Game Over, Man, Game Over

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

All my life, I have heard that the left have a plan, and it’s working perfectly and we’ve already lost.

If you’re my age — born at the very end of 62 — or older, you’ve probably heard the same from serious people, usually stroking their beards (even the women.) “It’s over. Communism will inevitably win. They have a plan. It’s lost. All we can do is delay.”

Often it goes back to how leftist the young are, and how “if you give me a child” etc. (Which btw is true in the small things (I still apologize to bread when I drop it) but not so much in the big ones, or no one would abjure the faith of their youth.) And sometimes to 1984 or other Ploddenapocaliptishmarxencrap (Probably a German word, or it should be.)

Yeah. Okay, the commies got a plan. That is sort of their one and only given strength. They plan, they organize, they work towards the world’s stupidest things, but they do it TOGETHER. (Eh, mostly.)

But to believe it’s working you’d have to forget everything from the collapse of the Soviet Union (THEY surely try to forget it) to the repeated smacks on the nose they have got in America, to the fact many of you don’t seem to know that the only reason that the Soviet Union survived that long was because we FED THEM. (Seriously. We should give all those who lost relatives to the Soviet Union and its depredations, including the poor bastards in Africa destroyed by Russia’s Cuban mercenaries a chance to disinter FDR’s corpse and kick it around. It’s no more than a very mild form of justice.)

Communism is in fact an idea so stupid that only intellectuals can believe it and try to apply it. Fortunately for them they do attract most intellectuals with the siren song of “because you’re smarter than other people, you see this.”

I was fortunate, I guess, to have grown up in a religion that has a long list of approved prophecies going back centuries, some of which range from the trivial tot he “OMG, that’s not even possible.”

But for every one of these prophecies, I can find a site on the internet where brilliant minds “prove” it’s already working out. “When they said the sky would turn purple with yellow polka dots, they actually meant my mom would wear a dress that color and stand on the fence. It’s happening, man. It’s happening.” And because I was raised and indoctrinated in that system I read those sites and believe it. For about ten seconds.

There is this kind of confirmation in the best written (and it’s brilliant fiction, btw) Ploddenapocaliptishmarxencrap. Yeah, 1984 is great fiction, though I’ll note I haven’t re-read it since I was 14. But I remember most of it, which tells you it was good. Just not fun.

However Orwell was a believer, even if a heretic. As an adult, read the damn thing and tell me it’s in the least likely.

Not only would it fall apart within years — if not weeks — because no one can manage a large economy well enough for it to survive that long (yeah, China. Sure buddy. If you think China is working out that well, you haven’t looked closely), but it could never extend to the whole world, or everyone would starve and die out.

The other thing is that it’s 1940s tech extended indefinitely. This might work — eh, sort of — under really tightly controlled regimes, but sooner or letter a clever monkey (ape, d*amn it. We’re apes) throws a wrench in. The internet is a big wrench, and their attempts to put the genie back in the bottle have been markedly unsuccessful. But it doesn’t take the internet. The Soviet Union was brought down by typewriters and copiers. At twelve I built a radio from old parts in the attic (well, you see, I wanted a radio. So dad put down Three Men In A Boat which he was re-reading and told me “So, get one. I have no objection.” (This is actually an accurate representation of that moment. Yes. I know. Look, I thought Have Spacesuit was not fiction, let alone science fiction. For all I knew any kid in America could go to the moon.).) It got BBC transmissions (better than FM, d*mn it.) Leaving aside a regime so nuts they thought that the BBC was “right wing” (Bernie? Is that you?) I did it at 12, broke, and well…. with not much knowledge. Because monkeys (apes, ook) will tinker.

Take a deep breath. I have in the backburner a project called “Loose a Heinlein character in 1984 stand back and grin.” But the truth is you don’t need a Heinlein character (I could never build a boat. I could learn to butcher my food I just never have.) You need a human. Just a human.

Communism is a toddler, trying to get humans to behave like building blocks, and screaming and yelling and breaking things when humans won’t. By definition it can’t win.

This should be particularly obvious when their strength is “mass everything” and we’re headed towards “individualized everything.”

They can hurt us. They can’t win.

In memory of our martyred — but not defeated — brothers in freedom in Hong Kong, all you have to do is be like water.

Be like water, my friends. Be like water.

In the end we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

296 thoughts on “Game Over, Man, Game Over”

      1. Okay, per the quote, you need to be able to conn a ship, walls were what he specified building.

        Conning a ship is a naval way of saying driving the ship (by telling the helmsman where to go).

        Not that he’d mind y’all building boats.

    2. Look up stitch and glue boatbuilding. Plywood, fiberglass tape and epoxy. Thought about it but decided against it. (It would take up too much shop space, and we already have a seriously unused jonboat.)

    3. This is in part a collective of strong minds, talents etc. Thereby a mixed bag of skills, ideas and much else. Between us I am certain that all the major job descriptions of a human will be found. I spent 20 years building boats. All sizes from 8 ft to 100 and everything in between, sail and power and personal power. Very doable. Funny thing about building boats and being good at it. It requires at the level I was sooo many different skills. Carpentry for sure, but mechanics, plumbing, electrical, rigging, design etc. Kind of a microcosm of the human skill set. And also must float, not like a house!
      Surpassing all of those is the ability to actually THINK. I am certain that if the famous IBM sign of just THINK was put up in a workplace in America now it would surely ‘trigger’ many, to the amusement and disdain of some.

      Been teaching the kids how to think and also what is the value of doing it yourself. We win they lose for sure, though I fear the process of them losing will prove to be very painful for us as well as them

      2. I believe that the pain we are now experiencing which will only get worse for at least the next year and change has intentionally been inflicted upon us for having the temerity to challenge what those currently in charge consider to be the rightful flow of history.
        Hillary should have won and entered the country into Obama’s third and possibly fourth terms of office. Trump was an aberration, a crude bully with no proper regard for our inevitable migration into just another glorious progressive socialist nation, and eventually a world ruled by benevolent communist leaders.
        This is the only explanation for why every one of old Joe’s actions has been intended to erase every positive thing Trump accomplished. Country if full of deplorables who do not have a proper respect for their betters and so must be punished and whipped into obedience.
        Best case the midterm elections flip both houses of congress and the rest of Joe’s current term he’s a do nothing place holder. Not holding my breath. Think 2020 voter fraud was bad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.
        That happens and we have but one box left. Fortunately (for some values of that word) this is America and that box is very well filled with all sorts of goodies and will be used by a host of citizens well experienced in their use.

      3. Ha! My Dad worked for IBM during it’s greatest time as a company (1970s) – and later, of course. He would bring home the pencils (it was encouraged by the company) with “Commitment to Excellence” imprinted on them and make my brothers and I do our homework with them. THINK mag was at our house all the time. I believe the moniker has been changed to “FEEL”. Sad times indeed.

      4. “I am certain that if the famous IBM sign of just THINK was put up in a workplace in America now it would surely ‘trigger’ many…”

        It certainly would, especially in academia. I went into higher-ed (as a returning student of nontraditional age, then as staff) 20-something years ago because I loved the whole thinking thing. Now it’s all “don’t you dare.”

        Two years ago, I escaped that stultification for a tech company whose three-word mantra could be boiled down to just THINK. I get paid much better — merit raises actually exist, and there are promotions! — and I’m quite frequently both the the dumbest person in the room and the only expert in my area (lemme tell you, that’ll make you think, all caps), and the company has zero patience for “woke” shenanigans. Pretty much a dream job, really.

        What a difference that shared mindset makes!

    4. I can’t quite agree with Heinlein’s famous quote, at least the part where he discourages specialization. In my field (software development) you have to specialize or you’ll never keep your skills at the level they need to be. Sure, I can do some basic mechanical stuff too, and I’ve picked up a smattering of other skills like rope-tying (need to study more on that), so I’m not insect-level specialized. But most of the time I spend learning things is spent learning software development skills. I’ve spent 20 years in this profession so far, and I’m starting to get pretty good at it. If I hadn’t specialized in it, there’s no way I’d have gotten to this point.

      1. You have specialized knowledge. That is a good thing! I don’t believe Heinlein would disagree with that. Becoming a specialized human being is a far different thing than having specialized knowledge, I think. It’s a humans-as-widgets sort of thing that the progressive is ever enamored of, and Miss Sarah and the rest of us lot are staunchly opposed to. In my life I’ve gained a little specialized knowledge, but many skills that can be broadly applied.

        It is a different approach to life and suits me well enough. I don’t demand that everyone apply themselves to it, though. I may be able to do enough construction, plumbing, and electrical to build a house, have enough computer and technical knowledge to build and maintain the infrastructure thereof for homes and small businesses, have a bit of logistics knack and be able to cook on anything from scoured river rock to a three star kitchen- but I’ve no special knowledge of specific medicine, law, coding (other than html and C languages), or the like. And doctors, lawyers, and coders are not solely defined by their chosen tasks.

        If needs must, I don’t doubt you could bang together a decent set of shelves despite not being a carpenter, or maintain a car by following the directions on a youtube video. If pressed, you could probably lead a team in an emergency related to your skills or interests, or follow if the situation dictated. I’d bet you could keep your head well enough to make that decision on the spot, too. Life throws all sorts of challenges to us every day, and they aren’t even 50% related to our specific jobs when you look at them all. Social interactions are another spot of complication, and there aren’t any flowcharts or decision trees complex enough to manage *all* of them (though rote response can get you through more than you’d think!).

        Heinlein was an aeronautical engineer in addition to his writing career- specialized skills were involved there, I don’t doubt in the least. It might be you are less in disagreement than you think, good sir.

          1. I don’t know why you suppose that. They did an entire album inspired by one of Ayn Rand’s novels; they were clearly aware of individualist thought.

            1. I think Almuric means the irony escapes the tree-huggers, not Rush.

              Now there’s no more Oak oppression
              ‘Cause they passed a noble Law
              And the trees are all kept equal
              By Hatchet, Axe, and Saw…

              Similarly, the Leftroids always find it much easier to knock down the exceptional than to raise up the underachievers.

              1. Yet again. They’re mistaking “Harrison Bergeron” as a how-to rather than a warning. (Looks towards Salem, OR and curses.)

  3. Orwell got the Inner Party right — cynical power mongers so obsessed with their vision they can justify any barbarity. Orwell got the Outer Party right — self-absorbed twits blindly following what the Inner Party says in the hopes that one day they too can join those ranks.

    What he didn’t understand were the Proles. As depicted in 1984, they were nothing but stupid drunks reproducing themselves, and I don’t think that was just for literary effect. To intellectuals like him, they were irrelevant; the interesting events were between the elites fighting to keep their position and the wannabe elites like himself fighting to usurp them. (He describes as much in the book within the book.) Proles being a mass of brain-dead appetites was a self-evident axiom for upper-middle class British twits like him. The notion that they could have formed any effective resistance to Big Brother was probably about as ludicrous to him as the idea that the British populace could vote for Brexit for the current elites — and the shock for both comes out of the same place. Those mouths on legs only care about being fed and housed and drunk; if they have that, why should they complain?!

    1. > Proles

      [looks at increasing numbers of local people walking about with face diapers even though the order ran out six months ago]

      Hm. We seem to have no shortage of proles in 2021 America.

        1. And unfortunately I’m stuck in an area where “It’s just being courteous to (or respectful of) others” is considered an acceptable reason to keep that part of the theater going. The jab is a hard line people won’t cross thankfully but it is very, very demoralizing to see even in a strongly red part of the state. And of course my own escape preparations keep getting delayed for extra fun in that area…

        2. It’s mandated in the state, but I die a little inside when I see a preschooler wearing a mask.

          The official number is that 76% of the residents have taken the not-Vax. I suspect the numbers are wildly inflated, or it’s only the blue areas.

        3. A few weeks ago we took the kids to the circus, it skipped a year but it’s back.

          The area had a couple thousand people, no extra spacing and almost nobody was wearing a mask. The only people wearing them were a few elderly and a couple of Asians, who have a bit more experience and social conditioning w.r.t. wearing them (i.e. it’s normal for them).

          But this was in St Charles County, which is relatively sane. Just acorss the Missouri is St Louis County, which is… not so sane. It varies.

      2. Extremely rare here in AZ, and most of them are transplants from the Democrat plantations…

      3. I just took a trip to Utah. In the places I saw, it was very mixed. Interestingly, since the predominant church has encouraged vaccination and facemasking, you see the facemasks most among the religiously observant, but even there, it’s by no means universal.

        1. Yes, but our church leadership, while they may encourage it, aren’t going to mandate it (likely on the theory of “don’t give any orders you know won’t be followed”. We’re very big on free will, or try to be. Also, President Nelson is a former medical doctor/surgeon, and may be letting his previous profession color his encouragement.

          1. There are at least three other apostles who also had medical or health care backgrounds in their professional lives, so President Nelson isn’t the only source for this encouragement. I also notice that in most places, church meetings have mostly returned to normal, and most of the temples have at least partly reopened. The pandemic isn’t forever, although I don’t doubt that there are politicians and bureaucrats who would like it to be.

            1. Yeah, even down in insane Colorado (the Fort Collins temple is the nearest one to me, at least until they get the Casper temple built) the temples appear to be back to near-normal operations. I’m hoping to get down there sometime in the near future…

      4. Almost none here, although a few folks I know with bad allergies have taken to using them when they are working outdoors or going to crowded. (You don’t sneeze on people when your hands are full, if you’re wearing a mask, an associated told me. Point.)

      5. It is possible for people to think a fear is moronic, and still not wish to a) hurt the fearful, b) deal with that irrational nonsense.

        1. I’ve actually gotten myself in some trouble with my own emotions by wishing to deal with the irrational nonsense by putting the worst con-men to death.

        2. About two weeks before the Covidiocy hit, I took some time to prepare some boxes of approximately two weeks worth of food — news was beginning to percolate from China about the virus, and I was following through on something I believed I should have done years ago (based on my religious teachings) — and I thought it would be prudent to be prepared to stay in my home for two weeks due to quarantine or some other reason.

          Shortly after that, there was a run on toilet paper, and then a run on canned goods, and other things — my wife and I would go to the store and be astounded at how everything was in flux — and I learned an important lesson: at that point, I had decided that the Wuhan virus wasn’t as scary as everyone else was making it out to be, but it didn’t matter what I thought, because if everyone else panics, I can still be up a creek without a paddle if I’m not prepared.

    2. I suspect that’s part of the reason why Huxley made his proles less intelligent (due to fetal tampering on a grand scale), and drugged them.

      1. Junior I think you might be mixing Huxley’s “Brave New World” where the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons had been intentionally modified before being bottled in the artificial wombs. Soma (and perhaps some other drugs?) were used HEAVILY. Orwell’s proles are just good old poor folk fed “Victory Gin” in gallon (pardon me Litre) quantities and given Circuses (betting, games etc) sufficient to keep them mostly inactive. No obvious drugs, although precisely what might have been available in the black market (which the party seems to have had a clue about and helped along in some cases) is not clear. Opiods would not surprise me India and its environs (Afghanistan, Burma/Mynmar, Pakistan etc) are part of where the incessant warfare between the 3 super states goes back and forth, so illicit happenings there would be unsurprising.

        1. ?

          I mentioned I was referring to Huxley’s lower classes, and provided the same description (more or less) as you did. I didn’t refer to them by the classes that the book uses. But they still fill the same general role.

          1. Didn’t see the Huxley reference. I clearly 🙂 need to read better. And yes they’re a bred to purpose set of proles. Part of 1984’s Oceania’s weakness is that you’d have to hammer the proles from time to time to thin out the odds/aggressive ones. The constant wars serve as a release valve to some degree, but as our hostess points out command economies are unsustainable. Although Oceania had only been in existence about 40 years or so, so had 20-30 years left on the standard command economy timeline, though it does sound like things were pretty bad.

              1. I think Orwell viewed the constant border wars as a way to deal with aggressive proles. One thing I would suspect was that the upper party members of all three powers were in communication. Likely they swapped troublesome regions at their borders or had brief spats with the other side just to keep their own proles in line.

    3. I’ve always thought it a point worth noting, that the proles were mostly left alone.
      The inner Party oppressed the Outer party. Intellectuals were targeted, dissidents and the moderately ambitious were broken, but the proles got beer (even if it were not as good as it used to be) and entertainment (even if it was derivative and recycled).
      Beneath the smug superiority, there’s both incomprehension and wariness.

      Any Prince knows to be careful of peasant revolts. Minor nobility and merchants are one thing. The great unwashed, another.

    4. No, that’s hardly fair to Orwell – he was much more clear-sighted on both the poor and his own class of intellectuals than … well, almost any other English intellectual of his time. Look at his non-fiction works, especially his essays, to learn what he actually thought.

      The thing about 1984 is, all the information Winston (and therefore us) has about the state of the world comes from the Inner Party – and the one thing we know about the Inner Party is that it has no respect whatsoever for the truth. The whole plot of the book is O’Brien gaslighting Winston until he finally breaks, and we’ve no reason to believe anything O’Brien says … which is everything outside Winston’s direct experience. For all we can tell the England in the book is like the real North Korea, an isolated state just powerful enough to make sure none of its subjects knows anything of foreigners, and all the reports of wars in far-off lands between totalitarian empires are pure fiction.

      The real point of the book is the close relation between oppression and systematic falsehood; and for that purpose the sheer impossibility of the world of 1984 as described (by characters in the book) may even be intentional on Orwell’s part. Winston believes it, because he’s been lied to his whole life, but the reader isn’t supposed to.

    5. He fell for the party line that the Communists were the ones suffering in the USSR, because all they KNEW about was the show trials.

    6. “What he didn’t understand were the Proles”
      Orwell went to Eton. Read Road to Wigan Pier, he looks at working class Englishmen they way an anthropologist looks at New Guinea Cannibals, fascinated but appalled.
      “Those mouths on legs only care about being fed and housed and drunk; if they have that, why should they complain?!”
      In-Universe The Party was smart enough to leave the proles mostly alone. Our current elites aren’t even bright enough to do that.

      1. He recounts the story of the time he wanted information and so went to the City Hall. His working class friends were quite certain that you couldn’t get information that way, but he was middle class by birth so he was used to that working.

        (They were both right: the uncooperative clerk gave him some of the information.)

        That is, there was some reason for him to believe that the proles might not be a problem owing to lack of initiative.

  4. BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE CHIPS THEY ARE GOING TO INJECT INTO US AND THEN ACTIVATE WITH 5G TO TURN US INTO THE ANTICHRIST’S ZOMBIE ARMY????

    1. Dude! Once you get The Chip(tm) you can be logged into FaceBook *all the time*! Besides, the 5G smartphone users are 90% of the way to zombies anyway…

      1. Do they qualify for PUFF? 😀

        If one bites you, do you turn?

        Braaains! BRRAAAINNNSS!!

  5. I have in the backburner a project called “Loose a Heinlein character in 1984 stand back and grin.”

    A Connecticut Yankee in George Orwell’s Court?

      3. Interesting. Although I suspect the back country of the ex US/Canada might have been a serious no go zone in Oceania. Even 200 years let alone 30 -40 would not be enough to tame certain sections of the US and Canada (think Appalachians and WV and that’s a start). The North (and south) American continents would likely have been FAR less hurt by the apparent Atomic exchanges with Eurasia/Eastasia that start the flow down into Oceania and INGSOC.

  6. I have always thought Animal Farm was a better depiction about how things would really go in an attempted commie take over. I read that, 1984, Farenheight 451, Brave New World, Soylent Green, and The Illustrated Man and other Stories for an English class as a sophomore in highschool. I thought that 1984 would be how they would try it but I doubted that the folks would go along with it. But I could really see them grinding the workhorses like Boxer to the ground.

    HOWEVER, I see that the Boxers of this country are not nearly as naive as the powers that be think. We can see what happened to neighboring farms and aren’t as like to be yoked to our deaths.

    Be like water. I love it.

    1. You have to remove books and literature and replace them with only party approved versions. That’s why they went for the education system at the top first. And you can see it with the fake racial nobility stories you see about people like George Floyd, and the silly Trees have rights indigenous people groups mention above.

        1. What they are doing is wrecking the economy so badly that people will be focused entirely on survival; they think that somehow, in the manner of the Cloward-Piven strategy, that they will be able to create their communist paradise. They are wrong of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that their willful destruction is going to cause a lot of harm, suffering and deaths, and it will take a long time to clean up their mess.

        2. And make variations on even the Party Approved(tm) stuff. And sooner or later they will morph into stories of how people actually are, instead of the “perfected” versions the Party wants.

          Apparently a huge part of the classical Greek plays were all the same basic stories, just tweaked to emphasize different things. The whole goal of their competitions was to see who could do a more interesting job retelling their parables for current issues and events.

        3. Which explains the various lockdowns at the height of Covidiocy, banning people meeting face to face. Oregon tried it in May-August 2020, and we had quite the chuckle over it at [redacted’s] 4th of July party. No face to face, less comparing notes. It might have worked in Portlandia, though being sufficiently left was enough to get out of the lockdown.

          OTOH, the People’s Republic of Austrialia, Province of Victoriastan to have continued it and ramped it up a lot. Never visited Oz, and I’m very glad that RCAncestor made it out of England before he was caught stealing from the country squire. The timing is right for him to have been transported…

          On the gripping hand, about half of my family and cousins live in deep blue areas.

      2. This is what happened during the Cultural Revolution. All “culture” was destroyed. Books were burned (except Mao’s personal library; he loved to read, and was well-versed in the Chinese classics). The only songs allowed were songs written by the CCP that praised Mao. The only movies were propaganda films. The only stage productions were the 8 Model Operas written by Madame Mao (who was an actress).

        The Mao biography I’m listening to stated that an Italian sociologist who visited Beijing toward the end of the Cultural Revolution mentioned that he’d never seen a more stressed out society. There was no escape from the constant inundation of propaganda, and virtually everyone the sociologist saw had facial tics because of this.

        1. The modern left, especially in the USA, really is trying to reproduce Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward; thus they are trying to impose Mao’s Cultural Revolution Redux and the “Green Leap Forward”.

        2. Apparently that’s a uniquely Middle Kingdom cultural thing. They’ve had a number of legalist regimes in the past do a “The world starts with Me!!!!” thing and glass over (or try to glass over) everything that came before them.

          And it looks like they’re getting ready to enter another legalist cycle, so would not be surprised if they do it again.

          1. Yes and no to it being unique.

            Other cultures have tried it in the past, to a certain extent. But China was virtually unique in the way that it was isolated from any other great, settled civilizations. There were some smaller civilizations on the periphery, such as Korea or Vietnam. But those cultures were geographically distant from the Chinese centers of power. If some Roman emperor had tried pulling that, then dissidents would have fled to Parthia or Sasanid Persia (depending on when) with their trove of old books and histories. And the people living in that region had the military power to tell the Roman emperors to get stuffed (which they did, repeatedly). But that wasn’t an option in China. That meant that China was uniquely positioned to actually attempt something like that since there was nowhere for dissidents to flee to.

            IMO, there’s one other item worth noting. Legalism was founded by the ancient kingdom of Qin. So when Qin conquered the rest of the Chinese kingdoms of that era, it’s little surprise that Legalism was implemented as the foundation of the new imperial government. However, while Qin Shi Huang – the First Emperor – considered his pronouncements the final say on any matter, and decreed that all of the ancient texts were to be destroyed, he also acknowledged that an unforeseen problem might arise in the future, and the answer might turn out to be found in the ancient texts. So he also established a library in which one copy of each of the ancient texts were preserved, so that rulers in the future would be able to check those texts for solutions.

            That was a level of humility that Mao never entertained.

            Oh, and the First Emperor’s library was burned down by the Chu when they sacked the capitol (which had already been occupied by the allied army led by Liu Bang, the future founder of the Han dynasty…)

            1. That was a level of humility that Mao never entertained.

              That is a level of humility that almost no politician or warlord throughout history ever entertained.

              1. Cute, but no. Most rulers throughout history have not had Qin Shi Huang’s level of sheer arrogance.

              1. Not surprising. When Deng (who joined the upper ranks of the CCP just before the Cultural Revolution, and iirc was purged and subsequently rehabilitated no less than *three* times before Mao’s death) ran the country, he put new laws and safeguards in place that basically amounted to trying to limit the amount of damage a long-lasting leader could cause to the country they ruled. Xi has undone these changes. Mao had “Mao thought”. Xi has “Xi thought”. The similarities are clear.

                The question, of course, is how far and in what direction Xi plans to go. Mao’s moves were invariably disastrous for the country. So I don’t expect Xi to follow Mao’s specific policies exactly. But he does appear to be getting at least some inspiration from the former leader.

                1. ugh, If Xi’s cosplaying Mao and Putin’s idolizing Stalin; does that mean Biden wants to be FDR redux?

            3. And the Han dynasty was Confucian, and followed the Legalist Qin.

              Big part of the Han story of Han legitimacy was playing up the cruelty and insanity of the Qin, to include the criminal code and punishments.

              But, archeologists have found magistrate tombs of both Qin and early Han, and the Han kept the Qin code for a while.

              So, it wasn’t only the Legalists, the Confucian regimes often also did it some.

              The Mongols definitely did not understand themselves as being Legalists, but the dynasty the put in, the Yuan (meaning Original), tried to pull the year zero stuff off.

              1. It’s hard to look at Chinese history and not think that in fact ALL dynasties were Legalist, just some of them covered it up with a Confucian or Taoist or Buddhist or Communist gloss.

                1. Legalism was separate and distinct from the other philosophies. But since Legalism, Confucianism, and Taoism, are all products of early Chinese philosophical thought, you would also expect to see some things in common.

                  And it would be a mistake to think that a strong emperor couldn’t act in defiance of whichever philosophy he claimed to subscribe to, if he felt it appropriate to do so

                  1. All three started with the basic assumption that there was something the government do that WOULD make people behave themselves. There was absolutely no conception of how perverse people can be.

          2. And each time they do, that land/nation enters a dark age that can’t be climbed out of until the falsehoods are disbursed and the truth relearned. The problem with dark ages is we go backwards. At least with Ragnarok everything is destroyed allowing you to start from zero, instead of negative 10.

        4. I’ve noticed from old vids that the Enthusiastic Crowds Praising Mao wore the most uniform Please Don’t Eat Me expressions…

  7. I’m wondering how much of that hypersonic warhead the Chinese demonstrated recently will work… if at all.

          1. Heck, I recall the USA had an aircraft that was considered so crap that eventually it was claimed the ONLY good to come of it was the USSR spent effort copying it. And a USSR copy… well…

              1. I think the big story with the reported hypersonic missile system by the CCP is the reaction of the Team HarrisBiden White House that they “welcome the stiff competition: as if the development by our adversaries of weapons that can kill us is a good thing. In what world does anyone welcome others developing weapons delivery systems that can potentially kill large numbers of Americans.

              2. I tried buying a fog machine from Home Depot for a photoshoot and the holiday, got it home it warmed up like it should, but the pump which pushes the fog juice onto the heater coil wouldn’t run.

                I got an exchange from Home Depot, this one even had a quality control sticker on it yet it had the exact same issue, heater coil warmed up but the pump was dead. I got a refund the second time.

                Yep, the machines were made in China.

            2. Chinese quality control: Somebody used the product, and didn’t die. It’s safe!

              Was ‘quality cpntrol’ deliberate, or just a typo? It’s a hoot, either way.

    2. Reminds me…

      The Mao biography I’m listening to mentioned that China tested a missile with a nuclear warhead mounted. EVERYONE involved thought they were going to die when something went wrong with the missile. It would blow up on launch. It would land miles off course. Etc… The general supervising the target site went so far as to move his HQ to a mountaintop in the hope that if the missile went off course, he’d have enough time to scramble down the far slope.

      But, apparently, that missile flew successfully, and landed roughly where it was supposed to (taking into account that this was not a precision weapon).

      Subsequent tests with no nuclear warhead, on the other hand, apparently we’re *all* failures.

    3. Hypersonic is a vehicle term, warhead is payload. Okay, the warhead actually has to work after the heating and acceleration of the vehicle, but…

      Basically, aerospace engineering has reached the point where they think they can build practical vehicles that can achieve hypersonic speeds and are not reentry vehicles. (IIRC, shuttle re entry is Mach 25.) Basically, NASA has flown some test vehicles, so Russia and China are claiming to have the capability. Maybe so, but if the engineering was easy, /we/ would have more hypersonic vehicles.

      Everything in aerospace requires testing, and sometimes wind tunnels and models are good enough. Hypersonic wind tunnels are a bit hard to do. Most of them are only at that speed for short periods of time, unlike lower speed wind tunnels which can be steady. This is important, because you have to test vehicle shapes at different attitudes and control configurations before you know how they handle, and can design usefully reliably safe controls.

      Pushing into a new region of aerodynamic behavior is always a little challenging from a vehicle design perspective. See the jet fighters of the early Cold War, which had issues due to the newness of the supersonic region.

      Anyway, the question is their delivery vehicles versus our defenses, and vice versa. The systems they can afford to field are probably crap, otherwise working on defense probably would not bother them so much.

      Russia’s announcement of a Hypersonic glide vehicle sounded like a bluff to me, ‘we can defeat your defenses, so it is pointless to do more work on them.’

      I’m skeptical of our adversaries’ current hypersonic capabilities, but we should probably be working on defenses to hypersonic threats. That way, even if they do figure it out, and do find the money to build them, and manage to field a good system, we can defeat it.

      On the other hand, their influence on the Democratic Party may have resulted in the Democrats making our missile defense programs FUBAR.

      And, with the Democrats frauding their way in, we can no longer write off a few leaks as ‘Big City inhabitants probably had it coming to them, because of voting Democrat’.

      1. Somewhere in this morning’s reading, (Schlichter’s column, perhaps) I saw that hypersonic missles were under development under POTUS-Trump, but were cancelled as soon as FICUS got control. I guess it had the wrong pronouns.

        1. No, this stuff is pretty clearly intended to hurt the capabilities our adversaries are most worried about us having.

          The fraudsters, election, covid, BLM and everything else Democrat, are also traitors.

          Trump’s pushing of hypersonic and space capabilities may well have been /The/ motivation. Okay, there are a whole bunch of plausible motivations. And, disclosure, my saltiness on this is personal interest.

  8. One thing I need to remember, the Soviets were always better at convincing the world they were stronger than they really were, while the west was always better at convincing the world it was weaker than it was.

    I remember reading “The Liberators” and “Inside the Aquarium” when I was a teenager. It was striking how so much of what they did were paper projects that just had to look good enough to pass first glance.

    I still remember the rail they built over the Rhine. The cars and coal hoppers were empty, and the train coasting on residual heat, so it wouldn’t break through the tracks. It was bad enough they even had divers on top of the cars to pull the train engineers out if it did go through.

    And when the Western reps spotted them and asked what they were doing up there, he told them, “SAM operators, in case of air attack.” He marveled at how the reports printed just that in their morning papers.

    2. And Soviet attempts to intimidate the US with their supposed strength led to things like the F-15. The Soviets lied about the capabilities of the MiG-25 (which was apparently a piece of crap), and the US built the F-15 to beat the faked capabilities.

      1. That part was hilarious, in retrospect.

        Now, the MiG-25 wasn’t a hunk of junk. What it was, was designed for a very specific mission: attempt to shoot down SR-71’s. It wasn’t able to do that, but just about anything else that tried to do a high altitude over flight was probably going to get shot.

        What it was not designed to do was turn or engage other fighters. The USAF folks saw the huge wings, giant engines, and massive size and assumed it could do all those things. They didn’t realize it was all stainless steel to not melt to fast at the speeds it was going at, or that the wing was so large because the plane was both stupidly dense (stainless steel) and made to fly at absurd altitudes.

        It was as much us fooling ourselves with the myth of the Soviet Superman as it was Soviet puff rey convincing us we needed toake Thor’s f’ing hammer in response.

        That said, we did put the wrath of god into mass production, and deployed it everywhere, so I think they managed to get the short end of that stick 🙂

        1. What’s even funnier is that the most successful late Soviet fighter – the MiG-29 – looks an awful lot like a small F-15.

          1. I’d say it has more in common with the F-14,just with F-15 wings, but yes, they do have certain similarities.

            I do have a lot of respect for their aircraft designers. They do a lot with what they have, but they’re hampered by limited doctrine and poor technology. The beer and the can, after all.

        2. I think it was originally designed as an interceptor to shoot down B-70 bombers (Mach 3+, high altitude). Then we canceled the B-70 which left the MiG-25 sort-of without a job. And it was an expensive, tricky thing to fly. Prolonged high-speed runs, for example, would require that the engines be replaced after the flight. But we didn’t know that at the time, so we built fighters to counter it.

  9. Marx’s bastard children are alive and unwell, too. Identity politics is demanding we all sort ourselves into oppressor and oppressed, find each and every skin colour in the Crayon box, pick ever more esoteric sexual deviant practices to flout in public, and teach all of this to children too young to drive in traffic (or even dress themselves). Glowbull Wormening is the common apocalypse that everyone claims to take seriously but nearly no one actually does. Men and women increasingly distrust each other, those that still think of themselves as such and acknowledge (however inwardly) a desire for the opposite sex. A constantly repeated refrain beneath the narrative whispers “hate. fear. hate. fear.”

    The party of “science” doesn’t know the scientific method. The party of women and minorities has already turned on them both publicly. The elections are rigged and always have been, and they’re even worse now than they’ve ever been. There’s no depravity, no betrayal so deep that it won’t come out in another ten years that they were doing it today. What’s more when it comes to light there will be those that say it wasn’t a big deal at all.

    Children aren’t taught to learn, but to inform on their parents. To hate everything that made this country good and to distrust anything that could show them the way out of depression and dependence. They have no future and no knowledge of the past.

    The virus, this latest catastrophic excuse for wicked hands to grab power, has us locked down and kept away from each other. Woe betide us, the wicked ones who just wanted to be left alone!

    And yet…

    Despite all the vileness that exists, we get to live in what was once an even greater country than exists today in some ways. In others, a far nicer place to live than the one I grew up in. The Appalachia of my birth still used outhouses and washtubs. I can’t tell you the last time I had to boil water to drink. While other parts of the country are mired in idiocy, I haven’t seen a mask on someone outside in months. And most businesses don’t care one way or the other, either.

    The one message given in the many voices of the media is not the only thing we hear. Even when I was in college, if you heard it on the radio or on the tv, unless you were *right there* you didn’t know anything else. The internet changed all that. College football stadiums echo with the call of “Let’s Go Brandon!” in defiance of official disapproval. People have actually been arrested, tried, and convicted of election fraud- may they all be caught and brought to justice!

    Parents still take their kids out of the schools and discover homeschooling. Teenagers are still being little rebels (I was one, once upon a frog), and are discovering they’ve been lied to. Shocker, there are goths of today that are Pro-Life, Republican, and Pro 2A.

    The voices of Authority become ever shriller to try to convince us of their victory. Their tools in the media will tell you It’s Over! You’ve Lost Forever! Remember the last time they said that? 2012 or thereabouts? Trump was just the most visible effect of the “Eff You” that was 2016. More and more normal people have awoken to politics, and it has been a *rude* awakening indeed. Rough days are yet to come.

    But we have survived trials before. I survived Global Cooling, Peak Oil, SARS, Swine Flu, the Clinton Presidency, the Dot Com boom and bust, the first Recession and the Summers of Recovery that followed. I survived the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, Shirtstorm, the Swine Flu, Bird Flu, and Obama’s “fundamental transformation” that killed my good insurance. I survived 2020, and so far, most of 2021. We will endure what we must and survive. The headaches of today will become the lessons of tomorrow, Lord willing.

    Chin up, folks. The current storm will someday pass. In the mean time, now is not a time to get wobbly. Shoulders back and hold your head high. We are not a beaten, broken people. Time to act like it.

    2. Shocker, there are goths of today that are Pro-Life, Republican, and Pro 2A.

      Can confirm, and I suspect TheWriterInBlack would agree.

      Speaking of election fraud, I just received a second ballot for local Seattle/King County elections. I had to “change my address” with the state to my ex-wife’s address while I was in Alaska so that I could get a replacement drivers license (they won’t forward them), and a few weeks ago I changed it back. And then I got a ballot mailed to both addresses. So much for “our all-mail voting is perfectly secure!” BS. All that stands between me and voting twice is them noticing the second ballot.

      1. There’s also Gothix’s channel on YouTube, one I recently discovered. Judging by the titles of some of the videos she has up that I haven’t watched yet, she was redpilled a while ago.

      2. The caretaker for my inlaws reported that her mom who was registered republican was removed from roles immediately. My MIL otoh, registered democrat, received 10 ballots 2 months after she died.

        1. And those ballots will have been deemed cast for the Democrat whether they were completed and returned or not.

      3. Just before Trump was elected, there was a LOT of scolding over on the dry side, too.

        You see, response on the Dry Side is like 60%.

        King County *regularly* got 90% response on their ballots.

        ….Okanogan County canceled my ballot when I moved. The wet side as mailing them to Texas for YEARS.

        And not a single time when I was in the Navy did I get a ballot, but the voting record says I was voting.

        Yeah, King and Pierce and such are *incredibly* secure. Not to be confused with accurately reflecting legal votes.

        1. Aaah, King County is nothing. There are precincts in Chicago and Detroit that regularly get 120% voter turnout.

          Even counting the cemeteries.
          ———————————
          My grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.

  10. Just remember. Water has no place of permanence. Water flows, and never the same way twice. Water also seeks the lowest points; so if it’s the weakest parts of the opposition, that’s fine, if it’s the dregs of your environment, you’re in for a rough time materially, mentally, and spiritually. But water also can dissolve the strongest substances, wear away anything over time. Water can freeze, and split the toughest rocks. Water can form glaciers to tear down mountains, carve valleys, and scrape smooth plains. Water can form icebergs and defeat the strongest of Man’s machines. Water gives and takes life. And water can transform into a vapor and rise to the highest heights before returning once again.

    Water is so strange and wonderful, it’s amazing that we haven’t discovered that it’s the key to superluminal travel throughout the universe.

    1. It’s like in ‘1632’ when the European big shots laugh about religious liberty and Rebecca asks them, “Which lasts longer, the mountains or the sea?”

      For a leftie, Eric Flint can sure turn a phrase.

      1. In 1632, that would have been a foolish question. You use metaphors to illuminate with the known. In 1632, both were permanent fixtures.

        1. 1632 was a year. ‘1632’ is a time-travel alternate history novel by Eric Flint. A modern-day American small town gets dropped into Germany in the middle of the 30 Years War. Drama ensues.

          1. and “1632” number of books, (not yet, but counting). With all the other authors playing in the sandbox, no one knows the final total.

          2. Yes, and the reason why the title was 1632 was that it was set in the year, and she was addressing people whose knowledge was of that year.

            1. Gustavus Augustus of Sweden in particular, who had some experience of both mountains and the sea.

  11. It’s a repeat of the 1970’s all over again. Not the same thing, but damned close enough to see where the rhyming scheme is.

    Crappy music. Without the joy of desperate AM and FM stations that have to try and find something good to keep their audiences.
    An oligarchy that claims and has quite a few fans in the free world claiming that it’s the Next Best Thing, with rulers that know How To Make Things Work. (This is where you laugh in “CIA couldn’t find it’s own ass with both hands.”)
    Our local oligarchs trying to make the free world into the oligarchs that they love overseas.
    Bad TV and movies. And, once again, not enough desperate competition and too many interlocking hierarchies to try and desperately find something good to get the audience in.
    Millennial pagans and heresies. Often trying to hide by being “secular” in some form (come on, CRT is just a crappy form of “twice the guilt” Northeastern Protestantism that hates everything-including and especially itself).
    Terrible drugs.
    Ugly women (in dress, in appearance, and in attitude).
    Worse novels and comic books. And, not even a single unironic appearance of Snowflame to liven things up a bit.

    China taking over the world? They’re having serious issues right now, and we’re just not hearing about them because world transportation is so messed up. Too many idiots are letting things run bad, and seeing how reasonably lacking in incompetence the Trump administration was is a shock all around.

    Short version can be summed up like this-it’s just bad, so far it isn’t terrible, and often when things get bad we can make them better in good time.

    There’s work to be done. I need to get some writing finished so I don’t hate myself and scream at my psychiatrist(nicely!).

    1. China taking over the world? They’re having serious issues right now, and we’re just not hearing about them because world transportation is so messed up.

      Oh we’re hearing them. It’s just that media driven popular narratives are always a few years behind reality at best.

      1. Property prices have dropped in China for the first time since 2015, which was a crisis year for China, YOY sales down by 2/3. This is a huge deal not just for the consumer but for the state. Chinese local governments derive almost all their income from property sales and local governments have been running a 15% deficit for over 10 years now. think of land sales as an upfront property tax with no annuity. No sales, no revenue.

        The geniuses on Wall Street are advising them to do a property tax. Given the average income is about $10K US and the average market value of property in (e.g.,) Shenzhen is over $1MM US, a 1% property tax would equal average income. The only reason the whole thing hasn’t collapsed is that the carry on these properties is essentially zero.

        By all means then, put on a tax. The collapse in property prices will be epic followed by a collapse in state finance especially as the fact that 80MM. — 80,000,000 — apartments are vacant show there’s no demand for those things and add to that that Chinese consumers are hugely indebted (1.3x income) and add to that the state debt level is the highest in the world and the election of Zho Bi Den becomes clear.

        Don’t get me started on the coal/ electricity mess that’s being blamed on Australian and Chinese environmentalism. Chinese environmentalism, really? Pull the other one. Like land it’s another case of central planning strikes again.

        Speaking of central planning, I hope it’s not cold in Germany this winter.

        1. Don’t get me started on the coal/ electricity mess that’s being blamed on Australian and Chinese environmentalism. Chinese environmentalism, really? Pull the other one. Like land it’s another case of central planning strikes again.

          I think the best part of that particular mess was where the continuing flooding caused coal mines to shutdown.

            2. That can partly be blamed on a California proposition that requires more living space for pigs that goes into effect January 2022. The California pig farmers took a look at the requirements and the renovation costs, and basically divested their assets.

              1. Pretty much all the ridiculous society and economy wrecking stuff can be blamed on California, because that is where the leftist nonsense starts and spreads nationally from.

                1. In this case, the pork aspects of the California law are better for the rest of you. What’s happened is that the majority of pig farmers (ranchers?) have decided that they’d rather lose California as a market than attempt to comply. Now there isn’t enough pork to support the California market, which means that there’s more pork available for the rest of you.

          1. Nope. Not even close. You have to take into account just how rich we are and how poor the Germans are. China is much much worse.

            1. After taking a close look at the power plants that have been shut down in NY and the lack of pipelines to anywhere with fuel (say the shale fields in PA), I think that it doesn’t matter how rich we are collectively. A serious cold snap will cause people in upstate NY to freeze if they lack access to to wood to burn because the response time to course correct isn’t there. Stupidity trumps wealth in this case. Based on the current ‘lowered expectations’ BS from the junta I think they think so as well.

              1. It would require the plants to fail and that’s possible, but not likely. Europe is likely to run out of fuel, period. India will almost certainly do so as will China.

                I suppose a local disruption is possible but there are always local disruptions we just don’t notice them. Sorry, the first question I ask when I’m told something is why am i being told this and localized supply issues are all the rage at the moment,

                I suspect it will be expensive, particularly in the beginning but exogenous Supply shortages tend to be followed by gluts and high prices cause low prices at least in a semi capitalist system.

                now, should Albany get more involved, all bets are off. They make Zho Bi Den look competent and honest,

                1. What happens when ice and snow damages electric transmission lines or damages pipeline parts, and there are no replacement parts because they are sitting on a ship anchored off the California coast?

                  1. Bad things, if that’s where they are and it’s not clear if it was any different before. They do keep some inventory after all and the private companies are starting to shift. Long Beach labor seems to be a government problem and the shippers are starting to shift. It won’t be as efficient but it will get done, soon I think. I really think this is over done but then I would say that since I’m still in the transient inflation camp. High prices cause low prices.

                    1. 2021 is the year everyone gets a lesson in JIT and Egg Baskets.

                      If we are lucky there are enough people smart enough and adaptable enough that we mostly don’t get “2022: the year of that but so much worse”.

                      I think we will manage it fairly well.

                    2. I know someone who works in a position in one of the east coast ports that is very hooked into the state of the supply chain and shipping and says it is much worse than even the pessimistic news reports state; that it is really in very precarious shape and will get a lot worse before it gets better.

                    3. All I really know, is that I worked on some personal issues today, and am a bit mellow.

                      Seem to have used up my daily ration of useful, funny, or insightful thoughts to say.

                      Good luck to all on a night’s sleep, and only spending energy tomorrow figuring this stuff out that will pan out productively!

              2. What? YOU think people will be allowed to burn WOOD?? That will be strictly FORBIDDEN!!

        3. From what I was hearing it was Australian embargos combined with Chinese Gov’t directives to shut down coal mining, that cause coal prices to go up, and that collided hard with Chinese price controls on electricity.

          So central planning lopping off its left hand to spite it’s foot?

          1. That’s the narrative, and it’s false. Australia is a red herring and are a marginal factor at most and if China was closing mines it didn’t show, and they are absolutely forbidden now. Nope, Chinese power plants are required to deliver power at fixed prices and used to buy coal from state factories at fixed prices. There are pricing bands and when coal is strong the generals running coal benefit and when coal is weak the generals running power benefit. The thinking is it all works out. Energy is essentially fungible and given all the supply issues coal got expensive and the generals running coal were allowed to break out of the bounds. the generals running power were then losing money on all power produced since they were required to buy coal. So they stopped producing power until they were given relief. if energy prices come down then it’ll be OK, if not they’ll stop producing power again or be taken over by another set of generals.

            In an odd way, Biden, Merckle, etc., may be casing China’s crisis. Evil will oft doth evil mar.

            Where did the narrative come from, well China environmentalism was Kerry’s narrative. just sayin, Always ask why you’re aware of these facts and who’s agenda they serve.

            1. And even then, when it comes to Certain Narratives, you have to take into account the ones that are being lied to by their underlings, because their families will get disappeared otherwise. This is always the problem when you fill up the middle management with yes-men.

          2. I think they may have seen the energy issues coming. Earlier in the year China stopped the massive bitcoin mining operations in that country. Bitcoin mining is a massive power usage. Of course the building of digital wealth that is hard to control and easy to export probably made the leaders of the CCCP uneasy. Regardless of the reason I am sure China will blame all of its woes on foreigners.

            1. So now they want to use the Texas ERCOT grid to mine Bitcoin. If/when we get another cold wave like Snowvid 21, well, a lot of people are going to be a lot of peeved if Chinese and other “miners” get power and normal folks get to shiver in the dark and watch their pipes burst. Again.

        4. T’other day I actually read something on “Chinese environmentalism”. Xi proclaimed that they’re going to be carbon neutral by 2060, and the first step is to stop burning coal.

          IOW, they’ve now thought up an excuse for finding themselves without those coal imports from Australia, so they can tout those electricity shortages as good for the Chinese environment.

          1. Oh lots of trouble. Trouble everywhere. That’s what Taiwan is about, taking people’s mind off their troubles People I know who know are talking about how bad it is and how much Xi the Pooh is actually in charge on the armed forces. Add the foreigner bad thing that’s sweeping China, particularly communications, and you know that they’re cracking down on bad news.

            They just said Evergrande was “contained”. Which ought to resonate with people who remember 2008.

          3. For years, China has been announcing that it’s stopping the production of new coal-fired power plants. And yet, every year, a large number of “exceptions” are given permits to be built anyway, because the government knows that it needs cheap power, and coal is the best way to get that in a hurry.

            Or in other words, Xi’s promise is an old song and dance that’s been repeated for a very long time. But somehow, no progress is ever made on it.

        5. The Wall Street Journal had an article stating the official Chinese GDP figure for the third quarter had “dropped,” to 4.9. For them to admit to any drop suggests trouble to me.

    2. CRT is a Maoist self-denunciation session aimed at whites. It’s pretty much the *exact* same thing.

        1. And no Election. All are Reprobated under CRT. No one is among the Elect, and we all know it (so no Unknowable Mystery who yet loves us, even fallen as we are.) It’s a sadistic parody of Predestination.

          1. Oh, we know who the Elect are. They’re the last ones standing after the purges end and the mass graves are filled and bulldozed over.

            And, of course it’s sadistic. That’s all these people can feel-the vampire feeding off other people’s pain and suffering.

        2. Yes, and no.

          I would assume that Calvinism – as a form of Protestant Christianity – has their element with the desire to help improve the individual. Maoist self-criticism claims to be to help the individual improve. But in reality, it’s imposed from above as a way to humiliate the individual performing the self-criticism. CRT, with its insistence on finding ever more minute “transgressions” by whites, as well as forcing the victim to admit to those “transgressions” in a public forum, strikes me as more of the latter than the former.

          1. As I understand it, Calvinist self-examination is internally driven, or should be. You are examining your actions and thoughts to see if they are as good as they could/should be, and you strive to do better. Are you among the Elect or the Reprobated [damned]? No one knows, no one here on earth can know, and so we are not supposed to worry about it. Worry about how we live and if we are good Christians, oh yes. But not worry about something we have 0 control over. G-d knows, He has decided, and we should be grateful that He loves us enough to even save a few.

            I could be wrong. I read some church history and theology, but I don’t always understand all of it.

          2. Ah, but you can’t improve yourself! You are Elect or not and all that is no choice of yours. Indeed, God can willfully deceive you into thinking you are Elect by causing the signs of saving grace to appear in their absence. So you examine yourself with the full knowledge that you may be completely deceived.

            Like most determinists, they were seldom entirely consistent but they were enough to be quite painful.

            1. Determinism went out the window when we discovered quantum mechanics. Now we know the universe is non-deterministic at the most fundamental level. The result of any interaction which has more than one possible end state can never be specifically predicted; only the probability of each end state.

              2. In particular, God already knows every end state before the interaction ever happened, being outside time.

    3. Crappy mass market music. Remember, we have the Internet now.

      Right now I’m listening to a vocal hard rock remix that was made from a track that the original author just lets people make their own versions of, done by a fan circle, because they thought it sounded awesome.

      The vocal character has sworn vengeance on, if I recall correctly, the lunarians for causing the deaths of her son and husband, and has so purified her rage that she has become the literal divine embodiment of wrath.

      The refrain is “Hell fire, do not go out!”

      It is as epic as it sounds. And it is not the only one.

      1. I think we need some mass-market stuff that appeals to ENOUGH people, to make a culture.

        Back in the day, we might not have been a fan of (insert band here), but we could admit they weren’t bad and there might have been at least one guilty pleasure song from them we enjoyed.

        It’s like how baseball and football were. We might not like the games themselves, but at the end of the day, we got no problem with going in and watching a game, if we have the right excuses for it.

        1. Mass market culture has disappeared due to cable and now internet and streaming services. Used to be the entire nation watched either ABC, NBC, or CBS during prime time and the next day people would tak about the shows. On a previous job I had al the counselors each day at the time clock each afternoon would be talking about “Dancing With the Stars”. I’ve never seen an episode- and most of the tradesmen and secretaries hadn’t either. Big disconnect.

          That and the top 10 shows among the black audience are virtually unknown to the white, Asian, and Hispanic audience. And I suspect the same is true of the top 10 Asian and Hispanic shows to the other groups- especially the Hispanic ones in Spanish.

          Mass market culture isn’t coming back.

          1. Free to a good home, preferably with a writer:
            Re do the show gender-swapped. Know some guys who could sing her part.

            Best part, the story could still work… not so much on the physical threat part, though.

            1. I know that feeling!
              So glad he shortened his name, because constantly asking my husband “What’s the name of that cute, long-haired guy, the one that took until like thirty to fill out and match his voice that does all the metal covers?” would get tiring.

              The video of him at I think 23 could pass as a 17 year old, easily, but the voice was *definitely* there, even without a good recording environment.
              (The kid chats with the viewers and I STR he mentioned this video is after he got out of their Army– he wears one of the cami jackets for the Last Stand cover. It’s just so *cute* how he gets excited about upgrading his recording studio and stuff.)

              1. oh, please. Vasconcelos is not that difficult a name. (I haven’t gone to my 23 an me to see if he’s a cousin. There are a ton of Vasconcelos from Brazil, though)

                1. Doesn’t have quite the impact on an album cover, tho. “Vasc” is a lot more punchy.

                  But I can’t remember his name either way (well, I can’t remember most people’s names), and am always surprised when he comes up. That boy sings with his whole self.

                  …and I’d like to hear him cover some Chris Isaak or Alex Ubago…

                2. Inherently? Nope, not really.

                  With my memory for names? Whoof.

                  He’d be “Cowboy…something….?” at best.
                  (vaquero/vaca) Or something large feline related. (lion’s den and Daniel Tiger)

                  I have to have something for my memory to latch on to, and for some reason that logo he made up for Dan Vasc works great for actually remembering the name as a thing.

                  1. Ahhh, and turning it into a logo makes sense on the name-shortening front as well (might as well put my otherwise-useless graphic design degree to good use :p ) Generally speaking, any logo involving text of any kind, you want the text to a.) be minimal, and b.) be of relatively the same size if there’s more than one word involved. So Dan Vasconcelos is too unbalanced to work well in a logo, while Dan Vasc would work really well, being only one letter off from the second word being the same size as the first 🙂

                    (Also yes, people viewing said logo/name are more likely to remember something shorter if they’ve only seen it once or twice than something longer. I agree, Vasconcelos is NOT really a difficult name BUT it would be harder to recall–particularly for someone to whom the full name is “foreign”–than the shortened version. (Also for people who, like me, are really, REALLY bad with names, no matter their origin 😀 )

                  2. >> “With my memory for names? Whoof.”

                    I always say the upside to having a poor memory for names and faces is that you get to meet new people all the time…

          4. And now I’m subscribed.

            There’s a reason Phantom of the Opera has never needed a deconstruction.

            And just ran into Sound Holic’s Beat Gather (Primordial Beat). One of the things I really appreciate about the isn’t scene is the sheer spectrum of emotion that gets worked with.

            Beat Gather’s theme is, bad things are happening, people are miserable, and she’s going to bring the beat to dance to anyways, because life is dazzling and worth it, even when it hurts.

            Where else would one find such?

        1. The original singer for Blind and Frozen is freaking unreal too. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a guy with THAT broad a range. (Hell, that one even did his own cover of Nightwish’s Ghost Love Score, which is most DEFINITELY written for a soprano with a lot of chops…)

          1. Okay, correction: I haven’t heard a guy with that broad a range since Freddie Mercury. 😀 Mustn’t forget the human siren that was Freddie.

              1. I admit, I don’t count Jackson because I don’t find him to be as technically skilled as these guys are. He was a good singer, to be sure, but he always struck me more as a one-trick pony: he was very good at singing high, not having a very developed range that covers the whole spectrum. I will admit, however, that I’ve not listened to much of his work other than what was on the radio back in the 80s. (One of my earliest memories is from 1984, at the age of four, arguing with a neighbor kid because I was CONVINCED that Michael Jackson was, in fact, a woman, based on his singing voice lol.)

                Yannis Papadopoulos (I probably spelled the last name wrong), the lead singer for Beast in Black has a range that means he can sound like a completely different singer if he wants to–my experience of Jackson is that he only ever sounded like Michael Jackson 😀 (This is not an insult, mind you, just my perception of their different strenghts)

                1. >> “he was very good at singing high, not having a very developed range that covers the whole spectrum.”

                  His voice can go surprisingly deep, even if he doesn’t sing that way. Check this out, and note that the mayor – the guy leading the mob – is Jackson in a fat suit:

  12. Though I guess the rebuttal to the “Game Over, you’ve LOST” bleats is this… and the only way to be sure:

  13. Ploddenapocaliptishmarxencrap I love it! Totally a German word. I can see the cracks filtering through the news filterers. Southwest has started to back off with the CEO going, “Mandate? I would never do that! It was the Feds, man, the Feds. Yeah, that’s the ticket.” If you listen carefully late at night, you can hear the other CEOs grinding their teeth. I ended my last missive on the subject to my firm with, “There aren’t enough Room 101’s for everyone in this country who disagrees.”

  14. From a wild, sprawling history to a capitol vs lowercase “l” libertarian swing to a LITERAL Heinleinian personal story?

    Has….has this whole blog just been a twenty year troll?

    Either way —> *golf clap, raise a glass*

      1. Given that we’re talking Heinlein, the first place my mind went to when I saw “TMIAB” was “The Moon is a Bitch? Why does that not sound right?”

        Took me a moment to remember what you were actually referring to. 😛

      2. OK, I give up. I looked through the RAH bibliography and can’t find a match to any novel, short story or essay. I’m done trying to guess; there are too many possibilities.

          1. Thanks. I got Space Suit, but not the other reference. Been a looooong while since I read it, and it’s in a box in the attic somewhere.

  16. Today, the State Department, having rescued all Americans still trapped in Afghanistan and solved all other foreign policy issues of note, published an article on why people list their pronouns.

  17. Say what you want and I more or less agree, but it’s a rough road ahead,paved with the NY Times, Wa Post and MSNBC.

    Along with keeping clothes and projectile pushers where you can find them in the dark, make sure your muck boots are handy.

  18. Be like water, my friends. Be like water.

    Well…people keep telling me I’m all wet, so I guess I’ve got that part down. 😉

    (Yes, that’s self-deprecating humor standing as a C4C.)

  19. “Be like water.” So . . . sparse, expensive, and never where you need it, when you need it? *giggles in hydrologist*

      2. Sarah, don’t take this the wrong way, but my precious bodily fluids are none of your business. 😛

  20. I spent the morning wading through the water on the River. Only boom-boomed once, and my knew is wrapped, and will be fine.
    I actually shouted to myself today, in the raging rain/wind “Communists are so f’ing STUPID!” It’s partly an expression of frustration, and partly the beginning of a laugh.

    All the commies can do is break stuff, and wail and weep. Yes, they can hurt us, but we get to respond as freeborn citizens.
    Example: the cops and firemen who got the boot Monday in Seattle spent yesterday behind a bunch of BBQ grills in downtown Seattle, feeding the hoboes and anyone else who wanted to come by. “Fire us? Fine! Love God, love your neighbor. Let’s go, Brandon!”

    I’ve worked with Chinese who pretended not to be communist at work at least. There’s this: they can’t figure anything out. They can’t think. They aren’t “fly” in anything, ever. They are the most rigid, dumbest people on the planet. Things an American would look at and kluge up a fix stumps them forever.

    Dennis Prager gave himself the coof, took outpatient treatment, and boom, he’s fine. At 73. He did it purposely, to be publicly brave.

    We win.

    2. My husband, unusually for one of our generation, has just finished twenty years of working for the same company. (And yes, he’s still working for them.) During this time, he’s only talked about quitting once, and it was because of a really obnoxious manager. Stressed him out for years.

      She’s been moved elsewhere in the company, and he only just told me that she’d grown up in China. Which explains SO MUCH about her rigid management style.

      His current manager is from the Netherlands, I think. Management style more like “You know what you’re doing. Keep doing it.”

    3. We took the kids to the corn maze with the model of the state capitol in it. The comments written on it were mostly garden variety pencil graffiti but some were…encouraging. We added our own shout into the wind and laughed.

    1. I love that show. And yes, this is how to be like water. (I couldn’t believe, the first time I saw it, how much they got away with in story. But now it makes so, so much sense….)

      “We provide…leverage.”

        2. The final season was rushed. They did what they could, but weren’t told until part way through that this was it and they needed to wrap stuff up fast.

          1. The episode plots were off, and seemed to get political. It seemed to go from taking down murderers and mobsters to “stop Walmart from opening in this small town”

            1. Ugh, yeah, that one was a standout bad one–not only the whole “big business automatically evil” (Look, I’m not a fan of Walmart either, but given the fact that mom-and-pop stores located in the middle of nowhere tend to be awfully expensive, economy of scale is NOT a bad thing), but the cruel actions they took towards the company rep who even the team admitted was not herself a bad person, she was just doing her job.

          1. In case you didn’t know, the writers wanted to include a flashback scene with Eliot going through the stargate, but the sets had already been torn down and they couldn’t. So, even if it didn’t make it into the show, canonically Stargate and Leverage are in the same universe.

              1. Right?!?! I came across that bit in tv tropes trivia page for Leverage (and passed it on to BlondEngineer :D).

                The only reason they did NOT have it was because all of the Stargate sets/Stargate prop had already been destroyed and they couldn’t justify rebuilding one and doing the special effects. Sigh.

                Soooooo many fanfiction plot bunnies, though…

                1. So, so MANY!!!! AAARRGGHH!!! And it explains *so much* about Elliott’s skills, his contacts, and his strength. Fighting Jaffa has to be darn good practice for being a hitter!!! EEEEK!!! *grins, bounces up and down, squeaking* Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for passing this on! 😀 *hugs*

  24. Well-said, even though it can be hard to keep focused on this with so much nonsense out there. Hopefully we’ll all get through this intact.

  26. Pingback: I need a move | Dio's Workshop

  27. However Orwell was a believer, even if a heretic. As an adult, read the damn thing and tell me it’s in the least likely.

    It ‘works’ as a story because 1) it’s terrifying, and 2) THE AUTHOR SAID SO.

    1. I read a fair amount of the less famous dystopia flavored stuff, but missed the famous ones.

      When I think about the issues, I find myself lacking in desire to write stories that show in detail how dystopia wouldn’t actually hold.

      The tone, the moral arc, the flavor of the world in a story is a choice. Dystopias in fiction rely on the author moving the sliders all the way over, and refusing to show characters out of step with the mechanism of oppression.

      It can be shown that a small group of oppressors isn’t going to be enough smarter than a large group of oppressed to create and maintain the super invincible mechanisms of eternal oppression. (i.e., a major assumption of critical theory, and perhaps Marx categorical struggle, is bullshit.)

      But, I do not want to write this non-fiction essay in story format.

      I want to read stories that make different choices from dystopia.

      2. Which is why Black Tide Rising works as zombie fiction for people with working brains. Yes, a horrible thing happened. PTSD is the new normal is a phrase mentioned more than once. There is despair and wallowing, but there is also more often courage and determination. Rational people in a post apocalyptic world make plans, save others, and get stuff done. Dystopia that allows for a way out are much rarer than the boring, everything sucks and then everyone dies crapsack world kind of story.

        Which means that there’s an opportunity there for good writers out there to exploit that. The sci-fi story I’m working on here and there is semi-post apocalyptic, but I’m trying not to make the characters too dumb to live. Mostly its just the loss of technology and history that’s hamstringing them, not the lack of brains.

  29. I remember the Heinlein postulate: Specialization is for insects.
    Humans are the world’s greatest generalists. We are good at attempting to do a crappy job at just about everything. AND, observing other humans to see how to do it better. Then, putting those improvements into play.
    Now, there are jobs that we are content to do in a lousy way; but, there is at least a subset of humans that will tinker, ever-attempting to improve our performance.
    It doesn’t even matter that the end product will not pay off in some tangible way; we just like tinkering around, trying to do a better job.

    1. As odd as it sounds, that was my first thought re: Gamergate. “Okay, you have just picked a fight with people who will do the same onerous task over. and over. and OVER in order to get a 0.05% increase in performance. AND who are used to derision. This may not be the bright move you thought it was…”

  30. I will note that the current cascading supply chain issues are quite similar to the results of central planning. Basically you end up with tons of stuff here that’s unwanted and no stuff there where it is (and no way to move the stuff from here to there)

    1. If you have any interest in WWII or the socialist governments of the 1920s and 1930s that brought about its terrors, I recommend checking out TIK’s channel on youtube. He was your standard young British historian, who actually redpilled himself while doing research for his WWII videos, which up until that point (and still somewhat today) focused on tactics and operational movements. However, when he started trying to figure out what was going on with regards to logistics on the Eastern Front, he went down a rabbit hole and discovered that, as he puts it, “Socialism doesn’t work!”

      A few of his videos in recent years have covered the ruinous nature of all three of the major socialist European nations, and how their gross mismanagement of their economies practically forced them to keep sacking their neighbors for loot and (de facto) slaves, just in order to keep themselves afloat another year or two. Case in point: the Nazis effectively took control of Germany’s national railways in 1933 (they didn’t officially nationalize them until 1937, but they put their own people in charge and the railways danced to their tune starting in 1933). By 1938, German cities were facing a massive coal shortage. Yes. A shortage of coal. IN GERMANY. And, at the same time, the coal mines were having to furlough workers… because they had no places left to store coal. The effectively state-run railroads had been so horribly mismanaged that in less than 5 years, they could no longer move sufficient coal from Point A to Point B. Money and markets had been replaced by paper surveys asking each business how much of each commodity they needed for the next year. The centralization of all economic decisions crippled the German economy. The only projects that were actually completed were the vanity projects, like the Autobahn, which received a priority on resources in order to make things look better than they were.

      Sound a bit like modern California?

  32. Well, the collectivists aren’t all that far from figuring out how to suppress their evil (and blame their evil when it must be acknowledged on the good people) from the unfortunately vast majority of people who live their lives and only pay attention to the news in passing. If that works, game over in the wrong direction.

    An interesting test will be how successful they are at demonizing the public for “hoarding” as inflation marches on and shortages become more acute and widespread.

    Some experts predicts that we’ll see 10%+ food inflation in the next 60 days. HORSE MANURE: It has already happened. I can cite many examples of 15%, 20%, and 30% increases which have occurred in the past 6-8 weeks in certain food items, and in the past week a few 50%+ increases. I cut back on the volume of groceries I bought in the past week vs. 2 weeks ago by probably 15%, and the total bill was basically the same. Do not be surprised if pretty soon people start talking about the “Biden diet” in much the same way people in Venezuela talk about “the Maduro diet.”

      1. Even with control of the media, the schools, and fedgov. The lies are so big they can be seen from space at this point. Smartphones and the internet mean nearly every dumb thing they say gets caught, repeated, and mocked by those of us that pay attention. The contempt has bred laziness.

        1. I mean, now it’s leaking out that the National Board of Education (or whatever the heck they are) that is screaming about parents being domestic terrorists and wanting the DoJ to stop them…had lots and lots of meetings with the DoJ and the White House BEFORE they ever actually wrote that letter–and that, in fact, White House aides/staffers likely helped them draft it…

          They think we don’t see this. Or that when they claim it’s made up we’ll believe them. They have NO idea how very wrong they are…

          1. In their defense, they’ve gotten away with it before. I can remember a time, pre Drudge, when even a hint wouldn’t have gotten out. And considering the average age of the participants, they are still operating in the same mental place that they still *can.* Even though there’s no chance of that now.

            You are right. They truly do have no idea. They thought they learned the right lessons from 2016. They thought the fraud would be enough. They thought it wouldn’t matter once they “won.” How many times now have the guilty escaped justice, the ones in high office?

            2. How do we explain the younger ones then? Taking cues from their elders, or just that dumb?

              1. The youth? Those ones raised in democrat schools, watching democrat media (celebrities more than the news), ensconced in democrat social media, never taught how to think for themselves, getting the social dopamine hits from dunking on anything smacking of liberty or American patriotism?

                Some of them, they never had a chance. They don’t know any better, and any step in a direction that could lead to a healthier psychology is ruthlessly punished. All the “smart” people tell them that we, the other side, are by turns viciously evil, ignorant savages, and bent on the destruction of all things good and precious in the world. If we were just people they disagreed with they might actually listen to us when they try to argue, rather than shout us down. You don’t compromise with evil. Therefore nothing we say gets through.

                The ones that escape it are rare. For some, it comes when they start investigating things for themselves. Candace Owens is a good example of this, I think. Others need some sort of shock that makes them start to question things they took as unquestionable before.

                The actual political right (as opposed to the grifter right) is the party of reason. You need to have reasons to back up your positions, because feelings are just not enough. If you’re on the left, open borders and a welfare state makes sense because you just care so hard for those poor people that just want to be Americans, like us! If you’re on the right you know that is insane because you won’t have a country if you let everybody in and give them free stuff as soon as they cross your “border.” And so it goes with the other positions.

                Do not be deceived by the stories in the media about the coming victory of the left. What have they gotten right in the past twenty years, as opposed to what they got wrong? They’ll tell you that the younger generation all voted for (D candidate), and anything someone else will tell you is a lie. But that isn’t true and hasn’t been true for quite some time, if it ever was.

                If you ask me if the ones that are in debt up to their eyeballs from a college degree that’s worth less than two-ply at this point voted more for the one that swore he’d forgive that debt, I’d say they did. But not all of them. At worst I’d call it 70/30, but I strongly suspect it is getting more even as that sad excuse for a President mumbles his incoherent way into ruin.

          3. I would note, that if parents are protesting at meetings, listening to them, or even ignoring them, are the options least likely to result in very unpleasant outcomes for teachers and administrators.

            The people who would never send children to public school, because they think that public school teachers are awful enough to “need killin'”, are not the ones complaining.

            Trying to shut up the folks openly complaining at public events, by force and intimidation, is mostly going to convince parents that they really need to homeschool. However, extremely heavy handed approaches could inspire a minority to consider direct action.

            The thing protecting most of these administrators and teachers is that folks haven’t been scared or angered enough to think that they are worth killing. It is not school security, it is not meeting security. They do not spend their whole time inside a government security perimeter, nor does the federal government have the force structure to guard so many.

            1. Actively trying to destroy/attack a parent who showed up at a school meeting to demand answers because his young daughter was raped by a boy claiming he was transgender is NOT going to end well–especially now that particular story is becoming known nation-wide. But that’s just it: the administrators/teachers (or, more to the point, the unions that hold all the power) think that oppression WILL keep them safe. After all, the government is all powerful, right? That’s what they’ve been pouring money and effort into achieving, and since the “right” people are in power then demanding they attack parents is, of course, the correct solution.

              These idiots really do, I think, believe that approach will get the outcome they want. Realizing that it’s more likely to drive parents to homeschool is either something they haven’t thought through—or if they have, they presume they can just point the government at making homeschool illegal and force all kids into public schools. (This has been attempted already in California/Oregon/Washington. I forget which one of those had the state supreme court shoot it down, but I was rather surprised it DID get shot down, given how the courts in those states usually rule. However, no doubt it will be attempted/is being attempted again, and one cannot rely on a court to continue to support basic freedoms.) And on the violence front, well…if it happens, then in their minds that just proves them right, yeah? That parents are dangerous terrorists and must be silenced/removed from the equation. I have NO doubt that, for at least some (and probably many) of these education union folks, getting all children placed in the custody of the State is a very ideal end-goal…

              1. “they presume they can just point the government at making homeschool illegal and force all kids into public schools. ”

                Well, actually, the actual mechanism will be to deny homeschooled students entry into college, licenses to practice trades, etc. Hard to prove that’s the actual reason. Just like they practice racialized admissions by making the admissions process subjective.

              2. Everybody involved in covering up the first crime, and then sending the little shit to another school to rape another girl, should be thrown in jail. Twice.

                But of course their ‘activism’ is more important than mere students. Virtue signaling is critical. If a few girls happen to get raped, well, omelet, eggs.

                ‘Public Education’ needs a drastic overhaul. We can start by abolishing Jimmy Carter’s Department Of Education. After spending 40 years and 2 TRILLION dollars, has it made our schools better than they were in the 1960’s and 70’s? After that, we can sack the 14,000 ‘Boards Of Education’ and make all those overpaid deadwood bureaucrats get real jobs. Private schools do a much better job of teaching without any ‘Boards Of Education’ so they can’t be providing much benefit.
                ———————————
                It takes a LOT of education to make somebody that stupid.

              3. Worse, he was objecting to the meeting to make the “policy” even broader– and they’d already tried to cover up the rape.

                The ONLY reason that we can say that the girl was raped was because when he was called in for a “physical altercation” in the bathroom, he listened to her, REJECTED the school saying they’d take care of it, took her to the hospital himself, told them they needed a rape kit, and reported it to the police.

                If he hadn’t taken every step of that action?

                The school would have gotten away with him being someone whose “daughter says she was attacked in the bathroom by another girl,” and she probably would’ve been expelled for refusing to use the bathroom without protection so they could “prove” she was a Bad Kid.

                1. My recollection was that the police officer called to the school took one look at the girl and her mother and immediately took them to the hospital for the rape kit.

                  In any case Chris Bray nails it:

                  There’s no mystery about [Superintendent] Ziegler’s focus: a child was supposedly raped in one of our schools, but anyway, her father yelled at us and it was profane and disruptive and threatening and counselors are rushing to help people who saw the father yelling. [emphasis in original]

                  https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/fight-the-real-enemy

                  1. The news report I saw said that the father called the police, and drove the girl to the hospital himself.

                    Yeah, news reports are often iffy, but that is one of those against-interest things– and a theme I’ve noticed in “law enforcement ignored fill-in-the-blank” is that the victims and their families didn’t do the basic “how to report an assault” stuff, in some cases not even contacting the police until after things hit the news.

                    How on earth is someone supposed to investigate a crime when the grand total information is “I was touched inappropriately weeks ago, I mentioned it to my coach a few days later”?

                    Schools systematically support this kind of prevent-evidence-gathering behavior, too– the assaults that reach the level of attempted murder that I am familiar with, the parents were called in for the victim-child “fighting” and informed that if they contacted the police, their child would be punished more harshly than the attacker.

                2. Yeah, the whole story is so horrifying I can’t even.

                  Add to that the parents of a little girl (7) with Down’s Syndrome and sensory issues in Florida. School had a mask mandate, parents talked to school and said “look, she can’t wear a mask, she has sensory issues and breathing problems” school said “Okay sure” and then some weeks later little girl comes home with a saliva soaked cloth mask TIED to her face with nylon rope and in more than a bit of emotional AND physical distress and the parents learn the school has been doing this to her the entire time and lying to the parents about it. And the little girl is not very verbal, so she could not articulate the abuse happening to her.

                  I was at the point of wanting to burn down the Department of Education in all its forms years ago (starting with No Child Left Behind, though if I’d been more aware of things prior to that I have no doubt I would have desire that even earlier in my life). Now I’m at the “I want them all in prison and/or hanged for gross crimes AND burn it all down AND salt the earth” stage.

                  Most of the time, I’m sad that I don’t have any children. But when I see crap like this happening, I’m glad I’m not having to watch any children of mine be exposed to this lunacy. (Actually, if I *did* have kids, I’d be doing everything I could to homeschool them.)

                  1. Oh dear heavens…. what the F else have they been doing that the girl can’t tell them about?

                    And Downs…their lungs and hearts are so often messed up, bacterial pneumonia is so much more dangerous…..

              4. Oregon. Pretty sure. Held up in 9th Court too. Then just to be sure, now Oregon has at least two, home school online public alternative options, that the State, and various school districts, based on student utilizing, must fund out of district/state-school taxes. Not quite money follows the student butt in seat because there is some money held back for “oversight“. But enough money follows the student for the programs to provide all material required, including laptop, software, support, books, etc. This is the program that one great-niece is enrolled in (proctored and supplemented by her retired teacher grandmother). Spends a lot less time “in class” than she would if she spent it physically in a classroom with 30 to 40 students. The other step-great-nephew is enrolled in an alternative language immersion school (don’t know which language) with small classes, with 4 parental units participating in overseeing the education (required by the alternative school).

                Our one child is out of the school system, through college. No grandchildren (yet? as she states hopefully). But agree, if I had a child in public school, we’d be home schooling. Hubby says we’d have child in alternative schools or private school. Nope. Home schooled. I’d work from home and/or I would be an unpaid teacher for our child.

    2. Food AND Fuel. (Fuel costs infect food costs).

      We just paid $62 to fill up our Santa Fe; 17.5 gallons, near as empty as it can be gotten. That is double what we paid Sept 2020 to fill up the almost empty pickup, 21.5 gallons, at a pump inside Yellowstone National Park. (NP used for emphasis. Normally YNP fuel is $0.5+/gal higher than home. 2020 it was about $0.25/gal lower. IDKW.)

      I’m regularly spending $100/trip to Fred Meyers (Krogers), for basics, no meat; sometimes milk (which is about the same as Costco). Meat at Costco is getting almost to the point of “dang, I need a loan”. Hamburger has had a per pound increase, twice, since Biden took office (I buy, make patties, and break into Chile/Spaghetti/Meatloaf portions, and freeze it). The “good steaks” are currently in the “um, No” territory. OTOH the Costco Roasted Chicken is still $4.99.

      1. Except Bernie actually has far more “true believer” faith in socialism than Ho Che Minh ever did.

        1. Given that the man is a multimillionaire (after ONLY ever “working” in politics, mind you) and has three mansions (at least)…no, he is not a true believer, he’s a grifter. He was in love with the USSR because he had/has dreams of being one of the Party high-ups who gets to live like a king and make the serfs do whatever he wants on pain of gulag.

          1. Most socialists that survive to get to the top end up as the “rules for thee but not for me” camp anyway. The structure has a place for true believers, and that is against the wall in the earliest days when they finally seize power. Grifters are more predictable and controllable in the long run.

  35. I’m not happy about supply chain disruptions, but I do wonder about the reasons.

    It seems to me both the US and China are feeding the problem. We are possibly in a cold war state. It’s a bizarre cold war state, in that both sides are pushing the same thing, decoupling, in the thought that it will hurt the other side?

    I don’t care about choice in products in the short term. I do care if essential industries, like farming, can’t get equipment, or parts and supplies to keep things running. Some of the shortages, though, are probably caused by companies stockpiling essential equipment, and/or ordering more stuff than they currently need. So, the end of Just in Time.

    As for the coal shortage in China, I also wonder. Their demographics are terrible. We are facing a transition to a world in which young, strong workers are in shorter supply. They are ahead of us on that curve, aren’t they? And if I were to make a list of industries in which to work, coal mining would be at the bottom in terms of health and safety. We tend to forget that hard, physical labor ages a worker very quickly.

    So, could the shortage also reflect a difficulty in staffing the most dangerous and difficult workplaces?

    2. It’s happening in Canada, too. Most recent example…Cat food. My one cat is extremely picky and will only eat one of the reasonably priced brands and the horribly over-priced one I won’t buy. Knowing shortages were coming I’ve tried to buy a little bit extra of that brand every time I stocked up, but one of their flavours has been out for the last two months, though the other three were still coming in. When I went to the store today there were 5 cans left, and the store lady said she’s been trying to order for months and not getting any, what she was getting was from orders from months ago.

      Where things are going wrong I don’t know, but…interesting times

      1. I just had to drive all the way to south Tacoma to get a can of the urethane enamel paint I’m using for the wardrobe cabinet I’m building. I asked why it’s so hard to get, and apparently the Texas factory that makes the base had its gas pipes freeze last winter and is still mostly out of action.

        I took the long, scenic route home, and I saw a Gadsden Flag in Dash Point, WA, a little semi-rural suburb just north of Tacoma.

        2. Still out of action is entirely unsurprising. A chemical plant’s worth of resin solidifying in the pipes is a “tear down the plant and build a new one” level dumpster fire.

          That would take a long time to fix in normal conditions.

      2. Purina Fancy Feast Appetizer Food Topping. All the flavors, but specifically the Shredded Chicken, Salmon, and Beef with Chicken. The only “canned” that 3 of the 4 cats will touch (the 4th, still a kitten is on the see food diet). Reminds me, need to Check Amazon and Chewy for it again. Petsmart, and both Mini-Petmarts, are out. Fred Meyer’s hasn’t had it in over a year locally. What is scary is the kibble, which is prescription, that both Petsmart and the Veterinarian is having difficulty keeping in. One of the cats throws up food too easily.

        Then there is the dog’s food. I am really close to taking her to raw and quit relying on commercial dog food being available.

        In all instances I’ll admit when I’m finding any of the above, I am buying out their stock. None of the options are inexpensive.

        1. We’re feeding Sugar the regular kibble from a company called “Life’s Abundance”. No supply issues yet.

      3. Whereabouts are you?

        My boys are on vet food, and no problems seem to have hit this area of BC yet.

        1. Ontario. Thankfully, my cats don’t have specific health issues requiring specialized food, aside from needing their diet to be at least half canned to avoid urinary tract and kidney issue for the boy. The dog’s Gabapentin for arthritis on the other hand is necesary, has been slow in arriving and because it’s prescription can’t be stocked up on.

  36. “Be like water…” Yeah… The radiation treatment for prostate cancer have me on a 1-2 hour cycle to run to the euphemism already… Good news is the treatment’s almost done and God-willing we’ll be back to “normal.”

    Meanwhile, Hebrews 13:5-6 has my attention. The poor benighted savages won’t know what hit ’em.

  37. When I was 12, I wanted a radio too. My dad bought me a Heath kit and a soldering iron for my birthday and said, “here you go!” Then he sat back and watched…

    2. When I graduated from junior high school (8th grade there), I got money and bought a Knight-Kit Star Roamer shortwave radio. I rather liked it, but didn’t pursue radio as a hobby much beyond high school. OTOH, now I’m getting into ham radio. Have “a few more things to do” to get the HF rig up and running.

      I thought about building the Elecraft K2 kit, but the time estimate for building it was too much. Since the time to do the station is impressive (even discounting a few months dealing with the knee fiasco), I’m glad I went with a non-kit radio.

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