Category: Current Events

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 3

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Westerns – Classic

I’m dividing Westerns into two categories; Classic and Modern, because they really are completely different categories.  I’ll list what I think are among the best or the most popular or the most interesting classic westerns in approximately chronological order.  I’ve reviewed a number of these movies so if you want my detailed opinion, you can do a search on the site.

  1. STAGECOACH (1939)
  2. DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (1939)
  3. THE WESTERNER (1940)
  4. THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON (1941)
  5. THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943)
  6. ‘MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946)
  7. FORT APACHE (1948)
  8. WINCHESTER ‘73 (1950)
  9. HIGH NOON (1952)
  10. 3:10 TO YUMA (1957)
  11. RIO BRAVO (1959)
  12. THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962)
  13. EL DORADO (1966)

Now this is just my list.  Your list will be different.  I left out some classic movies that are on everyone’s list; “The Searchers,” “Shane” and some others.  That’s just my taste. Some people consider “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” a western but because it took place in the mid-twentieth century I don’t consider it a classic western.  It’s a great film but I consider it something else.

So, there it is.  Feel free to add what I have left off or disagree with what I’ve included in the comments below.

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 2

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2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 2

Comedy

I’ll list what I think are among the best or the most popular or the most interesting comedy movies in approximately chronological order.  I’ve reviewed a number of these movies so if you want my detailed opinion, you can do a search on the site.

  1. IT’S A GIFT (1934)
  2. A NIGHT AT THE OPERA (1935)
  3. MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE (1935)
  4. THE BANK DICK (1940)
  5. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)
  6. THE ODD COUPLE (1968)
  7. BLAZING SADDLES (1974)
  8. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)
  9. MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)
  10. GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)
  11. PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (1987)
  12. BEETLEJUICE (1988)
  13. UNCLE BUCK (1989)
  14. GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)
  15. SO I MARRIED AN AX MURDERER (1993)
  16. AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY (1997)
  17. THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)
  18. OFFICE SPACE (1999)
  19. GALAXY QUEST (1999)
  20. SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)
  21. IDIOCRACY (2006)

Now this is just my list.  Your list will be different.  It has to be.  More than any other genre comedy is incredibly personal and therefore subjective.  It is also age specific.  My children would list twenty movies from 2000 to the present day that I haven’t seen nor would want to watch.  I have tried to leave out comedies that I consider marginal that happen to overlap with my most active movie watching era.  So, I haven’t included “The Blues Brothers,” “Caddyshack.” “Stripes,” “Animal House,” “Meatballs,” “National Lampoon: Vacation,” “Trading Places” and a bunch of other movies from my heyday.  I put Ghostbusters in as the best representative for that era.  Someone else would have chosen otherwise.

I hope my list will inspire a million spirited comments.  Everyone has their favorites and their turkeys.  Unlike politics we can all have our opinions on comedy movies without fear of doing any damage.  Have at it.

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 1

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When reality collapses under a landslide of madness:

  • POTUS exposed as a human vegetable
  • Cost of living now requires selling kidneys for gas money
  • Illegal aliens and homeless drug addicts now the two largest voting blocks in some blue states
  • Kamala Harris imagining herself as president unencumbered by anyone wanting to vote for her.
  • Morning Joe both extols Joe Biden as the sharpest he’s ever been and begs him to step aside to avoid defeat.

Well then, it’s time to take off the pundit cap and try to enjoy life a little.

I’ve always been partial to watching movies.  My tastes probably fall somewhere in the middle.  I’m definitely not part of the avant-garde by any means.  I’ve never enjoyed Cinéma verité and the various other European schools that abounded in the 1950s and 1960s.  They always just looked like low budget crap that someone made with a home movie camera and no money.  But by the same token I think that at least 80% of the output of Hollywood in its heyday was pretty poor stuff.

I totally believe that cinema is not a single subject.  There are several distinct things that get lumped together as movies.  Hopefully they all contain the characteristic that they entertain.  But beyond that I think one kind of movie makes you feel and another makes you think.  Now that is not to say that a movie that makes you think doesn’t also engage your emotions.  That would be odd in a movie created by humans.  But what I’m indicating is that many, even most movies don’t really make you think.  And that is not to say that only high-brow art-house movies can delve into the human condition.  Far from it.  Even someone as populist and popular as Frank Capra can capture a character or a moment that makes you think about the big questions.

So, I think I’ll divide my discussions about movies into two main categories; entertainment and enlightenment.  And let’s start with entertainment.  Because it is the summer and that is the season when we want to enjoy the beautiful weather and make believe that the world is a happy place where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just cartoon characters who dress in primary colors and get chased around by the Tasmanian Devil and eventually eaten.  So, let’s see.

Well, first things first, we’ll divide and conquer.  Let’s divide things into genres:

  • Science fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Action/Adventure
  • Comedy
  • Drama

Science Fiction

I’ll list what I think are among the best or the most popular or the most interesting sci-fi movies in approximately chronological order.  I’ve reviewed almost all of these movies so if you want my detailed opinion you can do a search on the site.

  1. Destination: Moon
  2. The Thing from Another World
  3. Them!
  4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  5. The Time Machine
  6. The Day the Earth Stood Still
  7. War of the Worlds
  8. Forbidden Planet
  9. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  10. Blade Runner
  11. Alien
  12. Terminator
  13. Starship Troopers
  14. Independence Day
  15. 12 Monkeys
  16. Jurassic Park
  17. The Matrix
  18. Contact
  19. Firefly
  20. Serenity
  21. The Martian
  22. Dune

 

Now this is just my list.  Your list will be different.  I left out Star Trek and Star Wars.  I consider Star Wars fantasy and I consider Star Trek mostly awful.  But the same could be said for several of the movies I put on my list.  I hope my list will inspire a million spirited comments.  Everyone has their favorites and their turkeys.  Unlike politics we can all have our opinions on sci-fi movies without fear of doing any damage.  Have at it.

What Makes a Good Story?

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An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.  A famous play is the story of an overly proud king disowning his only loving child for not flattering him and then paying the price for it.  A three-thousand-year-old poem tells the story of a proud warrior being dishonored by a foolish king and the havoc that ensues in a famous war that includes gods and goddesses acting decidedly human.  A boy saves a princess with the help of a space pirate and a mystical monk long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Two almost god-like races, one devoted to peace and truth and the other consumed by war and evil fight a war of extermination in the Milky Way galaxy over the course of billions of years.  A movie tells the story of seven samurai or seven cowboys agreeing to save a town from bandits with glory as the only reward.  A hen-pecked New Jersey grocery store owner sells everything he owns and travels 3,000 miles to California to buy an orange ranch that doesn’t have any oranges on it.  A man drags his wife and young son two thousand miles to an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains where they will all be the playthings of ghosts who want to add them to the spectral residents.

What do all of these stories have in common?  Well, almost nothing.  Each of them is a fairly popular work of fiction.  But otherwise, they’re all over the map in terms of plot, characters, genre and the societies they represent.  But what makes them successful stories is their ability to draw the reader (or viewer) into their worlds and spark human empathy.  It’s as simple as that.

We recognize Frodo’s humanity and cheer him on as he pits his tiny strength against titanic forces of evil.  We shake our heads at the pig-headed antics of Achilles and Agamemnon but we nod our heads at the recognition that war will take good men like Hector and make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.  We thrill to the heroics of a small band of warriors pitting their strength and skill against a small army of bandits, knowing full well that most of them will die in the battle.  We laugh at and at the same time see ourselves in a man constantly belittled and frustrated by everyone around him including his overbearing wife and annoying children who then stubbornly heads down the road to ruin only to be saved by fortune and his own indestructible sense that eventually it will have to be his turn.

So, what is the most important aspect?  Plot or character?  I used to think plot.  After all, we all like the quest and the action scenes and all the other hooks that draw us into the story.  But as I get older, I realize that if the characters are mere ciphers, then the hold thing devolves into a video game.  And it can be fun and exciting but on reflection it feels sort of meaningless.  Does it really matter how many monsters he fights if you don’t believe the hero is real?

So that’s the trick for the author.  Somehow you have to invest your heroes and villains with enough humanity to make your reader (or viewer) care.  Breathing life into a stream of words takes a bit of doing.  Usually, you have to take something from your own experience to make it seem real.  But when it’s done right it’s the rewarding part of writing.  Self-satisfaction.

Meanwhile Back on Planet Earth

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Busy day today.  Yard work in hazy, hot and humid conditions.  But physical activity is good for the mind.  It’s not good to dwell too much on the diseased condition of our politics.  And let’s face it, I’ve spent way too much time for the last week gorging on the panic on display in Washington.  What did Nietzsche say?  If you stare too long into the abyss, it stares back.  I think I’ll let Donald Trump worry about whether Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Morgoth will be the Democrat candidate in November.

We can check back in a couple of weeks or until the Left has a chance to cow Biden into withdrawing from the race.  It should be interesting to hear the excuse if he does withdraw.  I guess he can claim that the Almighty told him to.  Of course, to Biden it’s the Almighty Dollar that speaks to him.  Hey, maybe that’s what he’s waiting for.  He wants a bribe to drop out of the race.  Maybe a $100 million in one of Hunter’s off-shore accounts would convince Jumpin’ Joe that it’s time to park his Parkinson off-stage somewhere else.  Either way, that’s a comedy act for another day.

Probably the more useful thing for me to follow and consider are the people out there who aren’t waiting for the November election but are trying to fix things right now.  Christopher Rufo has been working on state level governmental efforts like the reform of colleges in Florida and Texas and some other places.  He’s on the Board of the New College in Florida and they’ve successfully demolished the DEI and other pernicious initiatives there.  Now he’s gotten started helping a whistleblower in Texas who reported a hospital for continuing a pediatric transgender program after it has been legislatively banned.  It seems that the federal government has gone after this whistleblower and Rufo is raising a flag over these retaliatory efforts by the Justice Department.

It’s going to come down to determined people in red states drawing a line in the sand and taking concrete actions to stop the federal government from crushing the freedoms that they no longer believe in.  If Donald Trump wins in November that might give us a little breathing room to rally the efforts of everyone wishing to stop the government’s encroachment of our rights and try to turn things around.  If Trump is lucky enough to get Republican Senate and House majorities then he can hope to make some meaningful changes to the laws.  If not, then executive orders can undo the damage Biden did with his orders.

But if Biden or some other Democrat is in the White House next February then it will be more important than ever that red state governors, legislatures and judges work tirelessly to find ways to obstruct all the damage that this new administration creates.

I live in a deep blue state.  I have always been a stranger in a strange land.  Every thing around me is imprinted with the code for the hive mind.  Even the local news station from the cable company is impossibly partisan.  I don’t need anything to raise my consciousness as a conservative.  Every day I search the internet for a trail to others like me.  There are a few of us out there and maybe one day we’ll figure out a way to focus our strength into something that provides real results.

I look at the devastation that the Tories in Britain brought down on themselves by lying about their agenda.  They tore down their own party, kind of like the Republicans have done here.  But then I see what Nigel Farage has done.  He’s started a reform party and even though he’s starting from scratch almost alone, he’s not riddled with fake conservatives.  He can try to do it right.  And that’s what I hope eventually happens here.

Cry Me Denial

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I watched the Stephanopoulos interview.  Compared to how that midget would have grilled a Republican this was a lovefest.  But as carefully and as politely as he could couch the questions, he still tried to get Biden to admit that the public thinks he’s senile.  And because they believe this the polls are showing his support slipping.

But Biden would have none of it.  According to Joe the race is dead even.  He’s on track to beat Trump and he’s never been sharper.  He’s trotting the globe defeating tyrants, expanding democracy and swashbuckling his way into history.  And only the Almighty can tell him to quit.

I’m not a fan of Stephanopoulos.  I think he’s a detestable partisan rat pretending to be an objective journalist.  But it was painful to see how completely unwilling Biden was to admit to any problems at all.  His handling of the country.  The public’s perception of his mental state.  Or in his present position in the electoral polls.  In Joe’s eyes he’s the best man to run the country and the only man who can prevent Donald Trump from regaining the presidency.

I’m of two minds about this.  The part of me that witnessed the 2020 election results thinks that Joe knows the fix is in and he knows they can print out another million ballots in Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit so everything is honkey-dory.  But the part of me that looks at the state of the country and can’t believe that even the Deep State wants this to continue, thinks that Joe is going to be carted off to the Cracker Factory in January 2025.

But either way it’s fascinating to see Joe Biden on display in all his deteriorating splendor.  His porcelain teeth shining bright in a mouth that can no longer produce clear English.  Near the end of the interview when, “Stephanopoulos asked the president bluntly how he would feel in January if Donald Trump ended up winning the election and his warnings about Trump and democracy came to pass. Biden replied: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about….””

Well, when your kids are two or three years old, goodest is a reasonable thing to say.  It shows a mind finding patterns in the formation of superlatives in English.  Past five I’d say it indicates a problem.  When used by a man running for the office of president of the United States, I’d say it’s a flashing red light.  He’s becoming a doofus.

To sum up the whole experience of watching the interview, it appears that the Left can’t get Joe Biden to jump off his campaign wagon.  And as things continue to unwind for his prospects, I have to admit I’m feeling a certain unbridled enthusiasm beginning to well up.  Sure, I know that anything can happen in the next four months.  And I know that absentee ballots can be printed at an incredible speed.

But even a “win” by Joe Biden at this point will be therapeutic.  How many people will be satisfied if the polls have Biden down by double digit in the swing states and he scratches out a win by a few thousand votes a week later?  I’m guessing almost no one.  And that would put to rest the myth of fair elections once and for all.  And to my mind that would be an acceptable conclusion to the whole populist experiment.  We’d know that dissent is forbidden.  And we could all give up the farce of voting every four years and do something useful instead.

But just imagine if Trump wins.  There would be a party that would go on for a week.  People would be dancing in the street and YouTube videos of Democrat voters wailing and gnashing their teeth would be playing on endless loops until the whole internet finally crashed.  Joe Scarborough and Rachel Maddow would have to be committed to lunatic asylums for electroshock therapy for a month just to stop them from screaming.

And I wouldn’t be able to stop smiling for a month.

Comic Relief

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So, the dust has begun to settle on Debate-Gate as many have begun to call it (well, anyway I just did).

Three quarters of the country now admit that Joe Biden’s skull is almost completely empty.  The other twenty five percent are waiting for space aliens and/or Elvis to explain Biden’s answers from that night to them in one syllable words of five letters or less.

And since Biden has dropped to six points behind Trump in the popular vote and even more in the swing state polls and since the evil party is indeed the evil party, we can assume that in a few weeks Kamala Harris will be the Democrat nominee.  And she will do this unencumbered by her even emptier skull.

And she might even “win” the election.  We know that absentee ballots are a powerful force in the right (wrong) hands.  So be it.

But all that being said, this has been a marvelous week.  Democrats have been howling and shrieking every day about how unfair it all is.  Today I listened as Lawrence O’Donnell explained how during a debate each candidate should have a staff available to answer the questions that the candidate doesn’t know the answer to.  He even said that the staff should answer the questions too.  He didn’t mention an option where the candidate doesn’t even show up to the debate but that does seem to be the next logical step in this progression.  I guess the end point would be dropping the concept of a president and just have competing bureaucratic teams (or maybe AI algorithms) running for office.

Another amusing point of panic is how can Kamala Harris be separated from the ticket without losing all the campaign money that is tied to either Biden or Harris.  Everyone had a favorite scenario for making Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker or Lord help us, Michelle Obama the nominee without losing the black vote.  Of course, Obama or Senator Warnock, being black, would make that easier but the candidates they really want are Whitmer or Josh Shapiro who are respectively the governors of Michigan and Pennsylvania and thereby provide some boost in picking up those states that are currently leaning Trump.

So, the pundits are like Indiana Jones trying to replace the golden idol with the bag of sand without triggering the death trap with the giant boulder chasing Indie through the cave.  There is talk of making her a Supreme Court Justice (wow!).  Maybe she could be vice president again (wow!).  I don’t know.  I’d offer her a lifetime pass to the zoo and all the peanuts and cotton candy she can eat from now on.  Maybe they could throw in her very own electric yellow school bus.  She really likes those.

Anyway, the point is that the pain experienced by the Left has been downright exhilarating.  Listening to them cry and complain and bang their heads on their desks as Joe Biden is exposed as a mental patient has been the gift that keeps on giving.

Now this can’t go on forever.  Eventually the Left will figure out a way to put this behind them.  And when they do, they will come after Donald Trump like a flock of demented harpies; all fangs and venom.  But that’s alright.  That’s the status quo.  Hopefully that will be in August.  By then I’ll be prepared for that phase of the election farce.  Hideous things are bound to happen between then and November.  Horrible people do horrible things.  But they’ll never be able to take away, “We finally beat Medicaid.”  And that’s good enough for me.

Cultural Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, good times.

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

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

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

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

Bye Joe.

Tighten Your Belt

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I was having a discussion with a younger family member.  Someone of my children’s generation.  And we were talking about how children need to be brought up at this point.  Now this guy is a very impressive individual.  He actually embodies all the of the characteristics that people make believe they have when they describe themselves in their resumes.

What he says he’s doing with his sons is making them ready to survive in a very bad economic environment.  He’s a strong believer in the, “Hard times leads to hard men leads to easy times leads to soft men leads to hard times” theory.  He wants his sons prepared to face adversity because he is of the opinion we haven’t even begun to see the bottom.  And I think he’s right.  Even in the challenging environment we are experiencing we haven’t seen anything like what’s to come.  The powers that be are working to pull the supports out from what used to be the American way of life.

The “great contraction” seems to be the plan to produce a step change in the number of people in the world.  I’m guessing they’d like to go from billions of people down to hundreds or maybe even just tens of millions.  And the way to get there is to remove the ability of average people to be gainfully employed and able to raise a family.  Essentially, they only want their class to continue forward.  And I think they’re succeeding.  Young people no longer believe it is possible to provide a middle-class existence for themselves, never mind for a family.

A family-based strategy seems to be the only way to overcome the reduction in opportunities and resources that is going on.  If kids can’t afford a house, then they’ll have to be housed by their families with their wives and kids in the family home.  Building an addition or trading in the family home for a multi-family building will once again become the way to allow the kids to afford family life.

Now, to some people this seems unacceptable.  Well, then maybe seeing your family end with your kids unmarried and without children of their own is the acceptable solution.  That’s a personal choice.  I guess if you are exceptionally wealthy you can buy them houses.  But then you probably already belong to the class that is supposed to emerge from the contraction; the elite.

For everyone else, surviving the new normal will involve tightening our belts and working twice as hard for half as much.  And maybe this is something that really has to happen.  Maybe the elites really are right and the good times are permanently over.  Personally, I don’t believe that.  Human ingenuity is an enormously powerful force.  Technological solutions exist for all of the “end of affluence” factors; energy limits, Malthusian population predictions, climate change panic.  I think that hard times are not a permanent situation for us today.  Rather I think a mindset by the global elites fosters the idea that Gaia needs our grandchildren to be sacrificed on the altar of depopulation.

I think we are headed for hard times.  Regardless of who wins the election in 2024, prepare to do what you can to help your loved ones to make it in very hard times.  It’s on the way.