Category: Current Events

David Brooks Admits the Truth

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They know.  We know they know.  They know we know that they know.

The only question is when it all blows up.

What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

“Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.””

…

“But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.”

03AUG2023 – Make a Start, Make a Start

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So, what to write about today.  Today was a day to get back on the exercise track.  I’ve been playing around with switching up the lat-machine and barbell patterns and reintroducing the rower.  The rower tends to aggravate my back so I dropped it about six months ago but I have a theory that if I improve my form then it won’t tweak my back.  Today my back’s a little sore but I’m telling myself that it’s not bad enough to shut down the experiment.  Well, we’ll see.  I’m mixing high rep, low weight with high weight, low rep sets with the rower in between for aerobic balance.

And I know nothing about exercise or how it should be done but after starting the weights a few years ago I haven’t managed to injure myself so I’m pretty satisfied that the benefits I’ve seen justify the effort and that I should continue to do it by trial and error.

Yesterday’s red pill about the truth of the regime we’re living under was a bit of a downer.  So today I want something more upbeat.  But what?

I was thinking of reviewing the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” that I was watching last night.  It’s a movie that I watch every few years because I once worked in a boiler room sales operation that was similar to the one in the movie and I can attest to the accuracy of the portrayal but it’s such a bleak, black comedy that it would just continue the black mood I was in.  But surprisingly, the movie and my real-life experience with the dark side of the marketplace ended up having the opposite effect on me.  So instead of reviewing the movie I wanted to think about the basis of the movie.  Selling.

And this positive outlook appeared because I remembered what it was like dealing with an insane workplace reality and I remembered that the lesson I learned was that these dysfunctional places were fake.  They were diseased simulations of real things that functioned correctly.  And so, the trick was to distinguish the differences and avoid the fake.  In the film, the salesmen are selling worthless real estate to unsophisticated people.  The various salesmen use slightly different variations on a hard sales pitch that attempts to get the buyers to believe that an incredible investment opportunity existed if they would buy this land immediately.  Otherwise, the opportunity would disappear forever.

The reality of course, is that the opportunity would exist indefinitely because the supply of worthless land was inexhaustible and the value of the property was completely imaginary.  So, these salesmen had an impossible job.  They were essentially robbing people of their hard-earned savings.  And every day they had to start again from scratch because none of their buyers would ever be return customers or provide testimonials as satisfied customers.  And that is the tension in the movie.  There is a mandate to increase sales and the only difference between the successful and unsuccessful salesmen is their skill at lying.  Al Pacino’s character has an innate sense of the psychological tendencies of his “marks.”  He knows how to make buying his product an exciting experience.  He is selling himself.  The other salesmen are not as gifted.  Their patter sounds hackneyed and unconvincing.  Their appearance belies their claims that they are highly successful and providing a valuable service.  The movie shows us the evil side of selling.

But experience with the marketplace will show you that there are also people that provide the real thing.  These are people who have products that have real value.  If you need a manufactured product and must pay a large sum to have something custom made, you need to know that the manufacturer is competent and, just as important, honest.  And truth be told, the only way to know the difference between the real and the fake is by long painful experience with the marketplace.

You have to know who’s out there.  You have to have dealt with the whole gamut of vendors and manufacturers and know who now has the quality craftsmen working for him and who is no longer spending the money to keep up his quality either in terms of components or craftsmen.  And the same goes for almost any product.  There is real and fake.  And the only way to learn the difference is by knowing your craft and sometimes by painful experience.  But a part of it is knowing people.  It’s funny, but the stereotypes about the dishonest salesmen are actually true.  Most of the time you can read the conman by his patter and his facial expression.  But that’s assuming you know enough about the product you’re buying to force him to lie.

And that raises another truth.  Caveat emptor.  Don’t buy things that you can’t rate.  Understand the qualities that define the thing you’re buying.  Educate yourself.  Don’t tempt a merchant by your ignorance.

But the encouraging thing is that there are still a lot of decent people selling their products and services.  And if you do your homework, you’ll find them.  And if you don’t, you’ll get sold some underwater real estate in Florida by Al Pacino.  And you’ll deserve it.

I’ll save that review of the movie for another day.

CNN Announces that Hunter is a Scumbag

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H/T to ArthurinCali for this clip.  It’s hilarious.  Calling the Bidens trailer trash is a wonderful burst of candor in a sea of dishonesty.

Wake Up to the Truth

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This life that each of us pursues is a mystery.  It entails a complicated relationship with many facets of our reality.  Each of us interacts with the natural world and the human world.  And the human world divides up into our interaction with people in a continuum that stretches from the totality of all human life; past, present and future; to every smaller circle of nation, state, city, town, neighborhood, right down to our family and finally to our relationship to our own human self; our own body, which then loops around back to the natural world.

And as much as each one of us is an individual and therefore unique, we want different things.  Some of us seek fame and others wealth.  Some pursue knowledge and some desire pleasure.  But because being human can no longer be a solitary endeavor, whatever we want to do with our lives, we have to do it in the context of our interaction with human society.  “No man is an island.”  So, we achieve what we do through our actions as part of human society.  And therefore, the kind of society we live in dictates the range of success that each of us and all of us can possibly achieve.

And that was the glory of the United States in its earlier days.  The range of outcomes available to almost anyone living in this place was remarkable.  The practically limitless natural resources, the constantly expanding technological advances and the personal freedom afforded by the United States’ Constitution combined to create an incredibly dynamic and successful society that transformed the world in its wake.

But now the obscenely wealthy and powerful have decided the party’s over.  There’s not enough to go round, at least not for the middle.  The elite will still jet over to Davos and utilize whatever luxuries technology has to offer.  And whichever toadies they need to organize their lives and whichever pets they adopt from the third world will be included within their charmed circle.  But not the rest of us.  The elite has decided that it is in their best interests to get rid of us altogether.

The future has been cancelled.  No jobs, no homes, no families, no kids.  Not even the consolation prizes like a car ride in the country or a barbecue on the grill.  Instead, you have to settle for getting mugged somewhere in your fifteen-minute city while going out to buy your cricket taco.  You’ll own nothing and “like it.”  Forget about having a family, you won’t even be human.  As a child your teachers will groom you to be neutered and then experimented on to resemble something different.

And even the negative freedoms are being removed.  The freedom from fear is one of the big ones.  Turning the cities into anarchic kill zones is a big part of that.  The police have been handcuffed and prosecutors and judges have been appointed to protect career criminals from the punishments for their crimes.  And just to make sure that normal people don’t attempt to protect themselves from this death trap, those same prosecutors and judges go out of their way to prosecute anyone who tries.

Then what’s left?  Everything good in life has been removed until finally death by fentanyl will appear to be the best option available.

It’s a brilliant plan.  If you control all the levers of power and even the social and educational apparatus you can distort human behavior until it fulfills your dictates.  Human freedom, at least outside of their circle, does not fulfill these dictates.  So, it must be eliminated.  And it has to a great degree.

Pretty grim picture.  But only by comparison to what we had before.  Only because our expectations and our assumptions about the world around us, about this society, are misinformed.  There are still opportunities and resources all around us in vast quantities.  What is needed to unlock them is the correct mindset with respect to the obstacles and traps.  Know your enemies.  Avoid the pitfalls.  Identify allies and resources and form communities that strengthen those that you identify as friends.  And wherever possible work to undermine the wealth and well-being of your enemies.  And most importantly of all, protect your children from all aspects of this war against us.  Protect them from the lies and tell them the truth.

We can thrive in this new environment.  All we need to do is adjust.  The truth shall set you free.  Wake up to the truth.

A Man with a Plan for Reducing On-Line Censorship of the Right

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This guy has identified two programs that the Biden administration uses to censor all of us on the internet.  Kudos to him.  Hey McCarthy, put these two line items in your funding bill.

Good and Bad Emperors

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Last week when I was railing against Joe Biden’s regime, I compared him to the Roman Emperor Tiberius.  Now this wasn’t meant to indicate a great similarity between these two politicians.  It was only to indicate that at a certain point in their careers each one was a debauched old man in charge of a great empire whose heir was a lunatic.  Honestly, the comparison is grossly unfair to Tiberius.  In his younger days Tiberius was a highly skilled and successful general who conquered several important provinces along the periphery of the empire.  By comparison, Joe Biden’s greatest achievement was getting hair plugs.

But it does bring up once again the comparison of the period at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire with our own time.  The end of the Roman Republic was a tumultuous century of greater and greater outrages against the Roman citizenry.  By the time the Caesars ended the farce all that remained was a plutocratic oligarchy harvesting the Roman citizens as legionnaires to conquer the rest of the world for use as slaves on Roman plantations.

But those legions were successful enough that they allowed the corrupt, mismanaged, Empire to expand for another two hundred years and after that to at least survive for another three hundred years.

And how about us?  Will the corpse of the American Republic, hijacked by the managerial mandarins of the federal government in association with the corporate oligarchs continue to rule the Global American Empire for its own half a millennium?

I guess that’s the quadrillion dollar question.  Based on the looks of Joe Biden you might say that five hundred days might be more realistic than five hundred years.  But let’s not be too hasty.  Currently our government is still masquerading as a representative republic where elections decide who is in charge.  A place holder like Joe Biden whose name is still familiar to those who remember him as a senator and vice president might be a very good way to begin the transition to the imperial model.

And after all most emperors aren’t necessarily “good emperors.”  You got Augustus and (arguably) Tiberius in the good column.  Then you get Caligula.  With the right public relations team even Caligula can last a few years.  So, with the right press secretary and national press Joe can survive.  Kamala, on the other hand is more in the Incitatus category.  Like Caligula’s horse, she is just a bridge too far and cannot pass the smell test.

And right in line with this common-sense limit no one is speaking of Kamala Harris as a realistic successor to Joe Biden, either in 2024 or afterwards.  The powers that be are respecting the instinct for self-preservation that still exists in the American populace.

But we could end up with an actor like Gavin Newsome or Elizabeth Warren or even AOC (God forbid.)  So, it’s well within the bounds of possibility that this empire could sputter along almost indefinitely with cretinous puppets in charge.  But what could shorten the span of time of the empire is military disaster.  All the way up to around 180 AD the legions provided a reliable bulwark against the incursions of the external enemies of Rome.  Germanic tribesmen and Persian armies alike still had to reckon with a relatively well-trained and professional army that could be brought to bear against an enemy.

Unfortunately for us this same military preparedness doesn’t seem to be available any longer.  But at the same time, the bluff is still being used to attempt to intimidate the other powerful regimes.  So, the spectacle of the Middle Eastern retreats (especially the rout from Afghanistan) is a recent indicator.  And now the bluster toward Russia and China rings quite hollow.

A true military debacle would be the catalyst for a much quicker loss of prestige and possibly the destabilization of the oligarchy that currently calls the shots in America.  After all, if we can’t even hold off medieval goat herders like the Taliban then why exactly would we allow the IRS and the FBI to treat us like slaves?

So, I guess my thought is that the American Empire can last practically indefinitely as long as it retains the competency that maintains it as a great power.  But if its military prowess declines then so does its ability to coerce the American people to knuckle under to its tyrannical demands.  The outcome of Biden’s saber rattling against Russia and China may be very instructive concerning the future of our oligarchs and their junta.

And by the way, where is our Caesar?

End Times Caused by Too Many Unemployed Elites

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This guy Turchin claims he predicted 2020 would be a disaster based on our society’s suplus of rich kids who couldn’t get jobs among the managerial elite.

And he claims that it’s likely to be these same elites who will organize to solve the current problems.  Why am I not comforted by that prospect?  Well, there may be a lot of truth in his diagnosis.  When the people running our economy offshore most of our manufacturing jobs it doesn’t take a genius to realize that there won’t be enough good paying jobs left for the rest of us.

29JUL2023 – OCF Update

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Hazy, hot and humid.

July!

So today I have the sixteen year old grandson here.  Now I have to up my game.  Sixteen is an island and nobody from off of that island can crack the code.  Will I have to play video games?  Do I have the reflexes do I have the brain cells left?  We’ll see.

Needless to say some part of the day will be a black out period on the site.  But I also expect the day to be shorter.  No one can expect to keep a sixteen year old’s attention except with other sixteen year olds.  But I’ll do my best.

Sixteen.  A fraught age.  At that age nothing I did involved coherent thought.  So many stupid people.  So many stupid ideas.  Just surviving the age was a minor miracle.  But that was a more forgiving age.  Social media did not exist.  All our sins and stupidities, for the most part, faded into nothingness.  Today they’ll nail you on a cross for anything or nothing.

But it’ll be good.  The torch is being passed.  With the abandonment of the European Americans by the federal government it behooves all of us to marshal our resources to boost our children and grandchildren out of the wreckage of the middle class and give them a fighting chance.  And just letting them know they’ve got a family that cares whether they live or die is a part of that.

So today will be interesting.  Hopefully we’ll shoot some pool, watch some bad super hero movies, eat some junk food and who knows maybe even talk.

See you around.