Tag: mindset

Learning From Your Mistakes

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What is the mission?  So that’s the first mistake.  When I was young, I was told by everyone that being an American meant that I could be sure that I was living in the land of opportunity and all I had to do was work hard and follow my dreams.  And to some extent it proved to be true.  What they didn’t say was that this was a temporary situation and my children and grandchildren would be out of luck.  Lesson learned.  Opportunities are as you find them.  Just because a college has a course in classical languages does not mean there are paying jobs for people who take those classes.  Or in English Literature, or Art History or Gender Studies for that matter.  There may not even be jobs for engineers or accountants.  It’s strictly up to you to figure out what people will pay for.  And that’s part of the mission.  Because the mission is to thrive.  It’s not some automatic thing.  You are constantly figuring out the changing rules and playing field that is life in 21st century America.

How about safety?  But America is the safest place in the world.  We have safe water, safe air, safe food, safe medicines, safe cars and safe roads.  There’s the EPA, the FDA, OSHA, the DOT, you name it.  We’ve got local law enforcement, the FBI, NSA, CIA and another dozen alphabet soup agencies keeping us safe from bad guys foreign and domestic.  And yet crime, property and violent, are skyrocketing.  To a large extent you have been thrown back on your own resources to avoid becoming the victim of accidents and attacks.  Now you even have to consider whether the banks you keep your money in are safe from mismanagement and malfeasance.  All of this is on you now.  Where you live, where and how you travel and what institutions you interact with and trust, you must carefully decide these things and base those decisions on accurate evaluations of the way things actually are, not what they’re alleged to be by the government or the press.

And then there’s the federal government.  The old joke was that the scariest words an American could hear were “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.”  Well, they don’t pretend any longer that they want to help.  If the feds come looking for you, they’re probably going to bust down your front door and perp walk you to their gulag.  The government has made it their sworn duty to separate you from your constitutional rights and as much of your money and possessions as they possibly can.  Avoiding the malevolent influence and attention of the feds may now be the number one priority of people who hope to thrive.

But the picture isn’t all doom and gloom.  There are still lots of good people and opportunities to live a meaningful and happy life.  What it takes is a mindset that accepts that life isn’t a cakewalk and that the government isn’t your friend.  You must decide how you will navigate the hazards of our society and pass this knowledge along to your children.

If you are realistic and aware of the pitfalls that have been planted in our landscape then you will have a better than even chance of avoiding them and living a rich and productive life.

But for those who either can’t or won’t heed the danger signals and instead blunder through the minefield that is today’s America, there is the high probability that you will become one of the cautionary tales that litter our society.

Be smart, stay safe, thrive.

The 2022 Mindset

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What progress we’ve made in the last few years is mostly in the form of changes to mindset.  The days of voting for team red and hoping for the best are over for many of us.  Allegiance to a party or a politician is now a transactional relationship.  I give you my vote.  You receive a salary or power or graft or all of the above in return for you stopping my enemies from taking away my freedom.  That is the bargain.  If party or politician fails to do those things then we look for an alternative mechanism to get what we want.  And that alternative may go all the way to leaving the city or the state or even the country for greener pastures.

But that is only one dimension of what the new mindset means.  More fundamentally it means that you examine everything in your life through a different lens.  I look at every company, person, service to see if it helps my enemies.  If it does, I look for a way to avoid that relationship or at least to minimize the damage it causes our side or maximizes the inconvenience it causes their side.  Basically, I’ve introduced spite as an operational part of my lifestyle.

Of course, the better way is to find a way to help our side.  If I can find a social network that caters to our people, I’ll use it and support it.  If a corporation is friendly to our side or even if it just explicitly says it won’t punish our side then I’m a loyal customer even if it’s slightly more expensive than the woke competition.  And finally, finally, finally these sorts of opportunities are beginning to appear.  Donald Trump’s social network and Rumble and domain hosts like RightForge and even some payment providers that cater to the non-woke are coming into existence.  These need to be examined carefully to avoid any grifters who only want to take advantage of the Right.  But for the legitimate providers of services this should be a high priority for those who claimed they want to support our side.

2022 will be the chance for voters to reward those who tortured us with COVID fascism.  There are enough people in the middle who saw their children treated as pawns by the teachers’ unions and the Democrats to allow us to flip the tables on these creeps.  Virginia is the proof that there is enough appetite for revenge that lots of moderately blue areas can be pushed to the Right.  And that can be very valuable for 2024.  Places like Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin need to put in place laws that prevent election fraud, even the old-style election fraud that Democrats commit in large cities.  It’s entirely possible that with not too much effort a Republican president and Congress can be ensured in 2024.

And 2022 will be the chance for a lot of the cities and states to do something about the George Floyd nullification of law and order.  Certainly, some of the cities are beyond hope.  San Francisco, New York, Portland and Chicago are terminally progressive.  Only salting the Earth makes sense in these places.  But maybe some of the other places are ready to change.  Or maybe the states they reside in are ready to do something about the lawlessness, even if only to quarantine them from the rest of the state.

But as stated above the change that occurred and was confirmed in 2021 is in our mindset.  We owe no allegiance to the people who hate us.  They are not our countrymen.  They are citizens of the global hive.  Their interests and our own are diametrically opposed, so helping yourself and harming them are almost always the same thing.  In the last few weeks, I’ve heard more and more of the usual suspects starting to make the “Why can’t we all just get along?” noises.  Don’t listen, don’t believe them and don’t buy into it.  That’s just the media whining that no one is paying to read their tripe.

So, get ready for 2022.  Things are still plenty horrible.  Terrible people are in charge of the federal and many of the state and local governments.  Our freedoms have been usurped by bureaucrats and deep state stormtroopers.  But the truth is emerging from the shadows and our enemies have made themselves hated and ridiculous.  Their incompetence and insanity are destroying their legitimacy.  Protect yourselves and avoid their malice.  2022 will be better than 2021.