would play hotseat for years in college (usually via e-mail) on Civilization III.

Civilization II is the best of the “classic” era Civ games.  It included a number of graphical and gameplay improvements over its predecessor.  Civilization III is, perhaps, one of the weakest entries in the series, suffering from a number of balance and performance issues.  However, it introduced a number of intriguing gameplay elements, like cultural borders and the need to negotiate “rights of passage” treaties to traverse another civilization’s territory.

The series entered the modern era of gaming with Civilization IV, which featured a brighter and more cartoon-y color palette.  It preserved the cultural borders mechanic of Civ III while also introducing religions to the game for the first time.  That has become a staple of the series, and there are few things more satisfying than converting the entire world to your religion (one of the several ways players can win the game).  I’ll never forget converting the entire world to Judaism in my first game of Civ IV, playing as the Americans.  There is, perhaps, something oddly prophetic about that.

Civ V brought an Art Deco aesthetic to the games, and shifted away from a square-based grid to hexes.  That changed military combat substantially; no longer could players create massive stacks of units that could grind a city into dust in a turn.  Instead, only one military unit could occupy a hex at a time, making conquest of cities more protracted and strategic in nature.  Terrain, which had always modified defensive bonuses based on the type (for example, a unit defending on a hill enjoyed a defensive advantage versus a unit defending on a flat plain), now became even more important.

It feels as though Civ V barely got its footing before the exquisite Civilization VI hit the scene.  This latest iteration included many of the elements of prior Civ games, but true to the series, it slowly ladled out key mechanics across two expansions–a particularly annoying but lucrative business model that has plagued almost every version of the game.  Regardless, Civilization VI and its expansions introduced, among other elements, climate change, which players can contribute to and/or mitigate through various means, and which gradually changes the map.  To be fair, Civilization II introduced “global warming,” which could have horrendous effects on the map, but Civilization VI approaches it in a more elegant and nuanced way.

Now with Civilization VII on the horizon, fans of the series are clamouring for more.  But which is the best?

In my assessment, Civilization II is the best of the “classic” era of the game.  Compared to modern versions it is quite basic, but there is something about its color palette and its gameplay that are timeless.  Civilization III struggled with various bugs, but I also enjoyed sinking hours of my life into it.

In the modern area, Civilization VI takes the cake for me, although its two predecessors were excellent games in their own right.

Usually, newer does not equal better, but in the case of the Civilization franchise, it does seem that player suggestions are implemented more thoroughly, and the games become more interesting and refined through each generation.  That is a positive legacy of the series, and one that will hopefully continue with Civilization VII.