Category: Current Events

A Jaded Mandarin

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People are always trying to compare the present era to other historical epochs.  Thucydidean Athens or Caesarian Rome or pre-revolutionary France.  All these analogies are clever or foolish depending on the author.  And all of them are of necessity partial in their similarity.  What’s the expression, “History never repeats itself but merely rhymes.”?

And that is true.  This era is like no other because the assembly of characters is unique.  What I notice about the cast of this drama is that most of them are a poor lot.  Don’t look for a Pericles or a Julius Caesar or even an Augustus.  We’ve got the Clintons, the Bushes and the Obamas.  And when even these mediocrities walk away, we get Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  Now I don’t mean to exhort Trump’s virtues as if he’s some messiah.  His feet of clay are legendary.  But he isn’t a politician.  He’s more of a supporting cast member dragged on stage because the headliners all forgot their lines and ran off stage in terror of the audience pelting them with tomatoes and oranges.

There’s something distressing about the people who run things from behind the scenes handing over the kabuki theater to really obvious fifth raters like Biden and Harris.  I can’t make up my mind whether they just don’t think it’s necessary to keep up the pretense of a republic anymore or that some bizarre sequence of circumstances has thrust these two truly unimpressive hacks into the limelight.  I’m not sure which of these two reasons is true and I’m not even sure which is a worse reason.

But for whichever reason, here we are.  And it is a spectacularly awful moment in our history.  For more than twenty years I have been steadily more and more dismayed by the path our leaders have been dragging us down.  Every presidential term has plumbed new depths until at this point it appears we may be well beyond the point of no return.  And so possibly the only thing left to do about our present situation is laugh.

Maybe mockery is all that’s left to do.  After all, exposing the stupidity and evil of our supposed leaders may even accomplish some small good.  Maybe it could even tip the balance by waking up even the terminally dense to just how imbecilic someone like Kamala Harris truly is.  And, if nothing else, laughter is good for the soul.  Watching those compilations of Biden stumbling and bumbling around trying to walk off stage or failing to remember words like government or health care were hilarious and without a doubt cheered me up.  And listening to Kamala expound on yellow school buses or the relationship of Russia and Ukraine on the map of Eurasia did my heart good.

But humor aside, I do think about what it means that Biden and Harris are now the caliber of leader that the dominant party of this empire finds acceptable.  It’s got to say something about how this country works.  We don’t elect political leaders.  We hire actors to read us the news from the regime.  In fact, it’s gotten so bad that we now have actors who translate the news from the actors we “elect.”  We have the Haitian Betty Boop come out and explain what Joe Biden meant when he mumbled incoherently about Russia or Gaza or ice cream.  We won’t get the truth but we’ll get today’s version of the narrative.

And so, looking at what we have devolved into I wouldn’t compare us to Athens or Rome.  I wouldn’t even compare us to Stalin’s USSR.  We’re more like one of the decadent Chinese bureaucratic dynasties right before the barbarians overran it.  We’re the Middle Kingdom that has always been and will always be.  It will go on regardless of ineptitude, graft and stupidity.  It will survive due to the titanic size and inertia of the whole interlocking structure.  Even the Mongol hordes were subsumed into its colossal bulk.  Maybe in a century a revolution will sweep the Earth and topple it to the ground but a century seems like the minimum time needed.

In the meantime, I hope for some miracle where Trump gets in and like some latter-day Heracles he beheads and cauterizes the polycephalic Hydra of the Deep State and returns sanity to our poor abused republic.  Otherwise, I better learn to bow.

Aspects of World Building – 1

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As is natural for a man of my era, Heinlein is the exemplar when it comes to science fiction craftsmanship.  But whereas in his youth he was something of a progressive I am a conservative.  So, whereas his earliest “what if?” scenario for his future history was the United States becoming an unlikely Christian theocracy, I’m confronted with the reality of a United States that’s already halfway to becoming a woke oligarchic police state.  Therefore, I’ll use that as the first component of my world building.  Of course, it’s hardly original or surprising.  Maybe it’s even lazy or boring.  But I think it fits.  Besides it can be a one off that’s quickly cured by a revolution that leaves a more interesting and fertile chaos in its wake.

And just as easy to add to the pot is the looming energy drought that is already a part of the daily conversation.  Global warming, green energy, fear of nuclear power; all of these conspire to make the future a bleak prospect for the everyday people trying to eek out a living and raise their families.  Therefore, technology around new energy sources and technologies is a no-brainer.

Now, all that’s good stuff but we need some cooler technology than geothermal turbines.  So, we’ll add in cold fusion (or at least warmish fusion) based on the alleged ability of some heavy metals (platinum group, tantalum, etc.) to produce neutrons under the right conditions.

And we’re going to need a Mars mission I’d say.  Why?  Why not?

What about global unrest?  I guess so.  I’m not all that interested in Asia or Africa, or Europe for that matter, anymore.  I guess I should think about their status to make the story convincing but I’ll leave that alone for the beginning.

What other technology?  Well, biological and genetic should be in the mix.  Maybe the ancient DNA information turns up some anomalies that point to a more complicated hominid prehistory that can be leveraged for some genetic engineering stories.  Maybe some research produces a useful understanding of how other aspects of the cellular apparatus beside the DNA mediate evolution.  Maybe some kind of evolutionary acceleration can be controlled using biochemical stimuli that are not currently recognized.  Maybe this science is unlocked by a genius who wants to change humans.  What kinds of change?  Obviously, intelligence but how about gills to breathe underwater?  Look at all those millions of square miles of ocean.  Maybe make humans photosynthetic.

Artificial intelligence is a for-sure part of the universe.  We need AI’s that in many ways appear to be conscious but whether they actually are I don’t currently know.  I’ll have to see what works.

Extraterrestrials?  I really don’t know yet.  Maybe it’s too early for that.  After all I don’t currently have a star drive.  Maybe I’ll start by finding out if there’s simple life somewhere in the solar system.  Could it be bio-pollution from Earth.  Could algae and tardigrades have drifted from Earth to Mars.  Sure, why not?  And could they have developed some interesting new tricks trying to survive on a freezing, almost airless desert?  Of course!

I used to toy with the idea that the gas giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn) might have a stable layer somewhere in between their hot cores and cryogenic surfaces where creatures swim and fight and live and die.  Maybe that would be fun to play with or maybe an ocean inside of one of the Jovian moons would be better.

Okay, I think that’s enough to start with.

Well, They’ve Had Their Second Shot At Trump

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This second guy, Ryan Wesley Routh, has been trying to recruit mercenaries to fight in Ukraine.  Now what do you think is the chance that Mr. Routh doesn’t work for the CIA?

https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/us-news/would-be-trump-assassin-idd-as-ryan-routh-58-of-hawaii-sources/

It’s remarkable that we’re talking about multiple assassination attempts on the Republican candidate for president.  But, no big deal.  Probably a misunderstanding.  Maybe his meds were off.

Imagine if it were Harris.  The cities would be in flames.  Well, will they go for the trifecta?  Probably.

Lights, Camera, Action!

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Today Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire has a movie out in pretty wide distribution called, “Am I Racist?”  I’ve seen some of the coming attractions and it’s in the vein of a mocumentary where he interviews various anti-racism experts disguised as one of them.  In this guise he gets them to say the most absurd things about racism and American society.  It looks like it might be interesting and potentially very funny.  And I say this after watching his first movie, “What is a Woman.”  It was very effective at exposing the incoherence of the various transgender hucksters and their victims.  I hope this new movie gets lots of attention and makes lots of money for Walsh and the Daily Wire.

This movie opening got me thinking.  It shows that stuff is starting to appear from our side of the street on a more regular basis.  But the problem is that it takes an outfit like the Daily Wire that has its own built-in readership to provide publicity.  What’s needed is an honest search engine that would act as a substitute for Google.  Of course, X is already beginning to provide a social media locale for everyone but the bias that Google uses against the Right is a big deal and can’t be overstated.  Maybe it’ll take the government busting up Google’s monopoly to finally even out the playing field.

In addition, it would be nice if someone would provide the same kind of integrated entertainment and media presence for the Right that Time-Warner provides to the Left.  Now I’m not crazy.  Amazon has decimated the book and movie businesses with its Kindle and streaming businesses.  And whatever is left of the movies is limping along under Disney.  But an underserved niche like traditionalists seems like a safe way to make money in the present environment.  Just look at Disney.  They own all the most successful franchises in the entertainment world but because they object to the traditionalist aspects of these intellectual properties, they routinely sabotage the success of the movies they produce in these franchises by injecting woke plots and characters.  Competition, any real competition is bound to make money by just following time honored precedent; sell sex!

If someone purchased existing stories in these same genres and just told the stories the way they were written fifty or a hundred years ago, they would be equally successful to the earlier movies like the original Star Wars or the earlier installments of Indiana Jones or the Marvel superhero stories.  All of these earlier works are just variations on the theme of the western hero that fights the monsters or villains and wins the girl.  This is as old as Odysseus or as new as Spiderman.  All anyone has to do is make sure that the man acts like a man and the girl is really good looking and falls into the hero’s arms in the last act.

It really isn’t that complicated.  But for whatever reason no one has attempted to build a lean, mean studio to do just that.  There are plenty of people; actors, directors, producers who have been cut out of Hollywood for the simple reason that the studios now have a quota system that excludes white people.  Hire a few of the better people, probably at a discount, and most importantly hire some of the best writers and put out movies at a reasonable price (not in Hollywood obviously) that tell stories that people want to hear.  And make money.

Well, eventually it will happen.  But will it happen in my lifetime?  Ah, well.  Where’s my fedora and bullwhip?

I Lost My Post

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I had an idea for a post and I wrote about six hundred words.  But by four hundred I was starting to dislike the idea.  I walked away from it for a while.  In fact, I watched a movie (“The Boston Strangler”) and by the time I got back I erased it.  It was too much.

So here I am at the eleventh hour (literally) and I’ve got to come up with an idea.

I’ll just give a slice of life.  I had to travel to the enclaves of blue privilege in the People’s Republic.  I was in Wellesley and Newton Mass.  Now I haven’t been in these Boston suburbs in years but they’re just as hilarious and nauseating as ever.  Now it’s been a year or two since I last saw a “Black Lives Matter” lawn sign but on one street there were four.  And then I looked at the bumper stickers on the BMW’s and every third one had the “We’re Not Going Back” sign or “My Body, My Choice.”  Now this was in the early afternoon so most working age people were at work but I never saw so many dour-looking old waspy females in one place.  It was like some kind of Katherine Hepburn impersonator’s convention.  I flushed two of them when my GPS sent me down a dead-end road.  When they saw my non-BMW car coming down their little Cul-de-Sac of Lost Souls, they looked like they wanted to call the authorities to put a stop to these riff-raff spewing carbon dioxide and testosterone in their little bubble.

At the offices I stopped in everyone seemed sedate and anti-depressed.  No emotions seemed to intrude and no visible life detracted from an air of propriety. Everyone followed the lines and spoke in low tones and wore the right clothes.  It was pretty creepy.

When I headed out, I took Route 9 west and at some point (maybe Natick or Framingham, not sure which) I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts.  And the people were among the living again.  Now they were still New Englanders which isn’t normal people for sure but they weren’t the pod people I had just escaped from.  They were rude, sarcastic and in a bad mood, in other words the typical Dunkin Donuts staff.  But they didn’t creep me out.  And as I drove along, I noticed plenty of Harris/Walz signs but not a single BLM sign.

Rich progressives are an entirely different life form.  They’re tucked away in their cocoon and they have no intention of ever coming out.  Their hermetically sealed world is completely shielded from Haitian refugees eating cats and geese and more importantly impervious to people who don’t think Trump is a monster.  They expect the world to one day consist of nothing but them.  How this is supposed to happen they don’t worry about.  But to that end they and all their friends send people like Elizabeth Warren to Washington to make sure that nothing ever interferes with their cloistered little existence and the measures needed to keep it that way.  It was an instructive day.  It reminded me who we work for.

Updated:

Milo Mindbender commented:

I also drift into an occasional bubble of liberalism, and they believe in free expression, but can’t contemplate someone not agreeing whole heatedly with their viewpoint. It’s not that they want to stop opposing views, it’s they can’t believe anyone doesn’t see the world exactly as they do.
This is the same thing when Martha’s vineyards declared itself a sanctuary city, until refugees showed up, then they used the authorities to relocate them just as fast as they could before it effected their real estate values.
I hope they get a real eye opener in November, and the ballot exceeds the cheat by such a margin that there is no way to consider it legitimate with a straight face.

Were or Weren’t Transgender

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Back in the stone age a boy in Brooklyn could buy a spaldeen (a Spalding rubber ball) for a quarter.  If that was too expensive, he could buy the lesser quality pensie pinkie for three nickels.  And with such a valuable artifact you could play handball, Chinese handball, hit-the penny, stoopball, punchball, slapball or sewer cover baseball for weeks.  Of course, if you used it for stickball, it would only last a matter of days before it split in half but the point is you really got your money’s worth out of this simple toy.

While looking for some toys for the kids Camera Girl informed me that a spaldeen now costs $7.88.  Of course, now it’s called a Spalding High Bounce Ball.  So that’s more than a 3,000% increase in about sixty years.  That sounds absurd.  And yet when I think of the return on investment compared to a gaming system that kids use today, I tend to think that this humble toy from the neolithic is infinitely better.

When I think of the hours we spent outside playing and fighting and running around and meeting new kids at the playground and thinking up new rules to make the games work better in the far from perfect environment of the street or the sidewalk or the public-school playground I know for a fact that we had much, much more stimulation, exercise and just plain fun than kids today.  There were relatively few fat kids back then and real obesity was unheard of.  How could you get fat when we were always running?  Baseball, softball, basketball, football, even street hockey were played in their proper season.  And tag, freeze tag, hide and go seek, ringalevio and a thousand variations that we made up filled the afternoon hours after school.  And we were always walking to go everywhere in our environment.  We could walk to Manhattan Beach (which is in Brooklyn) or see the fishing boats in Sheepshead Bay or walk down Ocean Parkway to Avenue U or Kings Highway to see a movie.  We walked for miles and we rode our bikes everywhere.

But what can the kids do today.  If you live in the suburbs there may not even be any sidewalks and riding a bicycle on country roads is sometimes very hazardous and so the kids have to be brought to organized sports like soccer or maybe baseball but organized sports don’t take up much time and to be honest, organized sports isn’t as much fun.

I guess what is needed is a common space like a big school yard that can be available to all the kids in a town with only enough adult supervision to keep really bad things like drugs and actual gang activity out but allowing the kids to develop their own hierarchy and split up into whatever groups they see fit.  A baseball diamond, a football field, some basketball hoops, a handball court or two and a little pavement would produce an environment that would allow kids to invent some games that could keep them playing and fighting for hours.

Maybe that would give them so much human interaction that they wouldn’t have the time to stare at TikTok, grow obese and worry whether they were or weren’t transgender.

Update:

War Pig commented:

Playing tackle football with 20 kids on a side. Playing baseball with 8 outfielders. Riding bikes to the park. Staying out from breakfast to street lights coming on with a break for lunch and supper. Skinned knees and Bactine. Playing in warm rains. Mud puddles. Drinking water from a garden hose or pumping it out of the well. Soaking watermelons in a net in the well to chill them, then eating them and having seed spitting contests. Hypnotizing chickens on the farm. Fishing in the creek and bringing home the “keepers” for supper. Gigging frogs for fried frog legs. Hot dog roasts over an open fire and toasting marshmallows on a stick. Climbing trees. Picking wild berries.

Me and my brother working on our paternal grandparents’ farm. We worked like clydesdales and ate like them, too. Stayed skinny, even on mamaw’s high-fat, high-calorie farm cooking.

Kids are missing out on a lot now. Fresh air, minor injuries, the odd bee sting, running and laughing just for the heck of it.

Damn, we had it good.

Master Diver replied:

And yet we lived!
(With the occasional application of Mercurochrome or Merthiolate!)

XXX Commented:

God those were the days.One other thing making ramps 5 feet tall and jumping like Evel Knievel, We built one once in Quantico Va. 5 feet tall and put it on the edge of a 6 foot drop off and got the guy every one hated to be the first, liked to have killed him but we had a laugh and moved on. I sometimes wonder if he ever got up, oh well one less momma’s boy.

TomD commented:

We had the woods with the abandoned German POW camp in it, the trees, a rock quarry where the Germans were worked. A bunch of us would be walking up Roswell Rd north of Atlanta carrying our .22’s to sit at the top of the quarry and shoot snakes. 5 or 6 kids with rifles on Roswell Rd now would bring SWAT and CNN.

I once lifted a stick of dynamite from a county work truck and worked on ways to set pieces of it off using the real M80’s.

Dodge ball and the other games. You’re right, no fat kids then. I can’t remember anyone being fat, young or old. Constantly on the move. Crayfish in the creek. Fistfights where no one was really hurt other than feelings.

My Last Presidential Debate

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I wasn’t going to watch the debate because tomorrow is going to be an early trip and a long day so I can’t stay up late but then I said, “Ah, the hell with it.  I’ll watch the sideshow.”

Well, she wasn’t Biden.  She could string together sentences.  And of course, the questions from ABC were almost all slanted against Trump and for Harris.  But basically, it was a free for all with both of them hammering away at each other.  Parts of it were somewhat entertaining but I wouldn’t call it very decisive.

I like the fact that Trump basically stuck to using a very large part of his time hammering her on the border and the economy.  Those are the bread-and-butter topics that people really care about and I liked his closing statement where he made the main point; that all the things that Harris says she’s going to do could have been done at any time in the last three years.  But they weren’t done.

So, does this debate help Trump or Harris more?  I guess it marginally helps Harris because she didn’t stand there like an idiot in the way her boss did a couple of months ago.  She’ll get a bounce because she’s proven she’s not brain dead and because the press will claim she was brilliant.  But really this election is a referendum on the economy and the Border.

Neither of those issues work in Kamala Harris’s favor and talking about them isn’t good for her case.  Now it’s entirely possible that America will vote for Harris.  And it is possible that even if they vote for Trump that the powers that be will print off a million ballots in Philadelphia and Detroit.  So maybe this whole exercise was pointless anyway.  But it did give us a chance to see Trump and Harris side by side.  I’ll have to say I do enjoy his show.  He is unique.  He’s crazy as a loon but he’s a hell of a lot more fun than anything else going on in this country.  He’s got energy and he’s got flair.

Well, that’s my take.  Was it worth it?  Nah.  I should’ve written about something fun.  Basically, I can’t wait for this election to be over.  It’s like some kind of boring speech you have to sit through while waiting for a game to start.  What happens after November will be a new world.  All the make-believe will be over and we can start thinking about the here and now.  Maybe my focus will be on hoarding things that won’t be available in the future.  Or maybe it’s time to start working on my do-it-yourself skills for when I won’t be able to afford the costs of craftsmen and the like.  Or maybe I’ll concentrate on fiction writing and leave the punditry to Tucker Carlson and his buddies.

But whatever else I’ll be doing; I think I’ve watched my last presidential debate.  I mean, what’s the point?  If these same people are put back in the White House after four years of this then I’m in the wrong country.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 10SEP2024 – California

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war pig

Dad was s big name at North American Aviation, then Rockwell/Rocketdyne. He actually touched things that went in orbit in the space program. I have a ring the factory made for important people at Rocketdyne. It was made from a crazy, missile nose cone titanium alloy. Like tungsten carbide, it took diamonds to cut it. It had been tempered in the hellfire of reentry and was light yet incredibly string. We lived in places like Simi Valley, Canoga Park and then up in the Thousand Oaks area. Mom shopped at the then amazing Topanga Plaza. We went ice skating indoors. We’d go up Mt Baldy in the morning to play in the snow, then in the late afternoon, we swam and surfed at the public beaches. It was the days of Wolfman Jack, Dragnet and Adam-12. It was also the days of the Watts riots, but as my heritage is divided between Caucasian and Native American, neither side had an issue with me. Mexican, Black and White kids got on amazingly well in school. Drugs were just beginning to be a problem. Living was large and life was good. We were solidly ahead of the Russkies in the space race. American technocracy led the world. We were winning battles in Vietnam (only to be betrayed by politicians later). Overall, it was a magical time.

Darth Vader is Dead!

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The iconic actor James Earl Jones has passed away.

I think it was the summer of 1972 (but I could be wrong) I went to see Shakespeare in the Park with a girl I was going to high school summer school with and it was Jones playing King Lear. The park was full of unwashed hippies and life was good. There was a convenient summer thunderstorm during the storm scene. He was a fantastic King Lear.

 

Will California Crack?

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California has been the jewel in the crown of the United States for over a hundred years.  Throughout the Great Depression Dust Bowl Okies travelled across country looking for salvation in the Golden State.  And afterwards throughout the second half of the twentieth century California was the capitol of modernity, innovation, affluence and optimism.  It grew at an astonishing pace both in wealth and in population for what seemed like forever.  And it reaped the rewards of this growth when Silicon Valley become the engine that powered not only California’s economy but the whole country through stock ownership in companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft.

But in the last decade that has all changed.  California’s policies on almost every aspect of life in the Golden State have conspired to put an end to that growth.  The cost of everything from groceries to gasoline have skyrocketed and the cost of owning a home is preposterously out of the reach of everyone but the truly wealthy.  For that reason alone, the exodus of Californians to red states like Tennessee and Texas has been large.  So much so that for the first time ever the state has lost representation in Congress.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Even the enclaves of the absurdly rich around Los Angeles and San Francisco are beginning to suffer from violent crime to an extent they’ve never experienced before.  And the lower income areas are becoming no-go zones for vulnerable older people and women.  The effect of all this is to begin unravelling the fabric of normal life in the state.  Shoplifting of less than a thousand dollars of merchandise has essentially been decriminalized and so drug stores and other retail businesses are moving out of the urban areas.  District attorneys and prosecutors refuse to prosecute property crime and even some violent offenders.  And so, the police have essentially stopped arresting them.

Encampments of homeless drug addicts and illegal aliens have mushroomed across the cities and with them has come crime, violence, filth and disease.  Taken along with all of the other dysfunctional policies of the state like the elimination of gasoline powered cars and the dependence on “renewable sources” of energy and the resulting brown-outs and black-outs this causes, it seems to me that California is ripe to be the first bright-blue state to wake from their woke fever dream and admit defeat.  Now maybe I’m off base and the trillions of dollars of revenue that Silicon Valley currently pumps into the California state coffers is enough to fend off reality for Sacramento law makers forever.

But even if insolvency isn’t on the immediate horizon, how about the common people.  You know, even if I were a Mexican-American working as a teacher or some other stalwart dues-paying client of the Democrat party I think I might be tired of having to put my kids in the bathtub to protect them from gangland gunfire in the crime riddled hellscape that their neighborhoods have become.  And that goes for having to pay five bucks a gallon for gas and $1,000 a month for an apartment that’s ten square feet!

But maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe this can go on forever.  Of course, if the profits in Silicon Valley ever dip it might really cause a problem.  Or suppose more of these companies decide to head to a low tax state like Florida or Nevada?  Well, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  The question I have is what happens then?  Can even Washington’s infinite currency printing machines make California work without Google and Apple?  They might be finding out sooner than they think.