One of my favorites is Ahab’s soliloquy spoken by Gregoey Peck on the bridge of the Pequod.
I do not have the funds to make great changes. No political power, no influence except among family who respect my opinions. I believe there is too much money In politics already, so I do not contribute to political parties or candidates except for a cousin of mine who is a county trustee.
Instead, I offer the party or candidate something totally above price. My vote. It cannot be bought as I would not sell it for millions, therefore it is beyond value. I earned my franchise through blood, sweat and pain. It is priceless to me.
As for social media, I eschew it. My private life is mine and I do not care to share it with strangers. I also do not care about their lives so no reason to join social media. I don’t want to see pictures of their restaurant meals, etc. I find no attraction in trying to gain approval from strangers by amassing likes. There are a few for whom I care about their opinions. Mostly my close relatives and a very few brothers in arms.
We really need to lower our population back down to about 150 million. We’re beginning to act like an experimental overcrowded rat colony.
Regular readers know that I admire, perhaps excessively, a small number of well-known literary works. Shakespeare has several of my favorites. But there are gems scattered throughout western literature from the Iliad on. And of course, there’s the Bible.
I’ve always admired this speech from Macbeth:
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
These are the words of a man who has come to believe that life is meaningless. But it’s really a rationalization for the results of murdering his own conscience. He was describing the hell he had created and that soon would engulf him permanently.
And I find this idea instructive. I think if you keep in mind that there is a moral order, then it gives you a sense of perspective. You can be surrounded by evil and forced to deal with the worst of humanity. But if you can work to preserve the things that are good then you can have some peace in knowing you are giving meaning to human life. And that’s not nothing.
Despair is a godless pleasure that we’re not allowed to imbibe. You have to work to make this crazy world of ours better. Certainly, we are currently seeing a diminution in the state of our world. The morals, the morale, the wisdom of our society is draining away in a shocking way.
And that’s alarming. But it’s far from the first time and it’s probably not the worst example on record. It’s important to keep things in perspective and act reasonably. We will be surrounded for the foreseeable future by people who have bought into the current narrative. This includes all kinds of very harmful ideas and practices. The results of this are the excesses of our culture; confusion over things like the roles of men and women and the importance of traditional practices in living our lives and raising our children.
We can instill meaning and purpose into our actions and interactions with each other by choosing carefully to perform the actions that improve our surroundings and make us better people. And this is especially important in our relations with the young. They are growing up in a world that has been stripped of reason and dignity. They spend their every waking minute immersed in a world of TikTok influencers and other phony celebrities telling them what they should think and what they should value. It’s a wonder they haven’t all been degraded down to the status of sub-human idiots. I feel it’s especially important to enrich the lives of the young people in my life with things that nourish and expand their minds and souls. There is the meaning that we can find; keeping this world from falling into a new dark age.
Life is brief but it is a tale told by whatever truth you have in your heart. If it signifies nothing then that is what is in your soul.
I could be wrong but I believe that this election represents an end point for a lot of people. My viewpoint on politics and our society has changed to such an extent that many of the things I thought were real I no longer do. And one of those things is the outcomes of elections. 2020 proved to me that election outcomes were one of those things that can be fabricated. So, worrying about them is a foolish preoccupation. And that goes even if Trump is allowed to win. To convince me that elections are legitimate again I would first have to see all of those who rigged 2020 indicted, convicted and imprisoned for their crimes. And we all know that has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever occurring.
And so, when the inevitable 2026 banter begins about saving the House or the Senate from the midterm slump or the even more inevitable panic about preventing Gavin Newsom in 2028, I think I’ll just concentrate on preventing the government from stealing my stuff and harming my grandkids. We all have plenty to do in our real lives and ranting and raving about imaginary battles that we could win is a serious waste of time and stomach lining.
And honestly, I’m not feeling particularly bitter about all this. Knowledge is strength. I blame myself for being as gullible and lazy as to not see how things really were. As the song says, “I was blind but now I see.” And that’s not a trivial thing. I can avoid all kinds of trouble by virtue of not believing in fairy tales. George Bush and the rest of the establishment Republicans are not on my side and they are not my friends. They’re just the flipside of the managerial elite who run this country and make sure they always will. If anyone emerges who claims he wants to change that, he’ll have to do a lot more than make noises about it. He’ll have to prove he’s stronger than the gang running things now and he’ll have to spell out what’s in it for me. And that’s a pretty tall order.
So as the next two months play out, I expect all kinds of entertaining hijinks. This week’s debate has the possibility of being highly entertaining theater. It’s not guaranteed. ABC could rig it for Kamala so that Trump doesn’t get to say anything at all. But it’s just as likely to be a fitting sequel to the Biden meltdown with Kamala screeching and running off stage. So, there could be all kinds of fun coming up. But I’m under no illusions about how the extra week of ballot manipulation will end up in Pennsylvania and Arizona. And I won’t be upset about it either. It’s as predictable as sunshine in the Sahara.
And come November, I have the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays coming up and every reason to look forward to get-togethers with family and friends. So, life will go on and new projects will present themselves but worrying about President Harris won’t be among them. I’ll leave that to the dreamers.
I read (or heard) that Donald Trump was talking about getting input from Elon Musk on streamlining or pruning the federal government. Now why Elon Musk would be a qualified individual for such an endeavor is far from clear to me. It is true that he reduced the headcount at Twitter by something like 70-80% after he bought it but since the social media platform is mostly an automated business, he probably just asked his direct reports to terminate everyone who couldn’t code. End of story.
But all of this brings up a good point. Why does the federal government employ millions of people to do clerical work? Just as banks and insurance companies shed millions of paper-pushing positions when they eliminated the paper, shouldn’t the various departments, bureaus and agencies do the same? And how about the fact that it seems there are multiple agencies working on the same “problems.” For instance:
The Administration for Native Americans (ANA)
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
Or how about:
The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)
And finally:
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The Office of Environmental Management (no acronym!)
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC)
How much you want to bet that you have to get all these agencies placated before you can get anything done that they have staked out as their turf?
I think Donald Trump is absolutely correct that streamlining the federal government (or more felicitously expressed, “taking a chainsaw to it”) is one of the greatest public services that any president could perform for this country. He has my whole-hearted support in such an endeavor. But will he be able to do it? Didn’t the Obama administration distribute tanks and automatic weapons to everybody from the IRS to the post office? I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some IRS guys would go postal after being fired. But the real trick will be performing surgery on the FBI and the other intelligence agencies. Those guys are vicious. And that’s not mentioning the CIA. After all most people think they actually did kill Kennedy and all he did was abort the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Imagine what they’ll do if you try to take the food out of their mouths. They’d probably break out a suitcase nuke.
But almost as much fun as firing everyone, would be to impose an across the board 25% reduction in pay for the whole federal bureaucracy (except the armed forces). For the armed forces the trick would be a reduction in the number of generals by a factor of five. That should keep them out of trouble.
Trump is definitely onto something. And the idea of enlisting actual businessmen to help identify the dead wood in the federal government is a good idea. Bloated bureaucracy has been the cause of over taxation and inefficiency since the Han dynasty ruled China. I would guess that reducing the size of the federal government by 10% would balance the budget immediately.
Now granted these fired individuals would be mostly permanently unemployed. They would initially cause a burden on our economy. Basically, they would have no usable skills and no work ethic. But this would eventually come off the books as they quickly starved to death. And after all these government departments were neutered the rest of the American workforce would surge forward in productivity, no longer hampered by the stupidity and malevolence of the vast government bureaucracy.
On second thought, Trump should consult with Javier Milei. If it worked in Argentina, it should work twice as well here. Just double whatever he did.
Isn’t it the case that the only times we feel incandescently alive is when things go very, very right or very, very wrong. At other times, even when things are going well, we’re mostly running on autopilot. Most of our brain is asleep or distracted by all the minutia of modern life; the internet, the office gossip, all the gnawing worries we have about family problems, money, politics, world affairs and health.
But on those days when we meet a stunning woman or get hit by a car or win the lottery or get arrested by the cops our brains are lit up like the Fourth of July. Every fiber of your being is jazzed. Even when you’re just thinking to yourself, the voice of your own thoughts is a roar in your head. You feel almost painfully alive.
Think about what it must be like to be a condemned man on the day of his execution. Adrenalin is coursing through his veins and the sound of his blood pumping is pounding in his ears. His muscles are tensed for flight but there’s no way out. Or think about one of those ancient armies that was in pitched battle when suddenly the enemy line breaks and turns to flee the ground in a rout. Think of the sense of triumph and relief that death has been avoided and instead the spoils of victory were imminent. Maybe you’ve saved your native land from rape and plunder by an army of marauders.
When we’re living our normal lives routine and a sense of moderation is the rule. Don’t eat too much, don’t drink too much, don’t stay up too late, don’t get too excited. Don’t live too much. I guess we don’t want to use up whatever we have left until the end. And that is the sensible way to do things.
But it’s not very Homeric. If you read Homer or even Tolkien you hear about the joy of battle or the battle frenzy. And I think it’s this same idea. It’s a heightened sense of existence. It’s an adrenalin rush. In our modern world only soldiers and police and firemen are likely to experience this sense of heightened existence from contact with existential risk. Maybe add prizefighters and athletes at the very peak of performance.
What about the rest of us? As I said, when the day is very, very bad or very, very good. I guess a lot of people might have had some sense of this on September 11th 2001, especially if they knew someone who worked in the Towers. I did and it was terrifying until I knew that they were safe. Maybe you can count a sort of minor rush from something like a favorite underdog sports team winning a championship or maybe Trump winning the presidency in 2016. But these are of course just tinges of exultation.
But the world is becoming a more dangerous and uncertain place. It’s part of the fundamental change of America that Barack Obama initiated. And as it becomes more dangerous, we will experience a heightened sense of being alive. We will live in interesting times. And we will by default become more interesting ourselves. And as risk becomes more and more a basic part of our lives, taking bigger risks will become less “unthinkable.” And then change will come from those who used to be oh so careful.
Tyler over at the Portly Politico has a post and a YouTube video linked about Tiberius Gracchus and asks the question if Donald Trump is our Tiberius Gracchus. If you’re unfamiliar with this historical figure the video is a good intro. The parallel is reasonable. Both times feature a selfish elite that imports foreign labor to displace native-born opportunity. Both times feature an absurd imbalance of wealth that threatens the stability of the republic. And both feature a reformer who was the target of assassination. Let me know what you think.
Today was an amazing experience. I get my land line and internet service from my cable tv provider. Yes, yes, I know. I should have cut the cable years ago. But I’m lazy and I also like to watch Turner Classic Movies so I never bothered to figure out a streaming stratagem that would save me some real money. But anyway, I’m still using these clowns.
So, I get home today at about 2pm and I open my laptop and all my open webpages are MIA. I restart the Wi-Fi and … nada, zippo. So, I travel down into the bowels of the earth to check out my modem. And the worst had happened. It looked totally dead. Not three lights or two or even one. No lights. I performed the sympathetic magic. I turned off the power and counted to thirty and flicked it back on. Once again, zippo. It was truly and utterly dead.
So, I called up the cable company on my emergency phone. I’ll have to say these guys have absolutely mastered the science of aggravating non-human communication. The synthetic female voice they’ve selected is Karen incarnate. And everything she does and says enrages me. If she asks me a question, it sounds like she’s finished but just as I try to answer, she throws in an unnecessary addendum and talks over my answer. She’s relatively deaf and even for an AI she’s really quite stupid. Finally, she exasperated me so badly that I shouted something at her. At which point she thanked me for being a loyal customer and hung up on me. I think that’s the first time I’ve been terminated by a machine. I think I know now how Dave Bowman felt when HAL 9000 terminated his call after refusing to let him back in the space ship.
Eventually I managed to reach a semi-human. This was slightly less aggravating. After about fifteen minutes I convinced this customer service professional that the modem had died indeed. So, I asked if a serviceman could be sent today to replace it. She started laughing. “We don’t send servicemen to your house anymore. We’ll have it delivered and you’ll install it sir.” It turns out they would ship it the next day and it would arrive in about two more days, depending on the vicissitudes of UPS or FedEx or whoever they send it by.
I objected and said I didn’t want to be without phone or internet for three days. She countered that I could pick it up at one of their conveniently located storefronts. I grumbled “Okay, where is it?” It turns out it was forty-five miles away. So, I choked back my rage and said, “Fine.” And she wished me a happy and bountiful day and asked if I agreed that she had solved my problem to my full satisfaction and then reminded me that Big Brother loves me.
So, I schlepped out the door with the defunct modem sitting next to me in the passenger seat and commuted into the wilds of southern New England with the afternoon sun in my eyes and utter contempt for my cable provider in my heart. By the time I got there I was calmer and as it turned out the folks at the store were much more helpful and friendly than the telephone drones both carbon and silicon based. And a mere hour after that I was home and I had the internet mostly running. But my land line is still not working so I’ll have to call them up still again.
It occurs to me that after living my whole life with instant communication as a living breathing reality the service I receive from my communication company has deteriorated by several orders of magnitude. Back when AT&T was the whole shooting match, I never lost service and if my equipment wasn’t working properly, they sent a competent repairman out who would fix the problem promptly. They would never send me to the ends of the earth after first torturing me with an artificial human playing twenty questions with me.
This can’t be the way future is supposed to work. I have to assume that our civilization has been infiltrated by an evil race of space mutants that have a fiendish plan to slowly drive us insane via cable providers. Well, it’s worked. I’ve gone around the bend. I love Big Brother.
Over the last decade or so it has become obvious that Hollywood and specifically, Disney is more interested in producing content that adheres to a social justice message than they care about making money. Examples of this are plentiful. Every recent installment of the Star Wars movies and their spin-off television series has suffered heavily from this policy. And recently the fans have reacted to this decision by abandoning the franchise. And to a greater or lesser degree similar results have been seen in the other Disney entertainment franchises; Indiana Jones, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and even things like the Toy Story movies. It’s gotten so bad that Disney has been forced to fire directors, cancel series and scale back earnings estimates. Which is something no CEO wants to do.
I have heard that Hollywood is claiming that they’ve heard the message and they will rededicate themselves to producing entertainment that is actually entertaining to regular people. Now if that happened, I would be ecstatic. Seeing Hollywood learn its lesson and focus its significant talents into putting out original and entertaining movies would be phenomenal.
But it won’t happen.
The people who run Hollywood are social justice extremists from the soles of their feet up to their eyebrows. They would rather see their companies go broke than give up their message. They will keep pumping out Star Wars movies that feature lesbian space witches of color as the main characters until Disney has to shut down the studio. The idea that the ticket buying public wanted to see Luke Skywalker rescue Princess Leia with the assistance of Han Solo and that all three were white, sexually normal characters is completely unacceptable to them. They have the same message as the Harris campaign, “We won’t go back.”
So that means the future of entertainment won’t be Hollywood. And we’re already seeing the alternatives. I’ve been informed by one of my grandsons that movies are being made based on the fiction produced by YouTube influencers who write stories based on video games. So, a space video game has an audience of tens of millions of boys and young men. And one guy writes a narrative story as an adventure in that game and millions of these gamers read the story and because of this immense popularity a movie studio (Amazon or Netflix) produces a movie from this story.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Eventually that will replace Hollywood nicely. Someone said to me that this won’t avoid the social justice activists because all the studios are the same. But there are indications that isn’t true. A couple of years ago Netflix produced Dave Chappelle’s comedy series that was pretty strongly critical of the transgender agenda. When Netflix employees protested the series, they were told overtly by Netflix that if their consciences wouldn’t allow them to work for a company that produced the Chappelle series, they should work somewhere else. And that put an end to the protests. I suspect that a home will be found for content that has an enormous built-in audience even if there is an extreme shortage of lesbian space witches of color in the script. Maybe it’ll be Netflix that steps in or maybe it’ll be a new company that an entrepreneur like Musk founds. But at this point it’ll happen because people are still people and they want to be amused and message fiction isn’t entertaining. It’s boring so something will have to give way. Au revoir lesbian space witches of color.
The world I live in has been changing at a rapid rate for the last four years. The COVID and George Floyd strategies combined with the Biden administration’s green revolution, Ukraine war, the opening of the border to all illegal aliens and finally the intelligence agencies use of extreme surveillance and control over the social media platforms have truly changed the way of life in the United States in a fundamental way. I guess this is what Barack Obama meant when he talked about fundamental change. He meant destroying the middle class and eliminating law and order.
But we’re still here. Where could we go? Europe has been similarly wrecked. There is no other place.
So, I often wonder how life will adapt under these new conditions. What was the saying back when everyone thought overpopulation would be our downfall? “We’ll all be a little hungrier by and by.” Well, that sounds likely. Both here and in Europe the powers that be are eliminating farmland, making farming more expensive and making things like fuel and fertilizer much more expensive. So, let’s assume the hungrier idea is likely. Of course, many would note that currently obesity is running rampant so how could we be going hungry? On the contrary, obesity and malnutrition can certainly coexist. Junk food can be pretty cheap. But it means shorter life and ill health. So healthy food will be scarce, unless you count crickets.
We already know that energy in all its uses will be very expensive. This means homes will be less comfortable, travel will be less frequent, work will be closer to home and all goods that have to be shipped will be more expensive.
Jobs will be harder to find and professional work will be scarce. Learning trades will once again be a very important avenue for employment. Colleges will fail on a grand scale.
And the existence of law and order will be on a case-by-case basis depending on who is in power in the local area.
Put all those things together and what kind of a place will we be living in. First off, I don’t it will be one place. We’re already seeing different areas of the country diverging from each other. California and other areas that encourage the importation of large numbers of illegal aliens are already becoming very third world with large homeless encampments, very high crime, high taxes and businesses fleeing to safer areas. Whereas places like Florida that discourage crime, illegal aliens and high taxes are booming and attracting new businesses.
What this means is that there will continue to be a polarization between the red and blue states and this will cause issues where the blue states will use their control of the federal government to try to outlaw the red state practices that give them advantages over their blue “neighbors.” How this resolves itself over time is an open question. If the red states successfully defend their sane policies eventually the blue states will become moribund and they will even lose their control of the Congress and White House due to population loss.
But if the federal government uses force to compel the red states to comply with the blue state practices, then we will be headed for the Brazilification of the United States. And at that point it truly will not matter where you live. At that point. We might as well be in Mexico City, Entebbe or Soweto. Our lives will be nasty, brutish and short. And probably better so.
Well, a lot is riding on this upcoming election. Here we go again.
“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over. He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dimestore window. They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there. “Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!” “Oh, my gosh!” “Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!” “Don’t look. Maybe it’s just a mirage.” “No,” moaned Tom in despair. “School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!” ― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
“June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear… So thinking, he slept. And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928.” ― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
