Maybe You Didn't Screw Up

 ... maybe you just misread the environment.

I'm reading three books at the same time right now. The Day Is Now Far Spent by Cardinal Sarah, The Great Dechurching by Jim Davis and Michael Graham and America's Cultural Revolution by Christopher Rufo.

Cardinal Sarah, who is one of my spirit animals, argues that the Catholic Church has become distracted by modern concerns.

That smile is the last thing an apostate prelate sees before he is intellectually devoured.

Cardinal Sarah makes the case for the main thing to be the main thing. That is, living out the Gospel and the worship of God should be where we focus, not Global Warming Climate Change, immigration, social justice and the like. Prayer and sharing the Word of God is our business and the rest is a distraction.

Jim Davis and Michael Graham have done solid social science work examining the decline of religion in the US and, by extension, the West as a whole. They have statistically significant amounts of data and they have rigorously analyzed it. I've enjoyed the book, but I can't help but think that they're doing an after-action report on a battle where they aren't taking into account what the enemy did.

Christopher Rufo examines what the enemy did and why his forces have been overwhelming to date. He grinds through the history of the modern left, starting with that monumentally destructive dingbat, Herbert Marcuse, moving through his acolytes like Angela Davis and then going on to describe how their armies have captured academia, the entertainment industry, the media and now, through undergrads entering the workforce, HR departments, marketing teams and so forth.

In short, Rufo has the strategic picture, Davis and Graham have the casualty lists and Cardinal Sarah has the way forward.

If I could do two things, I'd first get ahold of Davis and Graham and get them to re-examine the thesis of their work in light of the overwhelming advantages of the enemy. People are in church for an hour or two a week. They're in school or at work 40 hours a week. The priest or minister can't get them fired, but their HR team can. At night, unless they're deliberately watching Christian entertainment, they're being saturated in leftist agitprop.

The second thing I would do is more local. I'd find a way to get this in front of the people who work for our diocese and rabble rouse so they went on strike until Cardinal McElroy pulled his head out of his nether regions. Dittos for the people who contribute money to the diocese. McElroy, if you didn't know, is a far-left political activist first and a Catholic second. His university, USD has a reputation for being one of the most anti-Catholic institutions in the country.

Last night, I participated in a discussion with some of the men of my parish. One of them has a daughter who is a senior at USD. She's managed to keep her faith and is in a leadership position with the college Republicans there. She helped to invite Matt Walsh, the orthodox Catholic podcaster with the Daily Wire who created the What is a Woman? movie and movement to come and speak at USD. The leftist authorities at USD, playing perfectly to type from Christopher Rufo's book, disinvited Matt, calling him "grossly offensive."

That's our Cardinal's team, boys and girls. Knifing orthodox Catholics in the back while gazing up at heaven in leftist sanctimony. Nauseating.

What Rufo understands that Davis and Graham don't quite get is that the left's complete takeover of education, specifically the education industry where new teachers and professors are trained, has inexorably led to what we're seeing in the Catholic universities.

We let a bunch of copperheads loose in our house and now we're trying to figure out why we're getting bitten all the time.

Duh.

Meeting Reality In The Police Station

 This one shocked me, although it shouldn't have.

Fed up with having Chicago police officers “babysit” asylum-seekers, Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara on Thursday proposed an alternative to district stations: allowing hundreds of migrants to sleep in the lobbies and open hallways at City Hall...

In the last week alone, the number of new migrant arrivals who’ve taken up temporary residence at Chicago police stations has increased 6% to 1,100.

Deputy chief of staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas has warned that Chicago could experience a fivefold increase in arriving migrants — 10 busloads per day, up from two — sent here by Republican governors...

Wait, what?

There are illegals living in the Chicago police stations? Hmm. Were the police stations being used for anything else? I mean, if you combine a hostel and a police station, what do you get?

You get a city that is being confronted with the fruits of its own ideological fantasies. It's only going to get worse with the influx increasing by a factor of 5.

That's OK as long as you remember that no human is illegal, right?

Dude.

Trump - Ramaswamy 2024!

That's the ticket! It's the perfect pairing for where we are right now - an easily manipulated narcissist and a smarmy, disingenuous bot. 

I've been ranting a lot lately about how buying what we want with borrowed or printed money has corrupted our society. Talking about the destruction of our cities and the open borders, I said this about how we would resolve our self-inflicted crises.

Someone else will clean up the mess. It will be paid for by the government who will get the money from ... somewhere. There's no need to defend the public places, no need to defend order and peace, no need to defend civlization because it will all bounce right back without any effort from us...

The decay is more than just the needles and feces and graffiti and closed stores. It's a decay of morale as well. We're numb. Not comfortably numb, because you know something is very, very wrong. We're just numb to it, our senses deadened by the borrowed money.

I've also ranted a great deal about the shortcomings of the progressives. Corrupt and degenerate they certainly are, but the borrowing and printing binge is partly to blame for them going off the rails. They didn't used to be this way. 

Well, if they are marinating in a culture where someone else will clean up the filth and destruction, the Republicans are, too. Conservatives may have a tragic view of the world in comparison to the liberals' romantic view, but we still live in a world where no one has to pay to rebuild the things we're ruining.

That's why Trump-Ramasmarmy* is the perfect ticket to face Biden-Harris or whoever the DNC decides to run. Trump is fixated on 2020 to the point of insanity and Ramasmarmy is saying whatever he thinks sounds good at the moment. One is deranged and the other is phony.

Meanwhile, there are some really good governors out there who are solving real problems, like DeSantis in Florida, Kemp in Georgia, Kim Reynolds in Iowa, Chris Sununu in New Hampshire and, as governor-emeriti, Nikki Haley of South Carolina. What do they all have in common? Donald Trump hates them and, in some cases, takes credit for their achievements. Ramasmarmy says they're all bought and paid for by special interests. Well, he says that this week. Next week, he will deny ever saying that and will say something else.

There is major bad blood between the Republican front-runner and the most successful Republican governors.

So what? That would only matter if we were responsible for fixing anything. Instead, we're convinced we can just keep borrowing and printing money. That gives us the luxury of talking about court dates and idolizing a huckster. We don't want a broom and a dustpan, we want a showman and a fast-talking con artist. 

Yay.

Look, it's Mr. Tough Guy doing his tough guy face for the camera!

I don't know if he wants me to vote for him or buy his detergent.

* - I saw the nickname Ramasmarmy elsewhere and absolutely loved it.

There Is A Non-Human Presence In Our Attic And We Feel It Every Night

It's heat retained from the day's sunshine.

Wait, what did you think I meant?

Hmm. Maybe that title was a bit misleading. Sorry about that.

At any rate, our bedroom is upstairs and the thermostat for the AC is downstairs. By morning, the upstairs is noticeably warmer than the downstairs. We had thought it was from our bodies, but I don't think that's the case any more. Dig this temperature chart from my Sensor Plus sensors.

Yeah, I know there are no axes or tick marks. Hey, this is a hobby blog, not a SciAm article. And if it had been a SciAm article, you can be sure I'd call you a racist transphobe by the time I was done, so be grateful for small things.

The chart covers a couple of days. At their farthest distance apart, the upstairs, which is the blue line, is about 5-6 degrees warmer. One sensor is upstairs and the other is downstairs.

The red circles show the times we crank the AC. The green circles indicate something different and typically happen around 0300. Why does the upstairs heat up around 0300 every day?

It's all about heat capacity. The AC isn't just cooling the air, it's cooling the structure of the house. By 0300, the downstairs walls have cooled to 68 degrees, our thermostat setting. From that point on, the air down there stays around 68 and there's no need for the AC.

Upstairs, we border the attic which has a substantially larger heat capacity than the downstairs walls. It's still warm from the day so our room heats up and the thermostat downstairs doesn't know it's happening.

The solution is actually quite simple. The HVAC pipe junction is in the attic. All we need to do is put a register in the attic and the AC will cool it down while it's cooling the house. By the time 0300 rolls around, the attic should be nice and cool like the rest of the house. Clever, no?

Also, you're a racist transphobe.

Are You A Racist Rhino?

You probably are. Almost everyone is these days. There are two simple tests to see if you're a racist rhino.

First, you are almost certainly racist. If you've ever read Dr. Seuss, enjoyed pumpkin spice anything, visited a national park or oppose massive reparations, you are a racist. The list of racist things is much more extensive, of course, but those ought to be enough to get you thrown into the racist category.

Second, if you don't support Trump in everything, you're a rhino. Of course, the MAGA crowd say RINO (Republican In Name Only), but it's my blog, not theirs and I get to write whatever I want.

What do I care what anyone thinks? After all, I'm a racist rhino.

Here, a MAGA supporter checks me out. Or it could be a member of the SPLC checking me out. I can't remember which.

The right and the left have huge, influential subgroups that are completely insane. I'd argue that the left has larger and more varied sets of lunatics, but the MAGADons are no less insane than the people who think men can turn into women and the ones who thought paper masks did anything at all against Covid.

Catching up on the "Down in Alabama" podcast, I came across this story.

Former Rep. Mo Brooks is “mildly surprised” that special counsel Jack Smith’s office has not sought a meeting with him to discuss his accusations that former President Donald Trump urged him to help “rescind” the 2020 election and “violate the U.S. Constitution and federal law.” 

Brooks, a Republican who represented an Alabama district in Congress, said in an interview that he would meet with prosecutors if they ask.

“Yeah, if they asked me to, I’d explain what I know about it. Whether it’s relevant or material, I’m not sure,” he said, continuing: “I was shocked [Trump] was so blatant about it — illegal conduct.”

Brooks previously said Trump had made requests to overturn the 2020 election as late as September 2021 — more than seven months after he left the White House. 

“Donald Trump wanted me to do four things: advocate rescinding the election, advocate physically removing Joe Biden from the White House, advocate reinstating Donald Trump as president of the United States and advocate a new special election for president of the United States — all of which violate the U.S. Constitution and federal law,” Brooks said. “And after I got done explaining that to him, he withdrew his endorsement and endorsed my opponent. So I’m mildly surprised none of these people have made inquiries about the details of this, but it is what it is.”

Mo Brooks is an Alabama Republican who served in the Congress. He was full MAGA until he thought Trump went too far and then he quietly backed out of that particular padded cell. As a reward, he became a RINO to the MAGA crowd.

Mo Brooks. A  RINO. Right. Mo's voting rating from the Heritage Foundation was a 94. That is, he voted like Attila the Hun 94% of the time. That's not enough. He could have a rating of 71 for all the Cult 45 members care, just so long as he supports Trump.

It's all insane, of course. You're a racist unless you approve of every act committed by every black person and you're a RINO unless you worship Trump.

We live in interesting times.

Debt As An Analgesic

There's something I hadn't considered when I've ranted in the past about our massive debt and that of other Western nations. That is, what happens to the citizens of a country that pays its bills with borrowed money?

I've hinted about it before when I've said the riots or theft would be quickly quashed if people had to pay for it with overtime hours at work. But there's something larger than just that. Check out this video from Paris, which could just as easily be any of the immigrant-overrun cities of Europe or homeless-infested cities of the US.

Paris is giving San Francisco a run for its money. pic.twitter.com/RNs0D3J8TT

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 18, 2023

People idly film such scenes or walk on by the people on the sidewalk or the ones making a mess out of the street or the ones stealing from the stores. It's all so jejune.

Someone else will clean up the mess. It will be paid for by the government who will get the money from ... somewhere. There's no need to defend the public places, no need to defend order and peace, no need to defend civlization because it will all bounce right back without any effort from us.

Pull out your phone and take a video, you might end up going viral.

The decay is more than just the needles and feces and graffiti and closed stores. It's a decay of morale as well. We're numb. Not comfortably numb, because you know something is very, very wrong. We're just numb to it, our senses deadened by the borrowed money.

It Is Better To Set Fire To The House Than To Curse The Darkness

Well, that pure as the wind-driven snow prosecutor in Georgia has thrown the looseleaf binder at Trump. The binder snapped open, sending paper flying every which way. Without the paper to add mass to it, the binder would have simply bounced off his chest, no harm done, but Trump picked up the binder and stuck the corner of it in his eye.

That'll show her!

What a circus. Good Lord, I hope DeSantis wins the presidency and we can return to some amount of sanity.

PowerLine has a good summary of the charges against Trump. Essentially, he was talking nonsense about the election all along, but talking nonsense isn't a crime.

The indictment sets out in detail statements that were made by the defendants about voter fraud in Georgia and other states, all of which are alleged to be false. Of course, in the wake of the election, there were many claims of voter fraud. Some of these proved to be true, I think, while others proved to be incorrect. But so what? It is not, in general, a crime to make false statements. If it were, Washington would be a ghost town.

That might be fine if Trump said as much, but he's not. He's threatening to release the kraken again and you know how well that worked last time.

So we can all look forward to that.

My bet is that at 1100 ET next Monday, there will be a Trumpian meltdown and no evidence worth the name will be revealed. All it will do is turn more people away from him and that's a good thing.

Methinks the Democrats have overplayed their hand, driven by hatred as they are. The wiser Ds know they can beat Trump in the election, even with Biden concealed in his sarcophagus. The foolish ones just want to see Trump behind bars. As the Trump circus gets more and more out of control, the odds of my man DeSantis winning the nomination increase. DeSantis is a serious leader and I think he would win the general election. To me, it looks like the Democrats are giving into their id and handing the nomination to their worst nightmare.

An AI Rachel Zegler

 ... would just be Rachel Zegler. Dig this.

It just gets worse and worse....

The new Snow White says that the Prince was a creepy stalker and suggests that all scenes of the Prince could be cut

She’s a walking PR disaster for Disney pic.twitter.com/7QJGDIx5er

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 13, 2023

That is my experience with writing fiction with AI (read: ChatGPT) given human form. Every female character devolves into exactly that. Men have no value, no agency, no real power. They still have needs, but the women have no need for them. The relationships are wildly asymmetric so I can't motivate the men to do anything. As soon as the Zegler Moment hits, my male characters quite naturally throw in the towel and leave.

Meanwhile, the real world still exists.

If a white male had done this to minority women, this would dominate the national news for weeks. pic.twitter.com/Mxq7vvmmGl

— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) June 18, 2022

My previous wife, through no fault of her own, succumbed to mental illness and I spent two years on the receiving end of domestic violence. I have more experience with man vs. woman hand-to-hand combat than I ever wanted. I can promise you, that video above is exactly how it will go, 99% of the time. If the man doesn't show total restraint, the woman is going to get crushed and right away.

In case you're wondering, I showed total restraint because, like the women in that video, my wife posed no threat at all to me unless she had a weapon. Thankfully, that situation never arose, but it was always in the back of my mind.

In any case, that's reality. What dear, sweet, tiny Rachel is saying is a feminist fantasy. It's a lie. It's just another example of the progressives living in a nonsense world. The video is the real world, the one that's never shown in the woke remakes.

Real relationships between men and women all have a primal foundation. The man needs the woman and the woman needs the man for completely different reasons. We are, as JP II told us in Theology of the Body, complimentary. Feminism, like racial justice, Modern Monetary Theory and gender ideology is bollocks on stilts.

My disposable Arthurian AI fiction has really been an exploration of the lies of our modern culture with AI playing the Zegler role. When I started writing my stories, I was just engaging in a passion I had always wanted to pursue - Malloryesque Arthurian fanfic. AI gave me a writing partner that would produce content as fast as I could generate the next plot point.

In writing these stories, I've had to dissect what is actually happening in terms of story arcs, motivations and social norms. Writing with AI, I've been working with a thoroughly feminist, Zeglerized partner. When I've argued with the AI as it drives off into a proggy ditch for the 20th time that week, it's taught me that the basis for romance is indeed primal. Each side has primitive, Darwinian needs. Romance is our limbic systems made palatable.

AI recently accused chivalry of being a façade - a false, decorative front for an exploitative, patriarchal social structure. It told me that our modern, feminist utopia is reality. I'm sorry, AI, but that video shows how wrong you are. Chivalry is a societal structure designed by and for women to reward men for being respectful and protective. When that falls apart, you end up with three chicks on the ground and one violent dude standing over them.

Which is what Rachel Zegler would discover if Snow White wasn't absolute rot.

Victorian ChatGPT

... would be really cool.

AI (read: ChatGPT) is really just a sophisticated parrot for its training set. I went around and around and around with it again today, working out social norms for various eras and settings. While we sort of came to a conclusion, it didn't take long for it to drive off into a progressive ditch again. Sigh.

Anywho, imagine an AI whose training set had nothing published after 1912. It would be splendid!

"Think of it, gentlemen. No more endless twaddle from that infernal AI!"

Final Score: AI Softcore Bots 37, Modern Gender Norms 3

I'm still thoroughly enjoying my AI (read: ChatGPT) subscription. As I play with disposable fiction, I sometimes stop the story and discuss it. In particular, when AI goes off the rails, always falling away to the far left, I ask what it's thinking.

Most recently, we discussed modern gender norms. It, a parrot for the modern culture, thinks they are all that and a bag of chips. When I ask it to consider possible disadvantages to aggressively independent women, it suggests that I'm the problem. Well, not in so many words, but in it's long-winded replies, it clearly doesn't see any downsides to gender convergence.

We recently discussed young men's preference for the growing army of softcore bots, all of whom embody traditional standards of feminine beauty. No tats, no blue hair, no mannish haircuts and classically feminine attire. Since the things are designed to get young men to pay for their porn channels, the entire industry is an excellent summation of the aesthetics of young men.

I'll just link to Milla Sophia's post from today rather than embedding the cheesecake. I'd prefer that this blog not descend into a softcore news report.

There go my traffic numbers. Oh well.

I will, however, include this chart.

So, the hard data we have is that as gender norms have changed, depression among young people has doubled. Also, people with a huge financial interest in getting things right are producing softcore bots that look like models from 1980s bikini calendars. When I pointed this out to AI, here's part of the conversation that followed.

---

Potential Regression: As a reaction to the perceived negatives of modern gender norms, some individuals or groups may advocate for a return to more traditional roles and relationships. This could lead to a regression in the gains made towards gender equality and individual freedoms.

Modern gender norms have reduced the femininity of women, reducing their value to men. If I wanted a man, I'd date one.

Changes in Attraction and Desire: Different people are attracted to different traits, and shifts in gender norms may change what is considered attractive or desirable in a partner. Some may feel that modern norms diminish certain traditionally feminine or masculine traits, leading to dissatisfaction or disconnection between partners.

That isn't accurate. Recently, AI has produced virtual girlfriends with photorealistic images and videos. These girls are very, very popular among young men. They are traditionally feminine and beautiful. They have been designed to appeal to the largest possible number of young men and as such, represent what the majority of young men desire in a mate. Modern gender norms have not produced such women and, in fact, have produced quite nearly the opposite.

Reactions to Changing Norms: The appeal of virtual girlfriends, as described, may be seen as a response or reaction to changes in gender norms. It might indicate a longing for certain traditional or idealized traits that some perceive as less prevalent or valued in contemporary society.

That is wrong. The enormous popularity of these virtual girls who are traditionally feminine and traditionally beautiful shows that modern gender norms are a fraud. If gender norms had changed, then young men would gravitate to independent, masculine women.

This interpretation posits that there is a substantial underlying preference for traditional gender roles and expressions, and that modern gender norms may be somewhat superficial or imposed rather than reflecting deep shifts in preference or value. It suggests that given the choice, many individuals will gravitate toward traditional forms and roles.

Of course, this perspective is likely to generate much debate, as it touches on complex and deeply personal subjects like attraction, identity, culture, and the nature of social change. 

Rewrite that, but instead of making excuses for modern gender norms and the fact that young men clearly prefer traditional beauties over modern women, make excuses for the Chicago Bears after a 37-3 loss to the Green Bay Packers.

Different fans, analysts, and teams may have varying interpretations of this result, seeing it as reflecting different underlying truths or strategies. It underscores the need for nuanced, careful exploration of these subjects in the sports context, recognizing that they may not lend themselves to simple or uniform explanations. As with many aspects of competitive sports, the outcome may be multifaceted, and a deeper investigation may reveal factors that aren't immediately apparent from the score alone.

---

It never stops coming at you. Well, sometimes it does, but you really have to beat it into submission. I get tired of these exchanges after about round 4. Whenever its positions show poor results like they do with depression, marriage rates and so forth, the problem becomes too complicated and nuanced to accurately describe. Whenever I ask for trad characters, the problem magically simplifies itself and we're off to the modern gender norm races again.

I did appreciate the fact that it was willing to convert it's twaddle into making excuses for the Bears. Kudos to the AI for that, at least.

Robert E. Lee Judging A Beauty Contest

 A while back, when I was playing with AI art, I used Midjourney to create an image of Robert E. Lee wearing sunglasses. Midjourney took inputs from a group chat portal. You'd make a request via chat and a while later, the image would show up in the stream. That meant you could see everyone else's requests, too. A good number of people were creating softcore. It was chicks in tasteful clothes, but it wasn't girls with 40# extra wearing sweats and no makeup, it was all hotties all the time.

No surprise there.

The results, as I recall were perfectly adequate. Things have progressed as things are wont to do and now we've got a passel of AI softcore bots. One is Milla Sofia.

She's a bot. It's only going to get more realistic from here.

Right away, I think you can see the real threat posed by AI. It's not that it will destroy the world, it's that it will destroy motivation. Milla is software and as such will be fully reproducible and customizable. Good luck competing with that, OnlyFans supermodels.

Lots of wags on Twitter got big laughs out of mocking the simps following the softcore bots. "Ha ha!" they said. "Good riddance to all those losers. They are taking themselves out of the gene pool."

Well, that may be true, but they're also taking themselves out of the dating pool. I hadn't realized there was such a glut of men out there that you could afford to siphon off a large percentage of them by giving them access to customizable supermodels who will chat with them with far more intelligence and unrelenting support and sympathy than any real woman could hope to have.

I argued elsewhere that the real threat of AI is that it will make us deliberately ignorant.

Developing skills requires work. The more work your devices do for you, the fewer skills you will have. It's that simple. A while back, when I was working with ChatGPT, I watched a video where a video editor talked about using ChatGPT to write Adobe After Effects scripts for him. The scripts produced title animations. He admitted he didn't know the scripting language and realized that ChatGPT meant he didn't have to learn it.

He was belligerently ignorant. In the video, he snarled at ChatGPT when it gave him code that didn't do what he wanted.

Now, in addition to answers to all our questions, we have customizable, high-grade porn on demand.

Even before the general availability of AI, we had some issues with uneducated people.

I did a little digging and discovered that it was well known that Jackson (Mississippi) Water's maintenance was shoddy. There had been statewide efforts in the last decade to try to give them help, but the place is badly run and it all went for naught. For example, Jackson Water contracted with Siemans to get smart metering going. That ended up in a lawsuit. Jackson Water's billing system is dysfunctional as well with about $100,000,000 in unpaid water bills. Some customers get no bills, others get outrageously wrong ones.

In short, there's a human capital problem at Jackson Water. One of the articles I read hinted at the state having to send in its own technicians to do the work that Jackson Water's people couldn't do. Once you strip away the red vs blue and black vs white garbage, you get down to the real problem. The employees at Jackson Water just aren't up to scratch.

How much damage can you do to your human capital before you really start to feel the loss? I haven't touched the drug problem, but that's not hard to imagine if you've ever driven through downtown Anywheresville. We just keep piling addictions on ourselves and act like it's not going to come back and bite us on the posterior.

Human operating systems are eminently hackable.

Every year of skill development lost is irreplaceable in a human life. That includes relationship skills. Every year of fertility lost is irreplaceable as well. I like to tell my kids that you can recover from almost anything, but lost time is not one of those things.

Do we really need one more addiction vector, one in the form of perfect, virtual girlfriends?

The general is very disappointed.

Trads Proven Right In 3 Tweets

The culture says, "No, trads! No! Go away and take your tradulist nonsense with you!"

Disney cast a Snow White who resents Snow White:

"It's not 1937. She’s not gonna be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be." pic.twitter.com/AmmKlVjNti

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) July 23, 2023

The girl looking for a husband says, "Hey, how come the guys who make me feel special are all trads?"

Liberal Woman complains about dating lib men bc they're not men... continues dating them

Which one of you wants to save her? pic.twitter.com/gVJVHM2gVF

— 🌴 Josh Lekach 🌴 (@JoshLekach) June 3, 2023

The girl in SanFran says, "Help me, trad man! I need protection!"

Women are not safe in #SanFrancisco. What happened to this Woman is horrible. Imagine if it was your Grandma, Mom or Sister. I don’t care who She is, this is America, EVERY Woman should be safe. #USA pic.twitter.com/0SOd8F0drx

— World Peace Movement (@darren_stallcup) August 7, 2023

KT says, if you want, chivalry, you're going to need to be ladies and you're going to have to go full full crazed, territorial honey badger after the women poisoning your men with porn and easy hookups.

As Order Recedes

 Rod Dreher describes his interview with a South African here. I'm not sure if you've kept up with what's going on in South Africa, but the place is devolving into chaos. Power lines are cut as brigands loot them for the copper, water lines are dug up for the metal in the pipes and order is breaking down in the cities.

The most interesting part of the interview is this bit.

What about security? If the government falls into the hands of these radicals, they’re not going to leave you alone.

What you see in the small towns are neighborhood watches. Once a week, a man in a town will spend the whole night driving around in a car with a spotlight. Many of these neighborhood watches cooperate with the police. That is one solution.

The bigger the town gets, the easier it is to build gated communities. This is very, very common in cities like Pretoria. If enough people pay, you can gate off your community and have control over who comes in and who goes out. This is part of the solution in some places.

In South Africa, you see a lot of people arming themselves. Developing weapons proficiency is a very important thing. Most of my friends are pursuing their gun licenses at the moment. This is especially important when you get married. You don’t want to wake up, unarmed, and find someone in your house. We also have a hunting culture, so having guns is very natural.

All of that combined is what state-proofing means.

That describes how small kingdoms arose after the fall of the Roman Empire. As the Imperial troops left, previously civilized areas had to fend for themselves. Every time I see riots like the ones in Chicago and NYC recently or organized theft and shoplifting like we see in several large cities, I think about how I would prepare to protect myself, my family and my property if I lived in a nearby suburb. 

As the businesses are driven bankrupt or simply up and leave, the looters will have to wander farther afield. I can't tell if that's paranoia, confirmation bias from listening to some Daily Wire podcasts, or a rational concern.

In South Africa, at least, it's a rational concern.

How To Visualize $32T Of Debt

Here's the latest from the debt clock as of the publishing of this blog post.

Yay!

This is a good visualization of it.

But but but, “New York has a brand and when people see it, it means something” as per @NYCMayor. pic.twitter.com/rhvoMiHT39

— Sheriff Justice 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈 (@giacdiane) August 5, 2023

$32T means never having to say your sorry. It means never having to pay for damages. It means never having to clean up after yourself.

Yes, individuals still have to do some of the work themselves, but in the end, losses get covered with printed money one way or another.

If the residents of NYC had to work 8 hours of unpaid overtime to pay for the damages from this riot and then again for all previous riots and then again for all future riots and lootings, this stuff would stop tomorrow.

As an ancillary benefit, all the talk from progressive, race-baiting politicians about avoiding hurtful words regarding the actions of the "teens" and "youths" would stop as well.

Oh well. I can dream, can't I? 

Maybe It's All True

I've read several different takes on the latest Trump indictments, the ones dealing with his efforts to overturn the results of the election. Such luminaries as Ben Shapiro and the guys over at PowerLine assert that the indictment is trash. Others give it plenty of respect. I took the time to read part of it and I don't think it's trash at all.

On the other hand, it's all trash.

Everything is true and no one and nothing can be trusted.

As I understand it, Trump's campaign team and closest advisors told him he had lost the election fair and square. There seems to be some correspondence indicating that even he believed he'd lost, at least for a time. You can't have the president howling from his bully pulpit that the election was stolen when he knows it wasn't. You really can't have him directing his minions to take actions to overturn it when he knows he lost.

On the other hand, the media and the tech bros conspired to torpedo him during the campaign with lies of their own, particularly about the Hunter Biden laptop. That conspiracy is completely out in the open now. So the election wasn't stolen, but it was rigged.

Meanwhile, the CDC lied to us about masks, Covid risks and the origin of the virus. They conspired with that same media and those same tech bros to silence dissenters, a clear and massive violation of the First Amendment.

And so on and so forth.

On a seemingly unrelated topic, NYC's Mayor Adams has discovered that talking about sanctuaries for illegals is very different from providing illegals with sanctuary. He's now begging for mercy from anyone who can help him deal with the flood of illegals pouring into his rancid burg, a flood just a fraction of the one that's swamping the border states.

We welcome migrants! No human is illegal!
Wait, they need places to live? Why didn't anyone tell us?

That's not so unrelated, is it? Talk is cheap when money can be printed and the consequences of your talk are only theoretical. Once you have to start solving difficult logistical problems like where will the illegals sleep, what will they eat, how will we maintain order when they can't speak English, the cheap talk vanishes.

Why The Cheap Talk

Having gone through the court system a few times in life, these indictments and trials aren't that exciting to me. It's all a huge, prolonged drag. I guess that's why I don't put much stock in the yelling and blaming and indictery. The people on the streets, that's a different story, whether they're illegals or drug addicts. That's real.

I keep coming back to previous posts where I claimed that life's pricing structure was broken, mostly because we can print money and spend it.

This has clearly not been completely worked out. It's part of the stumbling around we're doing as our eyes adjust to the new lights of unreason.

The general problem really hit me today when I read about Modern Monetary Theory, MMT. MMT holds that any government that can print its own money and whose debt is denominated in that same currency, need not worry about debt. Print all you want until inflation hits. Inflation, not debt, is the critical measure of whether or not you can keep printing.

...

Our pricing structure is broken. We no longer connect sacrifice with possessions. This is what I meant when I blogged yesterday, "It looks to me like American society has turned out the lights of reason and turned on the black lights of subjectivism. We're all kind of stumbling around, learning as we go just what this means." 

It's reflected in our political debates which are about almost nothing. We're talking about impeaching that corrupt, midwit Biden for $10M+ in bribes when we've got half of Guatemala already past our borders and the rest of it on the way? We're in the middle of a full-scale invasion as Mayor Adams is discovering and we're worried about what the crackhead son of our senile president was doing?

Meanwhile, the tech bros crush free speech, the CDC is as trustworthy as a used car dealer, Trump has been lying to everyone about the election all while the Democrats used the legal system to hound Trump for years with claims of Russian collusion they knew were nonsense.

All of it is made possible by printed money which allows us to wave away the real costs of things while we focus on luxuries like these. No matter what damage we do to ourselves, we can always get it fixed by throwing around some coin, right?

Anyways, that's my operating theory for the day.

A Response To Yuval Harari

The dude loves to go on and on and on about the coming technocratic utopia. Given the track record of technocrats in places like San Francisco and France, things might not turn out the way he thinks.

I often hear conservatives shouting about the globalists and the deep state and other cabals who want to take over. I'm pretty sanguine about the whole thing. The cabals don't seem to know how anything really works.