Category: Current Events

Sister Morphine

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As I’ve said it’s always a bad idea to write a post at night.  At night the brain is tired and unlikely to give of its best.  The mood tends to be dark.

But here I am.

When you’re young, the world is a fascinating puzzle that you throw yourself into.  And the immediacy of your little neighborhood; your family, friends, work acquaintances and enemies, takes up almost all of your attention.  Sure, you notice things like recessions and wars because they impact you directly but as soon as things are resolved for you, your attention reverts to your little world.  And so, you are shielded by indifference from the spectacle of how our world works and who runs it.

So, it’s unsurprising that my familiarity with Joe Biden in the time before he was vice president was limited to the few times, he made the papers.  He ran for president long ago and almost immediately was singled out as third rate at almost everything except lying.  That was his only true excellence.  Plagiarism and misrepresenting his own achievements were his oeuvre.  This is what I remember about him from before he ascended to a larger stage.

Of course, since then he’s become a phenomenon.  As president of the United States, he’s the most famous man in the world.  He wields enormous power which he has used to impoverish his countrymen and immiserate whole areas of the world with his wars.  Knowledge of the sordid financial arrangement that his son Hunter Biden has perpetrated to extort money from foreign governments is ubiquitous.  Everyone has heard that Joe Biden is “the big guy” who skimmed 10% off the top of all of Hunter’s pay offs.  And the governments that he squeezed were places like Ukraine and China; authoritarian regimes that could pay for the influence peddling with no questions asked.

Now, this is all old hat.  There’s no end to the talk of Biden’s dishonesty and other character faults.  Everyone has seen the videos of him sidling up to children and women and pawing them and nuzzling them.  It’s extremely disturbing almost shocking.  But it’s old hat.

But here’s the thing.  What does this say about our society?  Do the stories about Biden and Clinton and Obama and their depravity mark our society as terminally decadent and tottering on the edge of dissolution or is this just the routine state of all societies?  Were all the presidents creeps?  Or have we reached a dangerous low point.

I guess I can’t claim I have a definitive answer.  I’d be interested in getting people’s opinions.  But I’ll give my opinion here.

So, human beings are extremely flawed.  And when handed incredible power and responsibility they can go off the deep end.  Jack Kennedy had many sexual dalliances while he was in the White House.  Bill Clinton had the Lewinsky scandal.  And both Clinton and Obama leveraged the contacts and probably the criminal evidence they possessed through the FBI to make themselves billionaires.  Therefore, there is a rich tradition of tawdry behavior by US presidents.

But I think Joe Biden is an order of magnitude worse.  Biden is an odious misfit that should never have come anywhere near the White House.  It’s as if a circus monkey had been appointed a municipal judge.  Sure, partisan politics will allow a lot of latitude with the selection of a candidate.  But this should have been a red flag.  Everything about him adds to a picture that is a caricature of a despicable creep.  With Biden we’ve lost even the illusion of honor.  I can only imagine what foreign dignitaries must be thinking when they have to interact with this demented wretch.  They probably wash their hands as soon as they can after shaking his.  Most of them probably make a point of leaving their wives behind on trips and I can only imagine what the female dignitaries experience when he comes in range.

So, I think we have dropped down a very long way in the caliber of our leaders.  Politicians like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi use their powerful leadership positions mostly to enrich themselves through insider stock trading which is a protected perk of the federal legislature.  And the president of the United States is bought off by one of the most corrupt governments in the world; Ukraine, to pay over a hundred billion dollars to finance a war from which no one benefits but the politicians and the merchants of death.

People will say that this is just the way business is done in an empire.  Caligula or Nero is just as valid a leader as Augustus or Marcus Aurelius.  As long as the army and the tax collectors do their jobs we’ll roll along for another few centuries.  I disagree.  I think the rot is advanced and has eaten its way through the other levels of the elite.  The managerial class seems to be far from the best and the brightest.  The universities have become clown college.  Even our supposedly state of the art information age corporations seem to lack initiative and inspiration to produce real innovation.

I think Joe Biden is a symptom.  But I think this symptom is one of those markers that are used in triage.  When a doctor notes this one, he sends the patient displaying it to the hospice for the morphine goodbye.

Who Do You Believe …

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… us or your own lying eyes?

Only the New York Times could try to sell us 2024 Biden as “Morning in America,”  For pity’s sake they even used it as the headline!

The gist of the article is that Biden’s whole term has been planting economic seeds that any day now will transform America into a wonderland.  Tragically for the voter we’re just too blind or stupid to see the bounty yet to come.  O tempora, o mores.

So vote for Joe and the miracle will be right around the corner.

The ending of this pathetic apologia for the failed Biden presidency is especially ironic.

“There also remains one respect in which Democrats should take a page from Mr. Reagan. In 1984, his campaign aired a famous ad declaring that it was “Morning Again in America.” Mr. Biden has grounds for making the same claim. His economic policies, if they are carried forward, hold the promise of opening a new era of prosperity.

The end of Mr. Reagan’s ad is worth repeating, too.

“Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

The answer is a shout we want to go back four years so we’ll have enough money just to buy food!  If people are moved by this clap trap they deserve to starve.

Sour Fisking in the Arena

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I was reading a recent essay by Curtis Yarvin called, “Heroin Liberals and Cocaine Conservatives.”  Yarvin is a clever writer and he made some entertaining comparisons between what liberals get out of believing in their narrative (anesthesia) versus what conservatives get from their narrative (hope).  Clever stuff.

But later the essay focuses on one particular conservative story.  He fisks an article that Chris Rufo wrote in the aftermath of his part in the recent ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay called, “The New Right Activism.”  This was a manifesto announcing the counterrevolution that Rufo declares as having already begun and he talks about what it must be, “The Right doesn’t need a white paper. What it needs is a spirited new activism with the courage and resolve to win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.”

Later on, he says, “Rather, the New Right needs to move from the politics of pamphlets to the governance of the institutions.    …   We must recruit, recapture, and replace existing leadership. We must produce knowledge and culture at a sufficient scale and standard to shift the balance of ideological power. Conservative thought has to move out of the ghetto and into the mainstream.”

This is all very general stuff.  And Yarvin is very unconvinced about all aspects of what Rufo says in his manifesto.  And he’s quite snide about the fact that Rufo has one of his degrees from Harvard Extension.  And he portrays the manifesto and by extension Rufo’s writing in general as merely salesmanship for his books and career.

Yarvin is a good writer and he is clever and some of his points about tactics may be true.  Perhaps replacing institutions is smarter than trying to reconquer them.  Maybe.

But I detect a certain aroma of sour grapes in this article.  Sure, upending Claudine Gay isn’t going to change the world.  It may not even make the next president of Harvard less beholden to the DEI orthodoxy.  But the point is Rufo has been involved in direct action in several cases.  Down in Florida he’s been involved in purging a state college; New College of Florida, of DEI, critical race theory, LGBTQ orthodoxy and all the other ills that infect modern colleges.  He’s accomplishing something that hasn’t happened before.  He’s taking back an institution from the Left.

Of course, it is necessary to see how this experiment proceeds.  Will a new board make New College of Florida a successful learning environment?  If it does, I can see how other states will learn from this effort.  And if he fails, there will be things learned too.

I always liked Teddy Roosevelt’s essay on the “Man in the Arena.”

“Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

This is not to say that intellectual ability is nothing.  But as things currently stand, what we are lacking is not ideas, it’s results.  DeSantis and Rufo and some others are actually trying to change things for the better.  I’m more than willing to hope they’ll succeed.  As far as manifestos, I’ll check back on his progress from time to time.  If he continues to score winds, I’ll begin to believe in the revolution.  Maybe I’ll join him on the barricades.  Maybe.

TikTok Socrates

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Our current awful culture is still western culture.  Of course, it’s been dumbed down so that any idiot can sing along.  And it now includes a whole preface that tells everyone that Westen Culture is a terrible thing that destroyed the rest of the world and the people that invented it are monsters.

But essentially, the whole world is adopting this impoverished version of western culture.  And the stupidest people will fit in perfectly with it.  While waiting for my car’s oil changes, I’ve been forced to see some of the programming that exists out there.  Words cannot express the level of stupidity I witnessed.  These are people who must have to be told to start and stop chewing their food while they eat.  Vapid can’t begin to describe them.  It was physically painful to have to hear their conversation.  Chickens clucking around a farmyard pecking at droppings would tower as mental giants above these “tv celebrities.”

That’s the base line that our culture has established.  And I’m sure that setting the bar so low is doing incalculable damage to our civilization.  Children mimic what they see on screens.  That has been going on since the invention of moving pictures.  And with our high-definition video and ubiquitous internet connectivity young people spend countless hours watching idiots on TikTok and all the other venues for this mindless stuff.

But I think it’s a mistake to think that the lowest common denominator will define the complete spectrum of what our culture will consist of.  On the contrary, I think there will be a reaction to the lobotomizing of our society.  People will search out information and entertainment wherever they can find it.  And as much as social media tries to restrict everything to content that conforms to the narrative, reality will find a way to break through.  In fact, the taboo nature of the truth will make it that much more fascinating.  All it needs is the right packaging to make it seem more forbidden.

Of course, there is a bell curve that defines the distribution of intelligence and that creates a distribution of various types of content; from the example of the television morons I described above on the left side of the x-axis to complex mathematical course work at the far right.  People will search out the information they need and are interested in.

Without a doubt the “narrative” has done a lot of damage to the younger generations.  The millennials and those who came after them have been gaslit by their teachers into believing a lot of the political propaganda about western civilization and the environment.  And there will be a price paid for this indoctrination.  I think a larger than normal percentage of these kids will fail to marry and have children.  And this is regrettable but at this point I think it is inevitable.  This will be a bottleneck for our culture.  And this was intentional.  Adding this to the policy of encouraging millions of third world migrants to move here produces an environment where western culture will be weakened and attenuated.

But this is still a partial change.  The more gullible people will remove themselves from the gene pool and those who produce children will look for a culture that encourages human survival and excellence instead of the Greta Thunberg version.

Currently there is an effort being put forth by right-wing activists to cleanse some of the colleges of the leftist propagandists.  Notably Chris Rufo has been appointed a New College of Florida board member and has broken ground on how woke colleges can be purged of woke ideology and practices like DEI, critical race theory and all of the LGBTQ agenda.  I think this process is the best way to improve the state of our culture going forward.  Eliminating all of these dangerous concepts and practices like affirmative action will be necessary to repairing the damage done by the Left.

Of course, the question remains whether the Left will allow themselves to be displaced.  At the federal level they are in charge.  We should have an answer in 2024.  If the federal government remains in the hands of the Left, then only a partial geographical reversal of the dumbing down of western culture will be possible.  What will be interesting is what the Left’s areas; the east and west coasts, will look like after the areas have a chance to follow their differing philosophies.  Let’s say after a century of DEI will the people in California still be able to walk upright and use fire?  We’ll have to wait and see.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 06JAN2024 – The AWFL Bubble

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war pig

Yes, the bubble, the echochamber. “It must be true because we all say it is true”. Then they employ the device they created, Bureaucracy, to wear down any dissent. As Stanislaw Lem wrote in “The Cyberiad”, the Steelypips found out that the Big B can defeat almost anything.

That is why they so fear and despise Trump. He is not of the system. He hates the Big B and its inherent evil. He slashes through it to get work done. He knows what paralysis and evil is hidden in reams of ill-used and sometimes arcane regulations with the force of law and which were not voted upon by public or congress.

She is right, of course about some things. Why buy Bucks’ noxious fluids full of arcane ingredients for 7 bucks when, with a Mr Coffee and a can of Folgers or Maxwellhouse, you can make your own caffeine drink at home for a few pennies a cup? Why, outside of need when busy, buy a breakfast sandwich of a toasted English muffin, a fried egg and a sausage patty for $4 when you can make it at home for about 60 cents?

But she is wrong about most Americans not changing their spending habits. Most of us, including old, widowed farts with adequate income streams, are changing spending priorities. I don’t fly to Europe unless it is in the back of a C-17 or other military jet. Then only when tasked. I eschew fast food dining except when on the run around the first of the month when I get most of the monthly chores accomplished. I do admit Five Guys burgers are rather good, but don’t ask for a large fry as I did my first time.

Liberal WASP women, especially those who are lesbians or cannot attract and keep a man, have a very skewed viewpoint. Personally I believe boxed wine makers are diluting their already useless product with various hormones to ensure addiction and with hallucinogens to prevent them from seeing reality.

The Venetian Gambit

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Well, here I am at 10 pm writing a post for the morning.  And that is the worst possible circumstance.  Creativity and even sentience is at a low ebb.  But life finds a way.

So, our insect overlords have decided to turn the United States into Brazil.  Well, I guess the odds are in their favor.  They’ve got all the money and are already in control of all the levers of power.  So, let’s assume they get their way and succeed in flooding the country with a hundred million random third-worlders and their offspring over the next four or five years.

Okay, so that will make things very different from even the mess we have now.  The level of chaos that will introduce into day-to-day life will be impressive.  Crime, of course, will become an omnipresent part of life.  And the ability of communities to provide first world amenities like utilities, paved roads and emergency services will become extremely difficult.  More and more, these atributes will be restricted to islands of affluence and order in an ocean of poverty and chaos.  And these islands will need to be self-sufficient and extremely well-guarded.

So, this will be the future.  It seems to me that the best outcomes will be realized by those who organize early and begin to build an infrastructure that creates one of these islands.  Maybe the island will be built around a factory that can employ some significant number of people and then build a “company town” around it.  The important thing is that the entire community is owned by some corporation that has enough clout to prevent the area from being infiltrated by a federal program that seeds prosperous areas with Section 8 housing and introduces drugs and crime into the community.

In a red state the state government can encourage the establishment of these islands as nuclei from which larger functional areas can be created by their natural growth.  You might think that red states can just maintain a healthy society based on their laws but I tend to doubt this.  Every state has one or more highly dangerous urban center that will act as a locus of crime that will spread out into the suburbs and even the rural areas surrounding it.  All that the state government can do is try to limit the exportation of this crime.  But it will be many years before all of this dysfunction burns itself out.  In the meantime, it is a choice for those living here whether they will find safe places to live or just sit there and be drowned in the coming tide of barbarism.

I realize I’m being optimistic here.  Perhaps the only islands of affluence will be those that have already been formed by the elites.  Maybe the red state leaders will just sit on their hands and allow the tidal wave of poverty and crime to overwhelm everything.  That wouldn’t be entirely unexpected.  But if so then those of us who have families will be forced to flee farther afield.  After all, even in Fifth Century AD Italy, a few safe havens were formed to avoid the rapine and pillaging of the Huns, Goths and Lombards.  In fact, Venice was specifically founded for this very reason.

So, I guess the idea is to look for places where efforts are being made to create areas of restoration and revitalization.  The chief indicator will be the imposition of strict law and order.  The tell-tale sign I’d look for would be the liberal use of the death penalty to restore order.  It is a very effective methodology.

The Christmas Truce

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A fellow on X had this clip pinned on his feed.  I think the WW I Christmas truce was probably one of the truly lost opportunities to change the world for the better.

https://x.com/Resurrec_Ted/status/1727552093991641216?s=20

Imagine if hundreds of thousands of soldiers had just refused to go back to the trenches and formed a united front to end the war there and then.  What might the world look like today?

Just my emotional response to the idea of common people revolting against madness.  Maybe some day we’ll find ourselves in a slightly similar situation if we all revolt against our masters in Washington and tell them we won’t dance to their tune anymore.

Waking Up to Brutal Reality

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I was having a discussion with a good friend who currently is about where I was in 2016.  He’s seen how fake the GOP establishment is but he thinks things are so bad, based on the polls, that Trump has to win.  He talked about the drift of black and Hispanic and youth voters either slightly or precipitously away from Joe Biden this year and he feels that this has guaranteed the election for Trump.

So, I asked him what happens if two weeks after election day Joe Biden wins in the usual places; Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia?  “Well, then it’s over.  We might as well look for a new country,” he said.  Based on my conversations with this friend over the course of over twenty years this is a seismic change.

2020 was a wakeup call for the normie-cons.  And no one can claim that in the world that we inhabited in 2000 or even 2008 that an economy and a social environment such as we have now would possibly have allowed for the incumbent that caused these conditions to get reelected.  It just wouldn’t have happened.  Everyone knows that election results no longer track with public opinion polls or even reality.  I’m convinced that if Joe Biden “wins” the 2024 Presidential Election the last remaining holdouts on the Right will be fully awakened to truth about American elections; that they’re fake.

Now this is a limited observation and conclusion.  I don’t claim that this realization will have any effect or result on our situation.  The only thing that will happen will be a collapse in trust in the federal and blue state governments and a search for some other power center that can be invested with whatever monetary and social support these people can provide.

People like DeSantis and Abbott will be looked to for protection against Biden and the unconstitutional power grabs that he and his cronies will enact.  It might even come down to a showdown over something like illegal border crossings in Texas.  But at the very least most people will finally agree with the statement that “we can’t vote our way out of this situation.”

And that’s huge.  This collapse in trust by the least political portion of the population is the death knell for the establishment Republicans.  Creeps like Mitch McConnell and Nikki Haley will be recognized for what they are; patsies for the Left.  Brave men who are willing to strike out in a new direction, to take matters into their own hands and force the federal government to accept the rights of Red State Americans to the constitutional freedoms that we were promised generations ago will be the true leaders and they will find enormous support from the people who are impatiently waiting for some kind of resistance to the unrelenting attack against us by the Left and their minions in Washington.

I look forward to the day when a whole generation of men who recognize what Trump did and use his example to replace the RINOs in state and federal offices and begin the process of defining and acting upon a concerted program to push back the outrages that have been perpetrated against the good people of this country for generations.

But all this supposes that such men exist.  What if they don’t?  Well then, if after the upcoming 2024 debacle no one steps forward to lead the remaining people of this country who want to be free, then I agree with my friend.  We’ll need to find a new country.

Selling the Magic Pill

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Not satisfied with inventing a diabetes drug that makes healthy women lose a little weight, the pharma companies are now looking for a drug that mimics the benefits of exercise.

Various approaches are being pursued.  One hormone that has shown promise is irisin.

“In 2012, scientists discovered a hormone called irisin that is released by muscles during exercise – a messenger chemical that communicates with various parts of the body. In November 2023, Wrann and her colleagues demonstrated that irisin can reach the brain and clear the toxic amyloid plaques involved in Alzheimer’s disease, a big breakthrough in understanding how exercise helps shield the brain from dementia.”

It is also believed to modulate bone growth and density and prevent loss of muscle mass.

But of course, why take a careful, reasonable subject for pharmaceutical investigation when instead you can just go Vlad the Impaler on it.

“Because scientists are still unsure which exercise hormones are the most beneficial, the ExPlas trial is taking a broad approach. Injecting blood plasma from people who exercise regularly is a simple way of transferring all these potentially beneficial hormones to patients. “The Norwegian idea is to take the plasma as the drug and give it to those who need it,” says Wrann.”

Well, sure.  Let’s drain the blood out of the young and use it to keep the centenarians alive forever.  I can just see it.  Nancy Pelosi spends some fraction of her hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten insider trading gains to have the blood of virgins pumped into her.  While she’s at it why not give her a skin transplant from some poor young woman who “accidentally” dies while participating in a beauty contest on Jeffrey Epstein’s Fantasy Island now under new CIA-mediated management.

I think we’ve reached terminal stupid.  And I say this as one of the dumbest people I know.  All these physiological and metabolic studies keep demonstrating that doing natural things like getting enough sleep and exercising moderately or even just taking a walk produce all these incredible benefits that surpass by orders of magnitude the benefits of all these pharmaceuticals and without the side effects.  They pump people, even children, with psycho-active drugs to combat the depression that is caused by the horrible lifestyles we’ve created but don’t care that the drugs make people zombies.

We sit around watching tiny screens and don’t talk to each other or walk with each other and certainly don’t go out and play sports or even get together for a meal.  At least going to the gym or your basement and doing some calisthenics and going for a walk in a park three times a week won’t have the side effect of increasing your desire to commit suicide.

The FDA is a rogue government agency.  Instead of policing the pharma companies it is their co-conspirator.  A new agency needs to be created with the mandate to review the drug safety and efficacy records for the last fifty years and eliminate all of the really harmful medicines that exist.  And while they’re at it they could contract out studies with teaching hospitals to test out non-pharmaceutical regimens for various medical conditions.  And they could concentrate on the effects of diet and exercise on human beings.  The AMA should also be forced to police its membership who should spend some reasonable amount of their busy day convincing their patients to get off their fat butts and stagger around the office park at lunch hour instead of going down to Taco Bell for another three thousand calorie lunch.

Now I’m twice as guilty as the next guy.  But I at least admit it’s my own damn fault.  And I have it from the highest sources in the pharma industry that many of the miracle drugs that are supposed to counteract the ravages of our diet and exercise malpractice do more harm than good.

If the smart boys in the labs ever did figure out a pill that kept us young and fit forever without horrific side effects, I’d be the first one in line to get my dose.  But they won’t.  That’s not how the universe works.  Things like the endocrine and immune systems in our bodies are so much more complex than what we’ve so far deciphered and each component mediates so many separate responses that the tinkering that biologists and pharmacologists do is closer to voodoo than science.  Maybe after artificial intelligence has had a century to stew in human biology, we might see some progress.  But all of us will be long gone.  So, get out the weights and put down the chimichanga and forget about the magic bullet.

The baby boomers want to be young and cool forever.  Their time is running out.  What they should be doing is figuring out how to exit with at least a little bit of class.