Children Are Our Future

 ... or, "Harvard And Yale Are The Source Of Most Of Our National Leaders."

Someday, this man may be your boss.

This Can't Go On!

Oh, yes it can.

Watching the online replay of Tucker's show yesterday, I saw Brit Hume and Tucker express their amazement at the way the press has completely ignored Joe Biden's obvious and massive corruption. Just that day, Tony Bobulinski, a business partner of Hunter and a registered Democrat with a history of donating only to Democrats, came out with hard evidence that Joe Biden was on the take from the Chinese to the tune of 6 or 7 figures, while he was VP. It was as smoking a gun as could smoke.

The news media ignored it. Here was NPR's take.

Tucker and Brit harrumphed and said, "This can't go on!"

In Minneapolis, a group of business owners facing intolerable increases in crime following the retreat of the police force from Neighborhoods of Color, demanded to know what the cops were going to do about it. The reply was had the honesty that comes from total despair.

"As far as a long-term plan I don’t have one. I have lost 30% of my street officers since the end of May. Budget cuts from COVID-19 and an additional 1.5 million from the council in August we have let go 17 CSO’s and cancelled a recruit class of 29. A potential Cadet class slated for January of 2021 was also eliminated. It takes about a year to get a police Officer onto the streets with hiring, backgrounds and field training so reinforcements aren’t coming anytime soon."

That article quoted someone or other as saying, "This can't go on!"

Oh, yes it can and yes, it will. It's happening right now and there's no indication it's going to turn around.

Going back to the Bidens, it's no longer worthwhile to wonder what happened to the honesty and professionalism of the news media. Brit kept saying things like, "A professional journalist would see this and do such and such!" Brit, that it's not happening should tell you something. There are no professional journalists any more. Waiting for them to show up and rescue you is delusional. The cavalry is not coming over the hill because there is no cavalry.

Now that I have this mental model, I bet I'll see this a lot more. It's people in their 40s and older, thinking that this is still America from the 1980s or so, where the culture still had some momentum from the Greatest Generation. That momentum is just about gone. What you see when the Participation Trophy Generation children at NPR refuse to cover the Bidens is reality. Your memories are not reality.

Our job, then, is to teach those values, not wish for them to show up again.

Free Money For Acid

 ... and by acid, I mean H2SO4, not LSD.

Printed money is corrosive to the culture.

There are no real stakes to policy any more. I can't recall anyone suggesting that the lockdowns have costs and then listing those costs. For example, if Biden said, "I want to lock down the country to defeat the Chicom Flu and that means everyone receiving money from the government, from SS pensioners to GS-15 civil servants, will have to take a 20% hit," the conversation would be substantially different. That's not happening because we're convinced that the choice is between locking down the economy practically for free or everyone dying.

Free money corrodes our sight, making it possible to just glance at poverty and addiction rather than understanding it.

That wall of printed money lets us pose and preen in the name of Social Justice while real people's lives are destroyed. We don't understand them and we don't need to understand them. We can pretend to care by voting for more social spending. We won't have to pay for that spending ourselves, because it all comes in the form of government debt which is paid for by printing money. We feel good and don't have to pay a price for it.

Money without cost means we can indulge our social justice cosplay fantasies.

Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?

We don't just listen to Ta-Nehisi, we adore him while he berates us. And why not? Once having has been detached from earning, only a bigot full of hate wouldn't be in favor of Justice. When the pricing mechanisms of a culture have broken down, then you can have and support anything you want. There is no reason at all not to pursue fantasy goals. 

Because there is no limit to government spending and no cost to it, the general public can no longer understand why anyone with a heart wouldn't support free health care, open borders, reparations for slavery, free college, more money for teachers, more spending on affordable housing and on and on and on.

Hate is the only possible explanation as to why you want any restrictions on free things.

Admit it. You want to kill them all, don't you?

Leadership Silence

... is par for the course where I work.

We recently began a major, new corporate initiative. I think. The only way I found out about it was someone at the worker level mentioned it on our social networking app, asking if anyone knew more than the name and a simple blurb she saw in the newspaper.

She was immediately told by a representative of leadership that she needed to take the conversation offline, onto private email.

Yes. Of course.

How in the world does anyone expect to lead if they won't communicate? I'm convinced that 90% of all leadership positions are occupied by people who just want the title and the cash. They have not a speck of interest in actual leadership, they're just climbers.

The Avocado Toast Insurrection

Going through music videos from Cardi B and Takashi 6ix9ine illustrates the utterly degenerate state of modern culture. Finding this essay from the editor of the student newspaper at UW Madison gives you a glimpse into the world of mainstreamed radicalism on our campuses. It is suffused with a hatred of America. It finishes with instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail.

However, if the lives of these beautiful protestors continue to be threatened by a tyrannical government who seemingly does nothing to stop the death threats against black people vital to the Milwaukee community like Nitty and Coleman, I can offer some of the blunter tools of revolution and the fight against oppressors.

The university administration allowed this to remain on the newspaper's website. No surprise there as our campuses are staffed by radicals in the faculty and elsewhere.

The author, one Adam Kelnhofer, is an odd choice for a revolutionary firebrand. Here's a recent tweet of his, complaining about how hard his classes are. 

One of my biggest pet peeves is when a professor assigns 10 questions for a chapter of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the chapter is actually a chapter and a half and 8 of 10 questions have two parts, making the assignment 18 questions instead of 10, causing me to spend four hours on it

— Adam Kelnhofer (@drvagry) October 13, 2020

Gosh, you have to do some reading? That's got to be tough. Oh well. As wife kitteh says, adversity is the anvil on which character is forged. If you think that's all he has to deal with, here's more torture from his classrooms.

Professors b like: Yes If I make these lectures twice as long they will surely understand better, even though they probably won't have time to watch them all.

And I will definitely send each student 24 Canvas notifications every day to remind them they have things to do, even though that means all the students have time to do is constantly check notifications. 

I have never missed having in person classes more than now.

Whoa. Talk about roughing it! I'd say that these are the times that try men's souls, but that was originally spoken by a white man and, in any case, the formulation is triggering for womxn*.

This, then, is our budding leadership class. Agitators lobbying for lobbing homemade grenades while whining about having to read books and attend class. They're the participation trophy generation, a group of children who shave. They don't know how anything works because they've never done anything real themselves. They protest and riot and make Molotov cocktails thinking that they're the only ones who take action.

Their teachers are similarly petulant children, just older.

Just like the leaders in the Democratic Party, they don't understand that people who disagree with them have free will, too. Hence the surprise at the waves of police resignations and retirements. Hence the surprise at the doubling of violence in black communities when the cops pull back. 

When the rest of us don't act like pawns on a chessboard, calmly doing nothing while they act out, they're stunned.

Imagine how stunned they will be if they keep pushing the country towards civil war.

Many of the fighters in this video also had to complete a weekly reading assignment that was more than two chapters long. It's being investigated as a war crime.

* - For what it's worth, I am convinced that womxn is pronounced whoompskin.

We're All In This Together

That phrase drives me bonkers. We're not really in "this" together, are we? If your business dies because of the lockdowns, you're on your own. If your neighborhood gets torched by Vandals of Color, you're on your own. If part of your state goes up in flames because environmentalists prevented preventative forestry, you're on your own.

As a matter of fact, you're on your own in almost everything. That's just life.

Instead, I feel like we're fed a constant stream of sheepdog barking, designed to keep us in the herd and obedient to our "leaders." All of the barking - climate barking, Chicom Flu barking, racial injustice barking - it's all meant to create a set of enemies, some human, some not, against whom we must band together.

Meh.

Climate change is coming from China. They emit a huge and rapidly growing portion of global CO2.

The Wuhan flu is dangerous only at very close ranges. Masks outside are pointless.

Racial injustice is simply nonsense. It's paranoia aimed at a specific demographic, built from the terror that some of them had begun to stray.

We're being herded for nothing.

Nah. This is not for me.

What Matters

With this post, I saw an end to my thinking deep thoughts. 

Why do we listen to the Elites yapping at us? Because we don't pay for things with our own money. When there are riots, when certain neighborhoods devolve into crime and chaos, when schools are vandalized, we pay no direct costs. If, at the end of the Minneapolis riots, proggy boy wonder Mayor Jacob Frey and the socialist crazies on the city council told their constituents that they all had to drop $1250 in an envelope and mail it to city hall, how much traction would Ta-Nehesi Coates get in that city when he came to yell at them about racism?

We bought the lunatic Nazi Race Theory advocates in our universities and now in our young, professional class as soon as we decided to pay for our social services with printed money.

After more than 14 years of thinking out loud on this blog, I had finally come to the conclusions Kipling reached in The Gods of the Copybook Headings. It dawned on me that traditional values resonate because they're true. Modern values, particularly the race-based ones and those trying to equate the sexes, turn me off because they're lies. It's not any more complicated than that.

This isn't hard. Living according to traditional values is simply a matter of relaxing and accepting the rules laid out in the reality that God created for us. As a man, acquire meaningful skills so you can protect and provide for a family. Expose yourself to the lives of men who are good examples of this, both through your friends and from history. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson come to mind. 

Wife kitteh and I had another in our evolving discussions about sexual roles last night. We both know women who have swallowed the modern values that tell them to pursue careers first. Their children, if they have any and many don't, are raised by others. They have loads of student debt. There's no evidence that they have the inner happiness of being good wives and mothers. We both wondered out loud what it was they thought they were buying with their careers. It certainly wasn't satisfaction. It was only stuff and the stuff had not made them content.

I need a lot more space to think this out and this post is getting close to tl;dr territory, so I'm going to close with this.

Politics is a false god. It demands that you care deeply about the trivial. Our progressive, social justice deacon gave the homily at Mass yesterday. As he rambled, he hit all of the fashionable themes - justice and racism and tolerance. He hit none of the themes whose dangers loom over us like monster-movie beasts - debt, drugs and sexual degeneracy. He thought he was saying something important and the congregation were all familiar with his topics, but none of them really mattered.

Ignore the political and focus on what matters is the message I heard, even if it wasn't delivered in the sermon.

More on this in later posts.

Learning skills, like cooking, matters. This is a beef tenderloin we found in the good-Lord-this-meat-has-almost-turned-lets-discount-it-and-sell-it-before-we-have-to-throw-it-away bin. We had gone to the store to get a fresh chicken to grill, but found this and scooped it up, no particular recipe in mind. However, I'm getting better with my Oklahoma Joe pellet smoker and knew if I put on a rub and smoked it for an hour or two, it would come out great. It did.