Banks and You by Francis Turner

Q: What’s the difference between Hunter Biden, Konstantin Kisin and you?

A: Access to banks

Let me explain.

Recently Konstantin Kisin (a UK comedian/commentator) got a message from the company that was acting as his bank for a podcast he does with some other people.

There then followed a certain amount of hilarity as Mr Kisin asked (not unreasonably) for a reason why and received a number of non-answers.

TRIGGERNOMETRY BANK ACCOUNT SHUT DOWN

Dear @OliverPrill, could you please explain why your bank, @TideBusiness, is shutting down our bank account with no explanation despite a healthy balance and transaction history? pic.twitter.com/kL0ibpgWZN

— TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) May 19, 2023

Despite numerous attempts to get clarity on this issue we have been repeatedly fobbed off with non-answers…. pic.twitter.com/EbYgi1ljeg

— TRIGGERnometry (@triggerpod) May 19, 2023

There are some interesting curlicues to this case though.

Starting with the fact that the “bank” isn’t actually a bank. There’s nothing wrong with that, what they’ve done is partnered with a couple of actual banks to offer a banking service that is more convenient for small businesses than that offered by a traditional bank. This is no doubt one reason why Mr Kisin decided to use them. However it probably gives them rather more flexibility to discriminate that they would have if they were an actual bank.

Mind you in the T&Cs there’s this:

So it would seem that the lack of initial explanation means there’s a “legal, regulatory or security reason” for the decision. Now, as someone who works in cyber-security, I can say that this vagueness is typically there so that the company has a get out when closing an account for a “Nigerian Prince” that offers exciting opportunities to for suckers to work from home while enriching some Eastern European cyber-criminals. BUT short of Mr Kisin running a scam, which seems unlikely given his relatively high public profile in the UK, and given that the account seems to be tied explicitly to a locals account where he and a colleague do video interviews for subscribers the “involved in (cyber)crime” excuse seems highly unlikely.

So the more likely reason is that the “bank” doesn’t like Mr Kisin’s generally unwoke and skeptical viewpoint on matters and is now desperately trying to retcon a reason. Quite possibly the root cause is that some SJW activists figured out that Kisin used Tide as a banker and caused some regulatorily complex work to be done on his account which meant that Tide was spending a lot more money responding to them than it could possibly make from Kisin’s account.

I should note that the excuse about third party payment processors and validation simply doesn’t pass the giggle test. TRIGGERnometry uses Stripe (as part of its locals based subscription service) and Paypal (linked from twitter and youtube for donations and in the shop part of the website) and as far as I can tell that’s it. Lets start with Paypal, which has had its own free speech issues (see this for example), and which seems more likely to be the source of donations. Paypal knows the email address and credit card (or bank account) details (including the address) of everyone using it and there is no effective difference (to the recipient’s bank) to a payment made for a purchase of goods/services and a donation. Moreover it stretches credibility that no other Tide customers are using Paypal to receive payments.

That’s the very slightly more plausible 3PPP. If Tide has problems with Stripe then I guarantee that TRIGGERnometry is far from the only organization that banks with Tide that uses Stripe. Stripe is ubiquitous and one of the reasons for this is that it is very good at reducing fraud, which it does by precisely the sort of validation that Tide says it can’t trust. Now I suppose there’s the vague possibility that somewhere on an older website that I can’t find the TRIGGERnometry people have a different payment processor, but that seems unlikely. Aside from anything else if one particular 3PPP was problematic, the obvious thing for Tide to do is to mention that they have a problem with 3PPP X.

Since, rather than say that, they originally gave notice of closing the account and only a week or so later came up with 3rd Party Payment excuse we can be almost certain that Tide simply don’t want TRIGGERnometry’s custom but aren’t willing to come out and say so.

Anyway, moving on. In one of the threads on twitter discussing this there was reference to an excellent, but older, thread by Patrick McKenzie (of Bits About Money):

Unfortunately the way this is usually implemented is “X stamps and we fire you as a customer.”

In much of the world, banks are not obligated to continue doing business with people who cause them lots of headaches or cost, and the headaches/cost are not evenly distributed. https://t.co/tufbFyRitG

— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) September 20, 2021

Assume everything you’ve been taught about the 20th century is wrong. Okay, so most of it isn’t if you’re going with facts and figures.

But if you look at the conclusions drawn from events, at the bigger movements you were told were behind things, everything you were told is a lie. Pretty much. Except, of course, that sometimes the people telling you the lies thought they were telling you the truth. Either because they, themselves, had been lead up the garden path by philosophers or (and often and) because they couldn’t endure the truth. It didn’t fit with some incredibly appealing theory they had been sold, and which demanded the plainly obvious reason for something not, in fact, be true. Even when it was.

Yes, we’re back again to the vexed topic of World War I. And thereby to the topic of all the wars of the twentieth century. And the vexed topic of military service for “your country right or wrong.”

In the comments on memorial day someone left a comment saying “Whatever your politics, thank the war dead for your freedom.” Or something like.

Look, I’ve been surer or that than I am now.

Um… I am okay with thanking the war dead, because at the very least they thought they were defending freedom and the principles of our constitution, but as a friend (who is a veteran) said in his memorial day post, it is hard to imagine any of our honored military dead coming back and seeing what’s happening in our land and not being profoundly confused, if not disappointed. Because in fact our own — corrupted, frauded in — government is indulging in the sins of the Kaiser and often — sorry — using the tactics of the German National Socialists.

They’re doing this despite the Americans who shed their blood to stop crazy globalism, and partly because their government, their education and, oh, yeah, definitely their bureaucracy is running a program resting on the wrong conclusions taken from the clashes of cultures of the 19th and 20th century.

Look, I can never do this as a scientific theory, not because I can’t develop methods to test it (though those would be mostly examining history) or accept or reject my hypothesis, but because the “science” of sociology currently is caca, and I’m not going to give any college my head for washing to get the right credentials.

So, instead, I’ll write it into science fiction books, and maybe sometime in the future someone can codify it.

This is the thing, though: As far as I can tell, both from observation and experience (acculturating (twice)) and from reading history, cultures are not just the assemblage of a bunch of people under more or less arbitrary rules, which they follow because they’re conformists or stupid or something. Cultures are also not (rolls eyes) born with the person, nor do they transmit genetically. Yes, we do know from animal husbandry that individuals can be born more docile or rebellious, more people-oriented or introverted, etc. and that those traits are inheritable within reason. (There are always sports.)

However, humans are not just creatures of nature, and on the nature nurture puts a veneer that puts limitations on or enhances traits, that rewards certain behaviors or suppresses others. So, even though most people in culture x might be docile if a baby is brought to a highly rebellious culture, like the US and raised in it, he or she will “conform” by being rebellious.

I, myself, had no idea I was introverted. Not a clue. Why? Because Portuguese culture is highly gregarious and group oriented. So, even though I was considered weird and standoffish for there, once I got to the US everyone thought I was very gregarious and people oriented. The one and only tell is that I’m utterly wiped out by being around people too much — the definition of too much being way more than I’m used to — and I either have to get some time away (when I disappear from a con, I’ve usually run to my room to read or listen to music, or do not much of anything. And Dan and I have been known to run away and have dinner by ourselves) or I start showing weird symptoms, like losing my voice. Until I figured that, I thought I always got sick after cons. Actually most of the time I don’t. I’m just wiped out. This is because my natural introversion was shaped by the overlay of a culture where everyone lives in everyone’s pockets, all the time.

Anyway, though, I have come to the conclusion from observation, that while individual humans are plastic to a certain extent, humans in a group, all belonging to the same culture are harder to mold and shape arbitrarily.

It is probably part of human evolution, that cultures react like sentient group entities when attacked, destroyed or occupied.

There is only one way — known for sure — of destroying a culture utterly without killing every member of that culture, meaning it’s eradicated and doesn’t surface again, ever. That is to kill everyone over the age of 3, adopt the surviving children and raise them as yours with no awareness of a separate entity.

Even our savage ancestors didn’t do that, that we know. Oh, in pre-history — even modern primitives (for lack of a better term. Cultures with no writing, and sometimes no future verb tenses or a limited language. Yes, they exist. Mostly tiny tribes in remote places — it was fairly common, as far as we can tell, entire bands and tribes were completely wiped out, their culture leaving absolutely no trace in the future except maybe as a fragment of much-distorted myth. And probably there were times when only the babies were taken and adopted. (Or eaten. Look, there are no noble savages, okay?)

Most of the time, though, throughout most of history, fighting men (or all males) were killed and women, children and non-fighting men (maybe) enslaved.

Because of this, cultures developed what I can only call evolutionary adaptations to survive those events: the women become whores (usually for he conquerors), the men become submissive, and children learn the new language and lose the old, oh, and full blooded children of the old culture stop being born.

In fact most of the symptoms of what we believe are “decadent cultures” aren’t. They’re wounded cultures. Cultures which, sometimes wrongly, assume they’ve been conquered, and therefore go into “survive conquest” mode. This is the mode that will allow some (or most) of its traits to survive, by being passed on in stories, in what you teach the children, in “this is how we do things” even when a majority of those who carried the culture are killed or enslaved.

Now, when I talk of cultures deciding something it sounds like I’m going to break in paens of the Ashkantic records (sp) or perhaps start talking of the collective unconscious. It’s not. It’s a short hand. Because, you know, we are social creatures (even those of us who prefer to make friends over the internet and only see our close family on a regular basis.) This means when your subconscious adds two plus two and gets aardvark, you give certain signals most of them non-verbal. And when everyone does that, the culture acts like a collective entity. I refuse to explain this every single time, so I’ll say the culture does this or that. You will most assuredly deal.

Our culture, yes, is acting like a conquered culture. This is because through most of history for someone to come in and impose on you “new ways of doing things” and trying to shape you into something different, meant that you had lost a war and a lot of you were laying dead.

In our times this is because our intelligentsia was converted against its own culture (while still being part of the culture, which makes them funny. Or they would be funny if this were happening to someone else long ago) by Marxist and “progressive” theories that purport that both humans and cultures are infinitely plastic. Being part of the ruling bureaucracy and class, they imposed arbitrary rules from above, which felt to our subconscious like conquerors giving commands.

Which brings us back to colonialism. As we all know the left considers colonialism evil. It probably is, at least when engaged in from above and arbitrarily. What I mean is, if you conquer a people and impose your ways on them, they’re going to suffer and their culture is going to become corrupted in weird ways. Sometimes…. sometimes that’s an improvement. For all their — many — faults, the Spaniards did stop human sacrifice to the South of (and in some portions of the Western states of) the US.

But it is strong medicine and a high price to pay. Also the reason why all the dreams of the early science fiction writers (and the retarded would-be techno lords of today) of a world government are not just impossible but utterly and unspeakably evil.

Because if you try to impose a culture (and the current idiots it’s not even a culture, just the Marxist virus) on the whole world, it’s going to …. change. And what it will become is not what you set out to impose, but this weird, bizarre amalgam. When you take in account all the cultures of the world, that means what results will be … uh… alien is a good way to put it. And probably mostly Chinese. (Because their culture is older, and frankly while judged in terms of comfort to humans and ability to provide completely nonfunctional, nonfunctional in a way that has created mechanisms to increase the cyclic dysfunction. And those mechanisms will survive and infect everything.) And on the way to installing this maimed and maiming thing, you’re going to kill most of the population of the world, and only a few outright. Most of them with depression and internal destruction.

And here we come back to the age of Empires from oh, the mid-fourteenth but more obvious from the mid-19th century to World War I. That was straight up internationalism.

Cultures that were in the industrial revolution and needed resources, but more importantly, cultures that were absolutely convinced they had the right way to live stomped around the globe showing everyone else how to live, and sometimes hard-enforcing it.

“But Sarah, that’s nationalism,” you’ll say. Oh, is it? Because what they were trying to do was create international empires, all over the world, and enforce the one culture, with, in some cases (hi, Germany) the idea that eventually the whole world would be like them.

I don’t care what they call it. Particularly when you look at the alliances of the ruling families (kings, queens, emperors, empresses, and princes and princesses) it becomes obvious that it was an overarching supra-national elite trying to add more regions to their already vast domains, and make their dominance world wide if possible.

They were not, despite the nationalism of those in the trenches, fighting to preserve their own tiny countries, but their vast international alliances and empires.

Yes, the Germans were the most rampant case of this and they were stopped by the sacrifices of those in World War One and World War Two. And we’re grateful for that.

Our degree of gratitude doesn’t change, but their wasted sacrifice might make us furious when we see the global elite has either achieved their objectives through other means (We’re looking at you EU) or are trying to achieve the rest of it by even stupider means (We’re looking at you WEF.) Oh, and let their buddies in the Soviet Union go a-colonizing for most of the 20th century, and would do it again (the Soviet Union never really existed. It was always Russian colonialism) given half a chance. And are now trying to distract us with a fun proxy make-believe war.

World War I was not caused by nationalism. Though it shocked various internationalists, including the Marxists, that individuals would fight to preserve their countries against internationalism, rather than the workers of the world uniting.

It was caused by colonialist impulses and imperial land grabs.

We — nationalists — have been at war with internationalism for a long time, and it’s time we recognized it, shedding the wrong stuff we were taught.

Yes some cultures are appalling judged on the only standard that counts: Do they promote human productivity happiness and health?

Yes, cultures can change. What they can’t is “directed change.” America has infiltrated more cultures than I care to mention from the beginning, purely by example. Yep, some of the results — I’m looking at you, French revolution — were appalling, because they were the result of our principles being taken up by an entirely different culture, that couldn’t process them as we did. (Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Note this is what I mean that a world-culture would be unspeakably alien.)

It’s entirely possible overtime we can change most cultures into being more functional and better for their members. But we can’t do that by imposing it from above. (Is looking seriously at the EU where most of the members are behaving like conquered cultures. And therefore becoming increasingly more dysfunctional.)

Colonialism is evil because it wounds existing cultures, and often imposes more dysfunctional ones. But even functional cultures, as colonizers, can cause splintering they don’t understand and can’t prevent. It might be needed but it’s always a form of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Imperialism, the formation of vast international empires, is a form of colonialism, whether under the banner of the Soviet Union, the WEF or Kaiser Wilhelm.

Cultures evolve in isolation. In our hyper connected world, they’ll change and meld through contact. The best we can do is denounce the bad changes. And keep the local identities as much as possible.

Because in the end, nationalism is good. Despite our fantasies — and I often have them — both a culture imposed from above — whether a real or synthetic one — and a world in which our physical location doesn’t matter are unworkable. And if they worked, they’d be nightmares.

Even as we live and work across borders, even as we borrow each other’s food and clothing, it is important to remember that the national culture evolved for a reason, and that everything we experience of other cultures must be experienced through our culture.

It is important to remember other cultures we come in contact with are intrinsically different and shaped through millennia (or in our case centuries. Hey, we’re the annoying genius kid) of different evolution. Evolution suited to the needs and location of the majority of people.

It is important to remember that every immigrant-group will bring culture with them, and that they will process their acculturation through their culture. (For individuals acculturation is more complete and faster. Not to say that it’s always 100%. It’s not. See my figuring out I was not an extrovert.) This is one of the reasons open borders is stupid. (Sorry. Yes, I badly wanted to believe in a borderless world. But that just guarantees the least functional, most predatory culture wins over all. No.) It is also one of the reasons that countries should be able to vet who comes in, and keep it — if possible — to individuals. And countries must demand and enforce acculturation and integration.

Because cultures will war with each other, openly or not. And because there are no noble savages, and the deep background of our culture was formed in a time of utter savagery, if you let cultures war, the least functional will win.

Cherish your national culture. Protect your national borders.

The dream of a borderless world is a nightmare, where elites completely divorced from the regional beliefs and needs rule all, according to their arbitrary will and their philosophical illusions.

Think of the different cultures as the founders thought of states: Little laboratories of humanity, competing (but not warring. Not if we limit immigration and don’t try to grab each other’s land and people) to see which is best for humanity. The best at achieving prosperity freedom and innovation will spread naturally.

Which is why all over the world, the future already comes from America.

Let’s make it a functional future. Let’s make it an American future.

Get to it.

Stock Up Now for Galt Month By Overgrown Hobbit

June is supposed to be Pride month. I was told I’d need to apply for a religious exemption to avoid being mandated to celebrate it.  I shouldn’t be suprised: Corporate is also keen on Greed, Gluttony, and Wrath year-round.

It’s tragic. It’s horrifying that virtues like self-mastery, charity, or humility are opaque to these perverted aristos. Who do we little people think we are, wanting honesty or dignity? It’s “See deer, point horse, peon.” We’re supposed to know our place as demoralized consuming/producing mules in their economic fiefdoms. Up is down, down is up, cruelty is kind, and decency is perverted: All the better to enslave you with, my dear.

So let’s not. And not tell them we did.

I know loads of us are already trying to follow the advice of Mr. Niemeir here. But it’s tricky, and hard to disentangle oneself completely, all the time. https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Give-Money-People-Hate-ebook/dp/B087C4V1GM

Maybe it’ll be easier for just one month, eh?

I ran across a suggestion a commenter I know posted over at Rod Dreher’s blog:

This year, let’s kick off a general economic strike on June 1st.   Don’t buy anything not absolutely necessary. Buy your groceries: That’s it. Whatever you can buy from farm stands with cash, do that. Planning a major purchase? Punt it to July. We’ll be washing dishes by hand for thirty days. Make do with clothes, shoes, what have you, until after June 30th. Find ways to avoid all but your most essential purchases.

I think a sudden drop of 10 – 15% in expected earnings could really drive the point home, especially since June is the end of the quarter. I’m told these sociopathic pool noodles live and die by their earnings reports.

If enough of us #GoGaltJune maybe the oligarchs will get it through their thick heads to just quit with the whole patronizing proselytizing Pride malarky* already and leave us alone. Leave our kids alone.

Me, I’m off to fund the The Wise of Heart

https://www.fundmycomic.com/campaign/113/the-wise-of-heart

and Draco Alchemicus https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rachelfultonbrown/draco-alchemicus before May 31st.

How ’bout you?

Godspeed.

*This is Sarah. I’m not overgrown hobbit, the author of the guest post above. And I didn’t originally have a problem with Pride parades. Look, in most cities it was rather dorky people shouting “We exist and are allowed to.” That’s …. whatever.
HOWEVER the “Pride month” and “Mandatory celebration” have stepped on my LAST NERVE. People are what they are, and being gay is not the worst thing, but why the heck would we “celebrate” it for a whole month? Even motherhood is celebrated ONE DAY a year. And corporate-mandated celebration? No. I realize they want a fascist state, but just no. These are my middle fingers. I endorse this here hobbit’s suggestion. – SAH*

In Flanders Fields

By John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high.

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Barbarella: The Center Cannot Hold #4

Prepare to enter the ultimate unknown! Barbarella, Vix and Taln know where to go to discover the galactic secrets of the Unnamable. Unfortunately, that means travelling beyond the edge of our galaxy and into the next — assuming they survive the termination shock on the way through! It’s a massive risk, but the chance to avert a galactic war that would kill trillions makes the lives of two females and a male hologram seem small by comparison — though maybe not to them!

FROM JONATHAN SOUZA: The Winter Solist: The Last Solist #2

Adelaide Taylor has survived her first semester at school and as a Dawn Empire Solist. She’s found her first Companion, Sayuri Suisha. Sayuri’s grandfather wants to meet his only grand-daughter’s new friend. In Japan, just before New Years. Along with that, she’s gotten a warning-one of the High Fae is hunting her and is planning to ensnare Adelaide in her schemes.
There’s a girl in her school that has been set up as a tethered goat for Solists.
Her local and very Catholic high school is putting her into places that shouldn’t happen at a Catholic high school.
And there’s a monster eating prostitutes in Queens.
Nobody ever said being a Solist would be easy…

FROM C. V. WALTER, JACK WYLDER, JESSE A. BARRET ET AL, AND WITH A COVER INSPIRED BY BRIAN LEE GNAD: Postcards from Foolz: Postcards from Foolz .

The rules of the game were simple: one image. Fifty words.

Twenty authors met the challenge and excelled, and this volume records their efforts. Between these covers are complete stories that will take a moment to read, and ages to forget.
If your appetite is whetted, you’ll also find that images have been provided for you to practice your wordsmithing skills. So that you, too, can try the next Postcards challenge.

Go on. Write!

FROM DALE COZORT: Snapshot II: The Necklace of Time

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Secret of Pad 34

Who would put a ceiling on humanity’s expansion into space?

That’s what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.

His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.

FROM DANIEL ZEIDLER: The Standard-Bearer’s Oath

Avenge the fallen. Restore honor to her people. Someone else can be inspired to liberate the kingdom.

Fourteen years after Sarbotel fell to the armies of a mad alien mage, Ilse is the last surviving member of her resistance cell. When she’s offered a chance to return to her homeland, she chooses vengeance instead. Allying with an immortal Guardian who has reasons of his own to want the mage slain, she’s out to put an end the Tyrant’s despotic rule.

The stakes are higher than she knows, for if Ilse fails to defeat the Tyrant, the entire planet may be destroyed…

FROM KAREN MYERS: Monsters, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That

A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That

MONSTERS – Xenoarchaeologist Vartan has promised his young daughter Liza one of the many enigmatic lamedh objects that litter the site of a vanished alien civilization.

No one can figure out what they’re good for, but Liza finds a use for one.

ADAPTABILITY – The Webster Marble Deluxe Woodsman, Model 820-E, has been offline for quite some time. Quite some time indeed.

Good thing Webster has a manual to consult, and a great many special functions.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Enchantments And Dragons

A wizard must produce justice enough to satisfy a dragon.

A young man tries to rob a tiger’s lair.

An enchantress tries to keep a court safe while they ignore the perils of misusing her magic.

A lady finds that court intrigues can spread even to the countryside.

And more tales.

Includes “Over the Sea To Me,” “Dragonfire and Time”, “The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn”, “The White Menagerie”, “The Dragon’s Cottage,” “Jewel of the Tiger,” and “The Sword Breaks.”

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: SEEMLY

Like sand through an hourglass indeed!

I wonder how much of America’s tendency to get mad slow (and burn very hot when we get to anger) is because we’re all very busy living our own lives and barely have time to stop and think?

Having lived in other countries, most others have more free time. Now, they pay for it in various ways, mostly in reduced opportunities/ability to do things. BUT they still have more free time. Time to sit around in coffee shops and to se bavarder about politics. In the states, not so much. We still work, often even on weekends, just on things we want to work on, rather than our jobs.

On the other hand, all of the world is busier than it was, even a century ago. There are multiple reasons for this: mostly because the government takes so much of what we produce that even most women have to work outside the home. It’s not a choice.

But also because well, even in the rest of the world it has become much easier to do or be or learn something else after work hours.

This is unheard of. Part of the reason for much slower narrative styles in the past is that people had a lot more free time filled with boredom. Well into the middle of last century.

Looking at the outrages perpetrated and the fact people haven’t rebelled makes me wonder about… well, about the perennial “why people haven’t rebelled yet.”

Because we’re busy. And tired.

Yes, demographics has to do with it. Demographics and corruption of education means most working-age people are working their behinds off.

And there is lack of ability to do much beyond being mad. Younger people, like in France, do have time to protest, usually on the stupid side, and that too is because they can’t find work. (See corruption of education. And yes, Pope Francis is often an *sspopehat but when he said the biggest problem confronting the world was youth unemployment, he might not have been wrong. It’s just that his solutions are likely to break everything.) But there aren’t that many young people. So they’re not going to be a force as they were in the sixties and even somewhat seventies.

This is why the Tea Parties and the Gillettes jeunes (I’m sure misspelled. It’s been years, and I’m dyslexic) of France were a big deal. It was the Silver Hairs getting involved.

It should have been a warning to the governments and the social-distractors.

We’re very busy, but not so busy that we can’t be angry. And we’re angry.

Remember mom and dad’s injunction? Don’t make me stop this car and come back there!

Well, if you make us stop our very busy lives and come back there, you won’t like it. It won’t be pretty.

But we’ll take care of the problem fast and set things right, because we have work we need to get back to.

And we’ll give the statists and the kakistokrats something to cry about.

We’re almost at stop the car and come back there. I can feel it. And all I can do is pray it’s not violent and doesn’t set the world on fire.

Of course it’s useless to tell the idiots to stop — metaphorically — touching their sister.

All we can do is keep our tempers hot but in check, and come up with solutions that don’t burn everything down.

If you’re a praying kind, pray.

Because it’s going to be difficult. And we need a miracle.

Distraction only works for so long. And makes everything worse when people get tired of it.

I’m okay. I was finishing setting up my office.

For explanation, I don’t talk very well to myself, so I have to look at my behavior to see what’s wrong. For months now, I’ve been working from the lazy boy in the family room. This is fine, of course, except that I’m working on the laptop, which has all the social media. Which means I haven’t been able to stay out of it, which means…. writing is slow.

It finally dawned on me that my previous office was the darkest room in the house, despite my lining every possible surface in mirrors. At the same time it dawned on my husband that us being in separate offices because of our music dueling didn’t work very well since our offices were side by side, and pointed out our happiest days were working in the same office.

So…. I am now in his office, having moved all the hobby stuff that used to take up most of the room where he had an office in the corner. It is now in the former office.

IT SHOULD HAVE TAKEN me a day. Anyway, yeah, all week. Apparently I’m not 35 anymore.

However the new setup should help with productivity.

Meanwhile, I bought the two little tigers a magnificent play structure. Dan says it’s way too extravagant, but–

That’s Indiana-Pollux. We don’t know where the very beautiful Helen is. Probably downstairs, cuddling Havey. She does that.

When I was little I was punished for telling lies. It didn’t help my budding sense of morality that half the time the lies that I was punished for were the truth, sometimes expressed bizarrely because I was kid.

Look, I know why the family didn’t believe I’d met a bubble gum pig. But it was pink! Really pink. And I did come nose to snout with it.

And kids, should, indeed be told lies are wrong. For why go and see Jordan Peterson.

However, for truly screwing up people look to official education and/or the activists with agendas that captured it.

I don’t know who thought it was brilliant to tell black people in the US that they were the first people enslaved in history, ever, and that it was all due to racism. I know they were already doing this in the 80s and before, because, after finding out a black friend believed this (and disabusing her) I confronted another friend who was a history teacher and she told me that of course they couldn’t tell black people that slavery had been endemic since pre-history, mostly among groups so homogeneous we can’t tell them apart, or that most black people brought to the US were enslaved by Arab traders. Why couldn’t they tell them that? “It will hurt their self esteem.”

I don’t know about you, but to my mind that is bizarre and exactly opposite. To think my people were the only people so weak as to be treated as chattel by other humans, and/or that every other race hated us would instead reduce me to a gibbering mess, and it probably explains the demand for reparations from people who were never slaves paid by people who never held slaves.

And before the usual “oh but other slavery wasn’t slavery. Slavery in the US is uniquely–” can it. Depending on when and where slavery could be — and still is, because it still exists — far worse than US based slavery. Yes, masters could kill slaves out of hand, including in ancient Rome for vast periods of time. And in Africa the Dahomey sacrificed slaves they took over the tombs of their kids. They sold the leftovers to America. Slaves in other places can be and often are treated much worse and much more as chattel than black people in the US. In fact, the US had a higher slave-survival rate than practically anywhere, and frankly there must have been a ton less rape on average. Why? Because black people are still — waggles hand — theoretically recognizable as such in the US (seriously, Megan Markle is less black than I am, in appearance.) Because in other places, the ones that didn’t die were um… integrated. The entire population became slightly darker. (Yes, there are other things at work there, but still. Given enough rape there would be no difference. See blue eyed Indians. And the rape there went both ways.)

So why tell people poisonous lies that will cause them to hate their country for no reason that makes any sense historically?

Every country had slavery. In the Iberian peninsula Moors and Christians enslaved each other with such gusto that being redheaded or blond was more likely to be true of Moors. (Visigoth slave concubines.) The US? it was questioned from the moment of its formation. Because our Constitution is antithetical to it. The Civil war was baked in from the beginning.

Sure, there were a lot of eugenics-like-writings here and elsewhere to justify black slavery. Because at some level Western conscience was prickled by it. Doesn’t mean it was universally accepted. No one writes essays on walking on two legs and those defending wearing clothing are rare. Because these practices are not controversial.

So, why lie? Unless you have rats in your head and think victimhood is a good, this lie is nothing if not poisonous. It robs people of their true history and weaponizes them as the tools of the “activists.” The answer to “You had slave ancestors” should always be “As does every human. They might out weight free people as ancestors of everyone.”

The same is true for the condition of women. Ah swear to bog if I hear one more frigging line of bs disguised as Regency books, on women being utterly without agency and unable to own property till sometime in the 20th century I’m going to pop a vein.

Yeah, the upper classes were different, but even in Regency England, women owned property and controlled it. Women started and ran businesses and even the richest and poorest of women contributed financially to the household. It was different in noble households because NO ONE was supposed to have a money-making job. (The newer kids equating noble with financier is hilarious. That’s not how any of that worked.) Women still were supposed to have dowries set aside for them. In fact, the whole problem with eloping is that you’d have no protections against he man grabbing your money. But most women didn’t elope. (Whatever the romances show you.)

And in the poorer households, women absolutely worked. It might be “just” keeping a garden and poultry. There’s a reasons people talked of “egg money.” Or it might be weaving or piece meal work at home.

Now this was mostly woman’s work: Inside, safe and boring, with a side of can be done while minding the children. Like my writing. And it brought in proportionately about what I brought in the first ten years after the boys were born, somewhere between 5 and 10k. But my contribution allowed us to live in a house we couldn’t otherwise afford.

My mom not only made most of the money in the house — yes 20th century. Portugal. You needed permission from your husband to work outside the home, didn’t have the vote, and had no right to your own kids in case of separation — but also started investments from saving on the kitchen expenses.

To say women had no agency at all till they were allowed to work in the public sphere and take leadership positions there is nonsense. Women always had agency. In many ways, women make society exist.

The problem with the lie that women “took” their rights from men, instead of being given those rights by men who knew it was fair and just is that it sets men and women on an adversarial footing and prevents women work from being valued.

This is how we got to the best women should be bad men. And it’s wrong. And we’re dying from it. There is a great loneliness stalking the land, and meanwhile women are worried about men “taking our rights.” How they think men can do this is beyond me. Sorcery?

And if it were possible, the crazy adversarial fixation is more likely to ensure it.

Look at the lies. Particularly lies about history. We’re being robbed of our history. And all the lies told to us all through the 20th century haven’t helped anything.

Find out the truth. Then disseminate it. Because a false past, no matter how pretty, won’t help anyone.

Phantom — in comments, recently — mention at the basis of all the leftist policies is the idea of overpopulation: the Malthusian hot mess that believes humans, like some kind of fungus will reproduce till the Earth can’t support them.

I’d never realized that. It is true sort of, though it’s perhaps based on an even crazier premise which in turn is at the very heart of not just socialism/communism but the idea that anyone gets to arrange all of human life from the top down, to spare individuals’ making wrong decisions. Which is, objectively, an idea so crazy that you can’t figure out how any human alive can think it.

And yet, if your theories tell you that humans are too stupid to stop reproducing when they’re starving, then any level of intervention is justified, because, OBVIOUSLY humans are brainless.

This tells me, btw, that good old Malthus understood bupkis about human biology. People can reproduce on relatively poor nutrition, but if actively starving, your body will reabsorb the embryo. And with anything short of the pretty decent nutrition of say the late 18th early 19th century (much improved over previous centuries due to among other things relatively cheap world-wide commerce) not only will you have trouble getting pregnant, but also you’ll have trouble raising that child to adulthood. So, when Malthus was getting his freak out on it was due to an increase in the ability to feed people that led to an increase in successful pregnancies and raising children to term.

No? Go read any story of a village or biography of a normal person, in early to modern times. Getting pregnant at all was difficult, birth was often lethal, and you often needed to have 10 kids to raise two or one.

But Malthus saw the increase in his time and thought “this goes on forever” and people can’t think or control themselves. Which makes perfect sense of the fact that he hooked up with Marxist ideas to become foundational to the left.

That it is wrong goes without saying. I actually don’t have any idea what the population of the world is, which is fine, because neither does anyone else, including those who’ve made their entire career out of proclaiming we’re eight and a half billion.

In fact, no one knows, because this data is collected by international organizations designed to pay per-capita to “struggling” nations. (Or struggling people in general. I think our underclass numbers are vastly exaggerated, which might be the point of importing more via open border.) Struggling nations can no more count their population than they can do anything but enrich half a dozen kakistocrats. So they estimate what will bring those kakistocrats more money and attention, internationally. For that matter, chest-beating would be empires (snort) like Russia don’t really have the ability, or interest in counting their population. Instead they come up with a highly flattering number and fly that. I’ll point out the fact they admit they have demographic trouble tells you it’s actually much worse. Same for China, and for that matter Arab countries. Look, if most of the real patriarchies of the world sent out a survey, it would go mostly to men, right? (Even in Portugal when I was little it went mostly to the head of the family. I.e. a male.) And if you think any male in the third world patriarchal cultures is going to write down he has fathered less than 10 kids, you’ve never met one of them. For context, though dad wasn’t Latin enough to claim more kids, he did report my weight wrong when he went to register me as being born at home, because being a tall and broad shouldered male, he assumed if he reported less than 3.5 KG everyone would think he’d been cuckolded. Look, he had scientific training. This doesn’t mean the culture wasn’t in there, giving him rats in the head that even his very premature daughter had to be big or people would assume she wasn’t his.
That’s a very minor incident of data corruption, and dad is not backwards, and Portugal wasn’t really third world. Now apply that to most of the world. Then tell me why you trust the statistics and numbers that come from these places.

So, I don’t know what our population is. But I know we’re not 8.5 billion. We’re probably not 5 billion. And I suspect the replacement of population worldwide has been in free dive from the early seventies and only higher longevity for the elderly has masked it. That and attributing high birth rate to the places of the world that not only absolutely can’t count but get paid for estimating more people.

And no, most people haven’t been not having kids because of world population. Most people have curbed childbirth because children are expensive, emotionally and physically demanding, and having a kid is as one of you said “Consigning a part of your heart to running around in someone else’s body forever.” And frankly, the state is already taking so much from each of us, not only in money, but in the labor required to even file for tax calculation, that most of us are running full tilt eyes closed before children. This might be intentional on the government’s part, or just their tendency to take every dram of available time and energy, so you can’t rebel, anyway. And that’s worldwide, btw, at least in places that function well enough to have even a government as such, and not a mob that claims to be a government.

Speaking of, Malthus was sure we’d run out of food. I’m not sure we would have, even without the wonderful innovations in agriculture and refrigeration and processing. Someone with more time and patience for the research can do it, but in the famines I’ve researched, from the 18th century on, almost all were what I’d call political famines. There wasn’t a lack of food. Your government/tribe/conqueror/despot just didn’t let your group have any. Absolutely nothing with too many people for the world to feed.

In face, our current afflictions are doing their level best to create a world wide famine, even if it necessitates sacrificing all agriculture to Gaia.

Which brings us back to okay, so we’re not overpopulated. There is no need to control humans from above to stop that kind of death for the species, but what about all the other stuff.

Scratch a statist and you’ll hear “Humans are stupid. I need to control them for their own good.” Which frankly always makes me want to ask them what is their species/planet of origin. Oh, they’re human? Well. Humans are stupid, shut up. (They are not wrong, btw. Humans are stupid. Which is why we can — barely — trust each human to do what’s best for him/her. Asking a single human to know what’s best for the entire species is just … bizarre. And impossible. Heck, asking a human to know what’s best for anyone beyond his immediate family — and even there the errors overwhelm the wins) is mental. BECAUSE humans are stupid. All humans. Perhaps particularly those who think they can decide for others.)

But a lot of socialism originates in “there is so much suffering in the world” from sob sisters — most of them male — who grew up well off and suddenly realize not everyone can afford bespoke shoes.

Seriously, a lot of early 20th century communists were motivated by their desire to elevate the poor, and make sure everyone had education, and everything they themselves had. Which of course starts with imagining everyone values what they do. (In that sense Pygmalion (or whichever was the original play) at least got some “poverty” was self inflicted. It came from a rooted belief the well wisher was superior to the object of his charity but it wasn’t ill intentioned, or at least not perceived as such by the person him/herself.

Of course, trying to eliminate suffering passed through redistributing everything, without attention to actually made or created and who were parasites, and it passed through feeding all the mouths, regardless of whose, by confiscating the food others grew to give to those who didn’t have it. In the process the idea that this “socialism” (I remind you the USSR itself never called itself communist) should also create a designed evolution of man, to eliminate what was viewed as the cause of suffering: self interest whether in work or sex or….

The end result was mass deaths, as it would be. Of course.

I don’t know how any of you were my kind of crazy as a kid, but I was always bringing back a bird (or puppy, or kitten or even mouse) who’d gotten injured/orphaned/was too young to live on its own, and ran makeshift infirmaries in cardboard boxes, bins or for older birds or birds almost well enough to be released, the upstairs bathroom.

Whenever I dragged one of my sad cases home, mom would flinch and say “You’re only going to prolong their suffering.” Which of course was true, except that my rate of loss was actually less than half. I mean, did they suffer more than just getting their neck swiftly wrung? Sure. But most of them recovered to go back out/be adopted/live their lives. Did they suffer more that way? Undoubtedly. If nothing else, they eventually died, because I don’t assume any of them became immortal. BUT they got to live for a while, most of them.

However, as Jordan Peterson says every human life ends in tragedy, and honestly every animal life too. So yeah, eventually they suffered more.

And that’s the problem. Eventually the only way to save humans from suffering is to kill them — even if your goal is to stop suffering, and not just to control everyone.

And this combines with the fact that once you make the state responsible for every individual, the individual becomes a debit instead of a credit in the column. The individual is always going to “cost” the state. Particularly if you let the individual get old. Particularly if the individual is not perfect. And if you believe there are already too many humans. There are always too many humans because they cost money.

Instead of being a credit, a self aware individual who makes enough for themselves and more, who creates and changes and enriches everyone, the individual at any age but the most productive becomes a debit. And from society’s POV it’s better if he’s dead.

And that’s why — as foretold in (my) prophecy — when the homeless start getting rounded up and killed, it will be the left doing it for “merciful” reasons. It’s already happening in Canada. When maladjusted, unhappy kids are killed without event he parent’s permission, it will be the left doing it. It’s also already happening in Canada. And when they round up the misfits, the gay, the trans, the too smart, the too dumb, the Odds, it will be the left doing it. After all, if they don’t fit in, the only way to spare them the pain of being a minority is to kill them.

When society decides it’s going to spare everyone suffering; when society decides everyone is a collective charge, a debit, then it becomes a ravening monster, swallowing humanity.

It always happens. And the collectivists have the nerve to look surprised and look for other reasons, like “nationalism” or “racism” or whatever. Every single time.

Each individual no matter how flawed adds something and is a credit, even if just by giving us someone to love and care for. And as such, every individual is indispensable and unique. You might not personally like someone, but it’s neither your duty nor your right to control their every decision and interfere in their every action. It is not your right nor your duty to dictate how your fellow man lives and dies. They can decide that each one by himself.

To value the individual is to value humanity. There is no other way.