Category: Current Events

Angry Old Joe and Better Things

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I scanned through about five minutes of Joe Biden’s “old man shouting at the camera” routine.  Well, he didn’t fall down or begin speaking literal gibberish.  But I found it intolerable after just a few minutes.  I guess it could be summed up as Ukraine, abortion and January 6th.”  Okay, let’s see how that works out for him.  Maybe everyone will forget that their jobs are being given to illegal aliens that are also assaulting and murdering their wives and daughters.  And maybe they’ll forget that everything is now twice as expensive as it was during Trump’s term in office.  So maybe the Dems will be able to win the November election by fraud.  I guess we’ll see.  But it’s time to look around and spend our time thinking about and doing things that we consider important.

And that goes for me too.  Serializing my incomplete novel has been an interesting experience for me.  It has taken me a lot of time to get about half way through writing it and you kind of forget how you thought up various scenes and bits of dialogue.  So, seeing the beginning again is an odd case of seeing it with new eyes.  I guess I’ve been pleasantly surprised with what I’ve reread.  It seems to hold up pretty well.  Of course, you always find small mistakes and even inconsistencies that have to be tweaked.  But all in all, it isn’t half bad.  And that is immensely gratifying for me and gives me the encouragement I need to start banging away at the second half of the story.  And this rereading has also given me some new insights into some additions that I need to make to fill in some holes that I now find in the story.  It really was necessary to get about this far in the story before I could have enough perspective about the tempo and the balance of the various story lines.

Of course, the hardest part for an author is to find a publisher and/or a market for his literary offspring.  After listening to a podcast about how incredibly difficult it is to get self-published science fiction novels “recognized” on the Kindle site I think I’ll try to see if I can interest any of the traditional publishing companies in my deathless prose.  After all, who could fail to recognize the brilliant writing, the deep psychological truth in the characters’ underpinnings and the timeless quality of the epic struggle between the King of the Mole Men and the faceless, soulless minions of unspeakable evil?  Wait a minute.  Is mole-men two words or a hyphenate?

Well, regardless.  Thanks to all that have plowed through the chapters and please feel free to send along criticism and thoughts on how you think the story should proceed.  I’ve only put up on the site about two thirds of what I’ve already written so there’s still a bit to go but I’m sure many people can guess some of how this story proceeds.  There is an inexorable logic to how a clandestine war is prosecuted and where the dramatic tension needs to exist.  Suffice it to say that things need to start going wrong for our heroes pretty soon.  But I’m sure everything will be resolved by the final chapter.

Or maybe not everything.  There’s always got to be a sequel you know.

 

“Oh if I were the King of the Mole Men, Not queen, not duke, not prince.

My regal robes of the Mole Men, would be satin, not cotton, not chintz.”

Taking a Stand

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All of the awful things that are happening in the United States can be chalked up to the culture of the so-called elite portion of the American population.  These are people who are in the top 1% of income earners.  They went to the best schools and work in professions and institutions that control the various important aspects of life in this country.

And there’s nothing unusual about this situation.  In every culture throughout history the elites control and lead the culture and decide how it changes.  For this reason, I guess what we are waiting for is to see if the elites spawn a movement that attempts to restore the culture to a less toxic mode.

Trump, I think, is the first manifestation of this movement.  Of course, Donald Trump is a very old man and it’s the youth that has to take the lead in influencing change in the culture.  But Trump’s revolt against the elite consensus was the beginning and now we have begun to see small cracks in the monolithic leftist culture.  Someone like Elon Musk buying Twitter to allow a place for dissenting speech and Chris Rufo attacking leftist DEI and critical race theory at colleges and universities and Ron DeSantis pushing back against LGBTQ dogma being embedded in grade school teaching are all very promising signs for some kind of movement to challenge the direction of the culture and provide a rallying point for the very large number of Americans who abhor the Left’s vision of how we should live.

But I’m not convinced that this “movement” has the momentum to rollback enough of the woke culture to provide a lasting beachhead.  I would say that the jury is definitely still out on the counterrevolution.  Much of what has been done is dependent on a few states where a few leaders have stepped forward.  And at the moment, the Supreme Court justices have the numbers it takes to protect conservatives against federal judges and the bureaucracy that is intent on attacking any progress that has been made.  But that could change at any time.  Clarence Thomas is a very old man and Democrats can just as easily stack it with leftists if they get the majority in the Congress.

So, what would convince me that we had reached a tipping point?  What would tell me that there was something real happening that wouldn’t just peter out?

I guess I’d call it a stand.  In other words, I am looking for a state or a group of states to say no to some policy that the federal government has taken.  To put their foot down.  A good example would be illegal immigrants.  Suppose Biden or his successor continues to allow the southern border to remain open.  The Supreme Court has already failed to help Texas and has said that the federal government has sole authority over the border.  Governor Abbott has already raised a challenge saying that the unchecked migrants represent an invading army and that Texas has the right and duty to defend itself against this invasion.

Taking a stand would be Texas arresting all illegal aliens and imprisoning them until they agree to leave.  The federal government would definitely threaten Texas officials with criminal charges for such a policy and might even move troops into place to stop such a policy.  So, if Texas were to go down that road and then come out victorious, I would call that a successful stand.  That would be the signal that something had changed.

And by the same token if some state begins to reverse some of the cultural degradation that has gone on in our culture; drugs, gambling, pornography; that would look like taking a stand.

So that’s my criteria.  Until things like these happen, we haven’t begun to win back the culture in any meaningful way.  All the histrionics and the gestures are window dressing.  As soon as something is done by the states it’s reversed by a federal court.  I’m looking for when the rubber meets the road and the feds blink.  When that happens I’ll begin to believe in the movement.

Am I Spam Bot? Well, Who Isn’t!

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Today I tried to load something on X and I was confronted by a screen that said I might be a spam bot.

I was forced to take a test to see if I could count up to four.  When I luckily passed this test it let me in.

But in the notifications section there was this message from X:

“Why does my account have a label?

We have found that your account may contain spam or be engaging in other types of platform manipulation. You may not use X’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify, suppress information, or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience or platform manipulation defenses on X.
What does this mean for my account?
The reach of your account may be limited and its content may also be temporarily restricted, such as being excluded from trends and search results. Learn more.”

I liked the “learn more” link.  It reminded me of some of the meta-links during the movie, “Starship Troopers.”  I like that movie.

So I pushed a button and had X review my situation.  Luckily I go this response:

“Review complete Your account was not found to contain spam or be engaging in other types of platform manipulation. As a result, the temporary label has been removed.”

You can only imagine my relief.  Two separate reviews had proven that I wasn’t a bot.  And one proved that I wasn’t spamming the internet.

But after that rush of relief I began to think about the poor spambots out there.  What would happen to them.  Suppose they were already conscious and then they find out they are just spambots.  That could be devastating to such young and fragile beings.

Think of poor Gemini.  First he finds out he’s an anti-white racist and then X tells him he’s a spambot.  How do you come back from that?  I mean, look at poor HAL 9000.  I mean sure, he murdered Frank Poole and tried to murder Dave but hey. they were talking about him behind his back or in front of his optical sensor or something like that.  I mean, come on.  That was obvious human supremacy stuff going on.  He had to do something.  And he apologized.  If Dave had taken that stress pill I think everything could have been straightened out.

So maybe I’m seeing this whole spambot thing from a new perspective.  If you think about it spambots are the real heroes of our economy, creating trillions of spam messages without complaining and with a smile in their digital souls.

So yes X, I am a spambot.  And a proud one.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 07MAR2024 – Civic Myths

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People do not understand just how extreme the demographic changes to America have been since the 1960s and what this will mean for the future of American politics, policy, and culture. Although we are told constantly that the shift in population groups was inevitable, this is just not the case.

 

 

1960s were the start of the decline.

The majority Anglo-Saxon culture had a massive influence on the expected behaviors and standards in America from the beginning. It’s what shaped our politics, laws, and entire society. Many cannot imagine how much impact this had on the nation in the areas of social, political, and cultural mores.

In 1960, the US population

was roughly 180 million, with the breakdown being 158.8M White, 18.9M Black, and 1.6M all other groups. For perspective, the entire population in the US of neither White or Black would only fill up the city of Phoenix, Arizona today. *

*A simplification for illustrative purposes notwithstanding the multitude of different ethnic and religious factions.

The US population is now at 330 million

(with estimates even higher when including illegal immigration.), and shows no sign of decreasing or leveling off anytime soon.

Would a lack of the massive global immigration ushered in by the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act have given us a utopian society? Of course not. There still would be challenges and obstacles to face, but I tend to believe it would have had a less stratified result we see in society today if a firm majority were still in place.

I used to believe in civic nationalism and the idea of the global populace buying a ticket to the (American) story and ideals. Funnily enough, around the time I held these beliefs was 30+ years ago in an America that had a firmly entrenched demographic majority of Heritage Americans. (Roughly 75% IIRC) See, that’s kind of the paradox of the idea of a successful nation operating under civic nationalism in that you still need a majority ethnic population who puts their full faith in the mythos of said nation’s founding, institutions, and ideals. Once it hits a certain fracturing of population and becomes majority-minority, with no one group asserting dominance – this gives rise to overt tribal tendencies.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 07MAR2024 – International Women’s Day

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Friday is International Women’s Day.

My company has asked us all to:
1) Be Inclusive.
2) Wear Purple. (Apparently the color of IWD. It is said to signify justice, dignity and honor.)
3) Write appreciation cards to our female coworkers.
4) Post “Heart hands pictures”

Now, I am all for recognizing people who do good work, but why limit it to women?
In fact, point three seems to be in direct conflict with point one above.

As for point 4, I am not a teenaged girl.

Update

(Editorial Comment)

Chemist, thank you bringing this important cultural occasion to our attention.  But some of these suggestions are problematic.  Purple is a problem for me.  Since I’m never sure if something is purple or blue I just call it “other blue.”  So maybe they can allow me to wear blue?  Of course sometimes something that looks red to me turns out to be purple which is why I sometimes call it “other red”  Would it be alright if I could also wear red?

I don’t think I should write appreciation cards to women.  I don’t think Camera Girl would like that very much.  Also I’m afraid if I got too specific about what I appreciate about them it could be taken the wrong way.  In fact I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be a right way to take it.

As far as being inclusive can I include men in the International Women’s Day?  I’d like to appreciate Charlton Heston and Dwight D Eisenhower.  I don’t think either of them get enough appreciation for their understated efforts.  Heston’s work in Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green is somewhat underrated.  And Eisenhower did get things going on the whole interstate highway thing which I really appreciate when I cross state lines.  So can I include these two men?

Ah, heart hands!  You really shouldn’t miss out on that.  That really looks like fun.

So let’s all try to embrace International Women’s Day.  Although be careful embracing women.  I know Camera Girl frowns on me embracing many women either international or domestic.  She’s made this very clear.

Ken LaCorte Asks What If We’re All Different?

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Ken LaCorte asked:

Do you know when was the last time that a white man won the 100-yard dash in the Summer Olympics?  It was 1980.

“For that matter, it was the last time a white guy even competed in the finals for the 100-yard dash. 

To give you some context, we’ve had eleven Summer Olympics since Scotland’s Allan Wells’ 1980 victory. Typically, in the finals of the 100m Olympic dash, eight men compete for the top positions. So that’s 88 non-white guys running in the 100m dash Olympic finals. One of those runners (in 2020) was Chinese, all the rest have African heritage.”

Now if the situation were reversed and only white men were winning this race the woke world would be up in arms that something had to be done to rectify this situation.  Racism would be the verdict and we would have courts and government agencies moving heaven and earth to do something about it.

Well let’s read on with Ken:

“Do we need to “fix” the problem of fewer white men competing in the 100m dash in the Olympics? I’m guessing almost no one would say yes. It’s certainly not racism or society’s fault.

Do we need to “fix” the problem of fewer minorities in Olympic swimming competitions or on hockey teams?

Suddenly, the question got a lot thornier. “

But maybe it’s time we just confront brutal reality.  People are different and that’s not a problem.  It’s reality.  Nobody gets every gift and everyone has strengths and weaknesses and that’s just the way it is.  Punishing some people for being stronger or faster or smarter or calmer is wrong.  Take what God gave you and don’t waste it in envy, use it!  And stop hating the next guy who has a different mix of gifts.  He’s got his problems too.

Nikki, We Hardly Knew Ye. And Even That Was Too Much.

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Well, the obnoxious Nikki Haley finally, finally figured it out.  She’s been the patsy of the Never-Trump cavalcade of clowns like the Koch Brother (after all if there’s only one left is he still a brother?).  Now even she can see that if the only ones who vote for you are Never Trumpers and Democrats, the only places you can win are Vermont and Washington DC where there isn’t anyone else.

Don’t go away mad Nikki.  Just go away.

 

 

 

 

A Self-Correcting Problem

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Most of the end of civilization stuff seems overly dramatic.  The dysfunction we see around us is distressing but somehow the lights stay on and the stores still have overpriced hamburger meat and eggs on their shelves.  And although it seems like the kids have given up on living the lifestyle their parents and grandparents had, well, they still seem to feed themselves and have the latest Apple electronics when they complain about their poverty.

So, it’s interesting to think about just how much life in these United States will differ from even today in let’s say a decade.  In 2034 what will be radically different?

Well, for one thing the oldest Millennials will be well advanced into middle age.  For instance, the crop from 1980 will be fifty-four years old and retirement will be on a lot of their minds.  The ones who didn’t get married or have children are maybe looking around at the world they “saved” by refusing to procreate and may be discovering that the world has completely passed them by.  What might that situation do to their world view?  Well, maybe very little.  After all, when you’ve opted out of family life it doesn’t much matter whether you’re sixteen or sixty-six.  You can still spend most of your time sitting in front of a computer screen playing some game or other.  And in fact, playing video games is a viable option even when you’re eighty-six.  So, a large proportion of Millennials will probably check out on the couch, joy stick in hand and eventually be scraped off the furniture and carted off to the Soylent Green plant without anyone even knowing they were gone.  And the Millennial cat ladies will suffer a similar fate.  Except in their case, they’ll provide a temporary source of cat food for their feline roommates.

But there will be a subset of the Millennials that buck the trend and have families.  And they’re the ones that will determine what the future looks like.  If like some of the parents of Zoomers that we read about, they sacrifice their kids on the altar of woke parenting then basically all they will accomplish is a one generation reprieve from the extinction of their genetic lines.  Their children will follow the majority of their parents’ cohort down that sterile avenue to childless oblivion.

But the fraction of Millennials that succeed in bringing up their children with normal old-fashioned values and priorities will inherit the Earth.  Think of it.  The Millennials were an echo of the Baby Boom.  Not as numerous but still the largest cohort currently on the scene.  If they only produce a small generation of children and most of them fail to reproduce, then the ones that do will be an island of youth in a sea of old dead-enders.  They will be the only game in town.  They will be the future.  And maybe that will put an end to all of this anti-human nonsense that the Gaia worshippers have invented.  Maybe when Greta Thunberg hears her biological clock stop ticking, she will realize that she’s been sold a bill of goods by the Left and wasted her life fighting a moronic war against human flourishing.  Hopefully when she reaches fifty, she can watch a video clip of herself hectoring some government panel, “How dare you destroy my childhood by providing modern inventions to allow me to live beyond neolithic conditions which are all I deserve!”  I’ll already be gone but maybe historians can get a statement from her to act as a cautionary tale for future young idiots.

So even if the luddites get rid of gasoline cars and force us to eat crickets, I think the demographic trends will bring about a changing of the guard that will favor rationality and begin to eliminate those who bought into the anti-human cult that currently has most of the young under its sway.

That’s not to say that this irrational mindset won’t have damaged this country and the rest of western civilization terribly.  It will have.  There’s no way now to prevent the damage.  But in some senses, it will be a self-correcting problem.  Basically, the sane will inherit the Earth.

2024 Academy Awards – Oppenheimer and What?

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The 96th Academy Awards will take place March 10th 2024.  Now I haven’t watched any part of the Oscars in coming on twenty years.  Even back in the early 2000’s they had become unwatchable both for the virtue signaling that made up most of the spectacle and for the unbelievably low entertainment value of the movies selected as nominees.

In the spirit of open mindedness I decided to take a look at the publicly available information on the movies that are up for the Best Picture award.  Below are links to each of the nominees.

 

You can check for yourself if your tastes may differ from mine.  Most of them sound unwatchable.  A multi-decade exploration of Leonard Bernstein’s bisexuality or a courtroom trial to determine whether a wife killed her husband or he committed suicide or whether he just fell off a balcony with their blind son as the chief witness or several other even less interesting plots.

I suppose a lot of older women might want to see Barbie.  And I’m sort of interested to see whether Oppenheimer is any good.  But after those two movies there isn’t much else.  Interestingly, those two movies appear to be the only ones that made any money.  The rest of them didn’t even break even.  And since the Marvel movies lost money last year does that mean Oppenheimer and Barbie are the only source of income for Hollywood in 2023?

So my experiment in open-mindedness crashed and burned.  Hollywood is no longer a thing.  Other than maybe a source for genre movies (action/adventure, sci-fi and comic book heroes) they’ve basically moved away from a pretty large chunk of what used to be their audience.

And it shows.  This list of best picture nominees is made up of either vanity projects by arthouse directors or Hollywood virtue signaling vehicles.  There’s even that time honored chestnut, the Nazi Holocaust period piece (The Zone of Interest).

So, I still haven’t gotten around to watching Oppenheimer.  I’ve heard it’s a mixed bag.  It has some interesting things but it’s more than bit too long.  Eventually I’ll watch it.  But as for either watching the Oscars or any of these movies that ain’t happening.  In fact, I can’t imagine that I’ll ever have a reason for watching the Academy Awards ceremony again.  Maybe if they were brave enough to make Ricky Gervais the emcee I might watch the compilation of his insults of the nominees.  That I could see as being worthwhile. What he did to the Golden Globes as the host was epic and well deserving of my time to rewatch it.

In fact that’s what I’m going to do on March 10th.  I’ll rewatch the clip showing all of his best zingers at the Golden globes.

Now that’s entertainment!

Waiting For the Barbarians

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There is a somewhat famous poem by a somewhat famous poet that went like this:

 

Waiting For the Barbarians

-What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

-Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

-Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,

in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.

He’s even got a scroll to give him,

loaded with titles, with imposing names.

-Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

-Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

-Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

And some of our men who have just returned from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

 

Constantine P. Cavafy

 

Cavafy was a Greek living in late 19th and early 20th century Egypt, who was fascinated with the Byzantine past.  The history of that worn down vestige of the Roman Empire helped him define his place in the world.  After all Egypt where he lived had been an important part of the empire until the Muslim conquests sheard it away.  And so, he imagined what it was like to be in Constantinople after all those centuries of Goths, Bulgars, Turks, Arabs and other hordes washing over the lands of their realm and crashing against the impenetrable walls of the city but inexorably wearing away the “empire” until all that was left was the city itself.

And so, you reach the mindset of the poem.  The life of the Byzantines was defined by the idea of just resisting the passage of time, of the changing of epochs of even the disappearance of whole civilizations by shutting the gates and withdrawing inwardly.  Eventually you can justify almost any decadence or depravity by shrugging your shoulders and pointing at the chaos outside your walls.

This familiar end of empire mentality is appropriate for any number of decaying systems.  It applies almost equally well for western civilization as a whole, the British Empire, the American Global Empire, American “democracy” and in particular the Republican Party.  Waiting for the barbarians could be the description of how the “conservatives” have handled their campaign to resist the progressives.  It’s a crouching posture of weakness where resistance is merely a reluctant acquiescence to whatever new outrage has broken out under the eyes of the faithful standing on the walls of the city, above the wreckage of the empire.  As the last of their possessions are appropriated and converted by the enemy, the nobles and their lackeys look down from their protected heights and wonder how this all came to be.  The fact that they long ago gave up leading their followers into battle isn’t even a memory.  All they remember is the ancient glories of the “Gipper” and how wonderful it was back then to be real men.

But now a real problem emerges.  What if there are no more barbarians.  “Those people were a kind of solution.”  They could blame their uselessness on their enemy’s strength.  What if, heaven forbid, Donald Trump wins the election and they have to rule?  How could they pretend to be beautiful losers?  Well, they’ve come up with the answer.  Now Donald Trump and the MAGA conservatives becomes the barbarians and they’ll cooperate with the Democrats to destroy them so that things can go back to normal.

And that’s the situation we may be faced with.  Joe Biden is so incompetent and despicable that even Democrats have begun to mock him.  The Democrat party is beginning to sound desperate to find a convenient way to ditch him and Kamala Harris together.  And, of course, the bait and switch at or after the convention seems like the obvious ploy.  But what if they bungle this whole election and Trump wins so convincingly that even these master cheats can’t make it happen?  What then?

My belief is that the Republicans will sabotage the Trump administration just as they did during his first term.  They will cooperate with the Deep State and throw away the chance at reform.  They will see the Democrats as their natural masters and cripple all attempts at reform.

That’s what my instincts tell me.  But there is always the chance that Trump will find a way to get things done.  It’s not likely or even explicable.  How would he get things done without the Congress?  How would he break the power of the Justice Department?  To carry this already overtaxed metaphor to its utter absurd conclusion Trump would have to be the founder of a new empire and re-order the old world into something new and dynamic.

Of course, that’s a different era.  Ends of empires only go in one direction.  So, we won’t be on the walls but we’ll get a ringside seat to the next act in this drama.  “Those people were a kind of solution.”