Born Free
To those who believe in living after death, to those who walked across the sea dry shod from slavery to freedom and to those who (just?) believe in Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness which no government can thwart: Go live and build and refuse to let evildoers thwart you.
I’m taking the day off. Promo tomorrow.
*I’m finally feeling more or less human. Not well-well, but way, way better. Let’s just have some memes, shall we?*
AND BTW, NO LIE DETECTED:
AND NOW LEAVING BEHIND THE FILTHY POLITICAL STUFF, AND FOR MORE FUN STUFF. THOUGH THE FIRST IS STILL CLOWN WORLD.
*It seems like there’s a need to repeat this every April. Not sure why. Perhaps, to mangle Jorge Luis Borges, the idea must return every spring as return the numbers in a periodical cypher. I just felt a need to remind myself of this. And perhaps you have a need too. – SAH*
Yeah, okay, so we’re back to Rango.
You see, when I was sitting here (minding my own (or at least my characters’) business), what caught my attention FIRST was the owls saying “But the lizard will certainly die” as the poor domesticated chameleon is running through the desert facing a million perils.
There is something…. awfully familiar about those owls.
Oh, yeah, okay, Greek Chorus — though I’ll note those didn’t always predict misfortune, sometimes they predicted great honor, which is I guess next door to it, as far as ancient Greeks were concerned — look, I grew up with the classical forms, to the point that when I first wrote a novel I couldn’t remember any of the novels I’d read, not structure wise, but I remembered the tri-part structure, how scenes were defined, how acts were defined. Oh, and that I needed catharsis. To be fair, I still think you should have catharsis in a book. I’m forever amused by people who tell me their books shouldn’t have feelings. Or the ones who complain of “internal monologue” in first person. Yeah? You think you don’t have internal monologue going on 24/7? What do you think that voice behind the eyes is. Being ADD (AF) all I try to do is prevent my characters thought stream from interrupting itself. Sometimes not particularly successfully. (True story: Copy editor: you can’t end a thought with a dash. The character wasn’t interrupted. There’s no one else there. Me: The heck. You’ve never interrupted yourself?… I guess it should have been an indication I wasn’t QUITE normal.)
Anyway, beyond the Greek choir, it was familiar because — honestly — I’m getting sick and tired of the “Abandon all hope” stream. No, seriously. If I wanted that, I’d be hanging out at Zero Hedge or other sites known to be Russian dizinformazia.
(Gee, I wonder why Russia — or China — would want us to give up, buckle under and just give in to the current invaders’ demands and/or kill ourselves in despair. Either or– I mean the insanity of the left was being capable of believing that Russia would back someone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” HOW fricking stupid do you have to be about how nations work, and history to believe that shit?)
Even people who know better write long articles about how China is going to win and be the big hegemon forever, world without end. And now that the left stole — remember, they HAD to cheat — their way into power, we’re going to turn into China, and woe, woe, woe.
No matter how often I tell them — and I’m not alone, and frankly like looking at the Diamond Princess numbers when the “pandemic” started, this is only sense — that yes, that’s what China thinks. It might be what the left thinks too (the dumber ones, at least. The smarter/not crazy/not stoned our of their minds ones are just trying to get rich and run out the clock and not get a la lanterned). But their thinking it doesn’t MAKE it so. Yes, that’s what their moves trend to. BUT have you seen their idea of reality and how far it is from, you know, real reality? What makes you think that what they think is the perfect move is in fact a perfect move? They’re not playing 3 dimensional chess. They’re playing 3 dimensional tiddly winks on an invisible chess board that exists only in their minds, while using live frogs as tiddly wink pieces.
Sure, China is going to be the world hegemon forever…. In defiance of their very long history of in point of fact not having a clue other cultures EXIST or that other people are different from them. An history that, back when they were the most advanced people in the world meant they often turned tail and isolated themselves, rather than deal with those icky, icky foreign devils who were so utterly irrational.
But let’s go with that. Tell me, oh, wise ones, how does China feed her people, once they take down the US? Because without us buying their (mostly crap, TBH) products, out of our abundance of wealth, and feeding them with our cheap agricultural produce out of our abundance of production, China can’t in point of fact support itself. It collapses very fast and goes into one of their warring states periods.
Can that happen? Yeah, sure it can because Chinese blind spots mean they don’t understand they can’t stop the wheel of the world’s production and innovation and go on their merry way. They’re the Middle Kingdom. They need no barbarian power, and life would be much better without the barbarian power.
So yes, China will try to grind our bones to make their bread.
But my guess is LONG before they get to the point we’re there, they collapse. However, that’s neither here nor there. The truth is if they try to do that, they collapse.
And what are we doing then, under their heel? Sitting with our thumbs up our butts? Because why? We suffered a paralytic stroke? For one, once the left stops getting loads of Chinese monopoly money, THEY collapse. And probably run away, though you know what, I wouldn’t put it past them trying to rule from a bunker. They almost are right now.
This is the same with “It’s 1984, and the left will rule us forever.” What? Like all the other great totalitarian regimes in history, which within years couldn’t feed themselves? Sure, they’ll rule us forever, because we’re going to live on air and unicorn farts.
Also I’ll remind you that we’re bigger in landmass than Germany, bigger in population than Russia, and that even there the resistance in the form of a black market and various f*ck-f*ck games not only existed but arguably were the only thing that functioned.
I mentioned that I’d watched Le Roi Danse, in French for the love of heaven — though not precisely true. I watched various parts of it — and part of what struck me was that the insane man — he invented bureaucracy, you know? — was trying to build the model of the industrial totalitarian state. Except things weren’t to where he could yet. And now they’re well past it.
The 1930s were the ideal world for 1984. Since then? Not so much.
Yes, sure, But spying devices, they know everything about us, and reeeeeeee.
I know, I know, running around with your head on fire is great fun isn’t it? And believing things are hopeless absolves you from trying to do anything.
But if those spying devices/ubiquitous data gathering were so d*mn effective, they wouldn’t have NEEDED to fraud at the last minute, in plain view.
One thing the left can never process is that other people lie to them. It’s part of their conceit of themselves that they are the smartest people in any room, so they know they can lie to us, but us? Effectively lie to them? That’s not possible.
The other thing that none of the people running around with their heads on fire get is that no tech, none can process the masses of information these ass clowns are gathering.
Information gathering ALWAYS exceeds the ability to process it. Sure, they can process more now, but they can gather exponentially more. I recommend you watch The Lives of Others to understand this discrepancy.
This is why, ultimately, totalitarian states are ineffective and starve. Because their terror is ultimately always arbitrary which personally scares the crap out of me, but it doesn’t mean it scares the crap out of me HISTORICALLY. Sure, their random bullshit could kill me and mine. Meh. We all die sometime. But America will come back and go on. ALMOST for sure.
Look, we’re in a pickle and no mistake, and the bullshit we’re letting these idiots get away with is going to make my great grandkids (if I ever have any eh) work ten times as hard to have a decent life, and innovate.
But you know what? We don’t have an America to bail us out and enable us in our stupidity. By our sheer size, and the fact we’ve been the engine of the world for so long, if we fall nothing replaces us. Which is good, because it means we can’t go on playing at socialism while someone else grows the wheat and sends it over to feed us.
In the end, America will have to unf*ck itself, because there’s no America to come bail us out.
Or, you know, we go down into the stonnnnnnne ageeeeee forever. REEEEEE.
Except that’s never happened. Ever. Correction: It’s absolutely possible, if you’re a small tribe, and your place gets covered with a volcano. But with a world-wide civilization?
Bah.
The Lizard will surely die, yeah.
Just like it was surely going to die when the “hammer” of the Soviet Union fell. Except because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, its might was mostly smoke and mirrors, and could only persist so long as people like Jimmah Carter enabled them because they were so scared of this “vaunted might.” And the fact the Soviet Union would “inevitably” eventually win.
I grew up with this shit. No one who lived through it can imagine how all the serious people stroked their chins and told us about the great efficiency of the soviet union, and how they were going to win the cold war, or send the whole world into the stone age.
And then Reagan stood up to it. And told them “We win, you lose” and the whole thing crumbled, like the rotten illusion it was.
So, having been there? This whole “China will ruuuuuuuule us foreeeeeever” is awfully familiar.
Look, the lizard in the Diamond Princess is sunning itself on deck and laughing, while you run around screaming of doom. Just as they were back a year ago. AND YEAH I TOLD YOU SO.
But yeah, we’re in trouble and no mistake, with a Junta having taken over and hating us with a burning passion.
And? It’s not even the stupidest thing we’ve ever done. Tell me another country who ever banned alcohol. ALCOHOL for the love of Bob. And another government who went around poisoning alcohol.
FDR was a greater menace than these assholes. His every instinct was totalitarian and thanks to mass media, he was not even suspected of the shit he puled and thanks to the perilous knowledge/control of history he fooled a good 85% of the people. And those he didn’t fool thought they were alone.
Yes, yes, yes, I know. The Lizard will SURELY die. But not today. Probably tomorrow, by slipping in the shower. Maybe.
But you know what? Yeah, every human civilization is mortal.
But we’re not ready to be eaten by a hawk, or even a blinkered dragon yet. And we won’t be.
Unless, of course, the lizard convinces itself to lie down and die.
In which case, China still won’t win and certainly not forever. The left won’t win and certainly not forever.
But we can CHOOSE to lose.
The question is: WHY WOULD YOU?
F*ck that noise.
To quote President Reagan: In the end we win, they lose.
Be not afraid.
Today I’m going to do something incredibly distasteful. I’m going to teach you to be paranoid.
It’s been obvious to me — well before it was to anyone else — that while not living precisely in the Truman show, we lived in a carefully manufactured reality.
Oh, it’s not a conspiracy, though it contains conspiracies. It’s a prospiracy. Meaning that everyone having been indoctrinated in the same “verities” (which ain’t) and taught to see the world through a Marxist lens (if I had a dime for every journalist whom I heard say their job was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted! I’d never worry about money again) they all want to be on the side of those they perceive as angels, and manufacture consensus “truth” like one manufactures sausages.
Oh, they have to maneuver around some hard shoals of truth, because it’s hard to tell the empty belly it’s full, or the unemployed that he has a job. But they come up with excuses for that to protect presidents they love. They couldn’t make Obama’s misrule into a great new beginning or an era of plenty, but they tried. How many “Summers of Recovery” did we have, with even the Wall Street Journal joining into singing hosannas? And how many times did they make excuses, based on the state of the world, and what Bush had done, and this and that and the other thing. And now he’s in the rearview mirror they’re little by little burnishing his memory, talking about how great he was at this and that. In twenty years they’ll have it in the history books that his presidency was a time of joy and plenty, with the country united, and the only hardships were caused by Trump, who of course, knew nothing of management or money. No? Watch them.
If we continue lending them credence, that’s exactly where they’ll have us.
I’ve been aware of it since at least Carter, when I watched not only the press explain away the catastrophically high gas prices he inflicted on the country by saying we were coming to the end of oil, but the science fiction community, even, swing into step, and instead of bright futures of space exploration, start to write of miserable futures of scarcity and rust, where everyone behaved like villains. Because when the president is a miserable failure who shoots cats for sport, the only way to make him look good is to make every Jack and Jill a villain.
And then I watched the burnishing of the Carter years in the rearview mirror, the same as I watched them painting the Reagan years as miserable years of want and struggle and greed.
They lie to us, because they lie to themselves. Because their cult demands they be right, and history must be adjusted to fit.
As they used to say in the Soviet Union, we always know the future, because it’s dictated by the party and it’s the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat, ahem you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. It is the past that keeps changing, to retcon history to make the idiots in control always and forever heroes, instead of the scurrying rat villains that they are.
Their power is diminished now, this is true. The only people still reading the increasingly detached from reality newspapers or watching the official news (and don’t fool yourself that Fox isn’t converged) are people who are very busy or very old and usually the very busy are at least my age.
The cult of the “acceptable source” has diminished. Or at least it has split to acceptable sources on the right and acceptable sources on the left. Oh, and perhaps still acceptable establishment sources, but that’s smaller.
However, it is important to realize all those sources are still influenced by the big megaphone of main stream press, and still come through if diluted.
Yesterday at Power Line (Yeah, I know. Note I rarely link them anymore) I found myself reading a baffling article in which they talked of how Chicago and Wisconsin and whatever the other race was had gone left, and analyzing the causes. As if causes beyond “the vote is rigged” made any sense. They immediately fell into line with the big megaphone of the left, and accused those “agitating against abortion” of being guilty for the losses. Which frankly is why the left keeps agitating for abortion. Not because it’s an immensely popular topic or that the right talks about it much, after being quietly glad the national mandate was overturned, but because it gives them coverage for the massive, rank, obvious fraud.
And our side knows there was fraud. Impossible not to know in 2020, and those who paid close attention to important contests in 2022 saw it too, the same impossible numbers cropping up, as the automated fraud kicked in from the machines.
But because the mainstream press keeps treating those elections as legitimate, we eventually fall into treating them as such, and looking for causes for them.
It made me feel like someone watching people look for their glasses with them on their faces. Or carefully ponder what happened to the eggs, and ignoring the frying pan and oil, and the dirty plates.
None of this is unfamiliar to me. I was fortunate, at a very young age, to be present at historical events, and then read them described in the press, and finding no resemblance whatsoever. I’ve also been fortunate to realize that whether I was there or not, and no matter the verisimilitude, people will remember the lie oft told over the truth.
In fact, I will tell you it was easier for my parents to see the lie when reading the press under the national socialist government which fell when I was 11 — because they knew it was a lie and under censorship, and knew to read “pravda” by reading its entrails — than afterwards, under the succession of socialist and one or two outright communist regimes, and the lies became even harder to discern later after 78, under supposed “freedom of the press” where it became a prospiracy as what we have, and the directives from above more or a “Of course we should talk of x to advance y.”
Do you remember when Alaskan cruises were all the rage, because the left wanted to kill the Alaskan pipeline, and so they must go on and on about this pristine wilderness that would be “destroyed” and take as many influential lefties as possible through it, people who never asked how the pipeline would in fact harm this natural environment?
Right now the rage is all in cool electric cars. Because of course, the left wants to push the carbon free bullshit, as though it were possible, and didn’t cause more environmental destruction — unless you don’t count Africa.
And for a while they were trying to push the poor, oppressed illegals, though I think they found it hard going. But these themes will be everywhere at once, startlingly, because all of them rush to be the “good people” the (im)moral crusader no one needs.
The fact that now their big thing is to teach children weird sex is both baffling and a measure of how out of control their message machine is.
At the same time it’s a massive distraction. You should of course be outraged about it. And about the fact they’re trying to careen us into war. And and and
But you shouldn’t lose sight of the important thing: They’re doing all this because they’ve corrupted our voting system.
The only way to fight it that doesn’t involve blood up to our ankles is to fight it on that front. To do everything possible and impossible to restore voting integrity. The big things like repealing that fraud machine, Motor Voter, must be done once in power.
Meanwhile, it behooves us to not use machines. To vote late and on paper. (And raise holy hell on all fronts if someone has already voted for us) and above all to sound the tocsin and remind everyone that there is election theft, and it will continue until made to stop.
At this point no election can be assumed to be clean. To assume so is to give them power and legitimacy they don’t have.
Sound the tocsin. Sometimes it’s all you can do. Refuse to forget the theft.
And when you read the news stay alert for “why is everyone talking of THIS now?” and stay alert to discontinuities in the story, things that made no sense. They will describe x as leading inevitably to y, but there is no connection, either in fact or even — often — in Marxist fables.
Take the current rise in crime. They will tell you it’s because people are poorer and therefore are committing more crime. But that connection only exists in the minds of Marxists. Poor people are not likely to steal because they’re poor. The crime rate is probably the same, rich or poor. It’s only the crimes that are different. However, the left letting murderers, rapists and thieves out of jail (or into the country through the wide open border) has indeed increased the crime.
When they talk of increased automation, and “AI” causing unemployment, remember they used the same excuse under Carter. It is no such thing, but their onerous regulations (Biden signed a boatload last week) and taxes and instability causing the economy to buckle.
Pay attention to those explanations that make no sense, to the events that disappear from the front pages or are never mentioned, to the lacunae and omissions or outright obvious lies.
By remembering the Diamond Princess Covid-19 numbers, I stayed clear-eyed about the rather minor impact of the virus and how out of proportion the response was.
What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
Robert A. Heinlein
There is no truth in pravda, but there is truth in the lacuna, the omissions, the “wait a minute, that ain’t right” in the “it was there, and it was nothing like that.”
Find those. And hold them. No matter how tempting it is to forget and join the consensus. No matter how easy it is to think “I must be wrong, because they all say that–“
Find the facts, and hold them. And steer by them. We need people aware of the truth, as the gaslighting machine that our overculture has become spins us further and further from reality.
Because reality is that which will kill you, even if you deny it. Reality is what you must live with, even if you’re away with the fairies in your mind.
Reality is a stone cold bitch. It never forgives.
But if you live by her, if enough of us lives by her, there is a chance, slim but possible, that we can get through this and emerge on the other side as the free nation we were meant to be.
Again and again, what are the facts? Go find them.
The audacious masculine is taking extreme, foolhardy, risks simply for the right to say, “I can SO do it!”
In “The Devil Goes Down to Georgia”, a Georgia musician bets with the Devil. Now there’s someone you can count on to keep his word! The contest: who is the better fiddle player?
The stakes for the musician could not be higher – he loses everything, his very soul. To win gains him a fiddle made of gold. But it is clear that this contest, for the musician, is not about money. A gold fiddle is useless for making music. The reason for winning is for bragging rights. It would prove that the musician is so good that even the most evil being in existence, an inveterate liar, cannot help but acknowledge him.
For the Devil, if he wins, he destroys another soul. If he loses (and why would he admit to loss anyway?) he loses only a meaningless bit of matter – a fiddle made of gold.
The modern folk song by The Longest Johns, “On the Railroad,” imagines a work song that could have been sung by the workmen, including freed slaves, whose back breaking labor built the transcontinental railway in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States. “Sweat and blood gonna earn my pay,” they sing, and the grunts punctuate a tune that evokes a visceral sense of the immense physical exertion required; labor so hard that although the workman “ain’t no slave” he must “slave away,” where they “spare no quarter and… spare no man,” and each instructs the others that “if I should fall, leave me where I lay on the railway.” Grim, dirty, blood-soaked.
But in one of the middle verses, an audacious boast. The boss man has set a pace of a mile of railroad laid per day. And the workman sings back his boast: “I’ll make two for the look on his face.”
A stupid boast. Everything about the song says that a mile a day is already excruciatingly back-breaking labor. Why would the workman even try for two miles? What would he get for it except the boss’s expectation that he could try for twice the work per day that he had planned? And a more deadly pace for the workmen?
But the purpose of the audacious boast isn’t to win any material reward, just as it wasn’t for the musician. The musician must get even the devil to admit that he is the best musician, even should it cost him his soul. The railroad worker must stun the boss man with his sheer physical prowess, even should it cost him more sweat and blood and leave him fallen on the railway.
Why the audacious boast? What does each man gain by risking everything on something so meaningless?
In the end, each man triumphs over his opponent, who never had anything to lose, or even, actually, much to win.
The musician walks away from the devil, risking everything to play the fiddle the best that it can be played. And so, in risking everything in the boast, he becomes what he has boasted – the best. His music is better for his boast, and he has expanded what “best” means.
The railroad worker doesn’t walk away from the boss man. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Maybe he will fall on the railway to Frisco Bay. But he has given his sweat and blood and he has been paid. Even if he “slaves away,” this time he is “no slave.” He may have a boss man, but he does not have a master. If he makes it to Frisco Bay, he will have earned his pay, and while he has “dirt on his brow,” he also has “steel in his soul.” The boss man may only require a mile a day. But he knows he can do two. Because he is a free man and he chooses to so dispose of his labor.
The boast of the audacious masculine is that he will risk everything to go past what he has done before. If he fails, the price is catastrophic. But if he succeeds….
Through a mutual friend, I got something ESR said, and it struck me as profound:
“Voltaire can be inverted. If you’re willing to commit atrocities, this is a sign that you believe absurdities.” –
Eric S. Raymond
The context was a discussion of AI and AI advancements but that is not important right now.
The important thing is the actual meaning of those words.
We’re surrounded by not particularly bright or educated (though a lot of them are very credentialed and confuse that for intelligence), but very passionate people causally saying things like We need to reduce Earth population by several billion, or We must all stop eating meat, or We must stop using fossil fuels.
Each of those involves atrocities that would make Pol Pot blanch. Whatever they imagine, they have no idea what it would entail.
They might think all we need to do is stop reproducing. Say, sterilize most of mankind, and let population reduce quietly. But it’s never that way, of course. Even if you managed that, do you have any idea what removing people’s hope of connection to the future — most people’s only way to matter — and making them feel they don’t count? Ooh, boy. I could write an entire dystopian novel on the death and destruction that will follow. Entire industries would collapse, and the ability to feed those humans they left able to reproduce. The end of civilization comes shortly after.
Or let’s make meat too expensive and/or unavailable. Turns out — conversationally — children need a certain amount of animal protein to develop properly. And you have no idea what parents of a dying child will do. None. Again, I could write entire dystopian novels.
Stop using fossil fuels, this might sound very good if you are wealthy and live in an enclave where you can drive your electrical car everywhere and charge it everywhere and, oh, yeah, if you don’t know where electricity comes from. Not only is renewable negligible for electricity production, in the current state of tech, but to mine the materials for batteries is destroying (of course, poor continent) Africa and its children. And electric will never do for the transport of goods and materials that take to support a civilization. Not in current tech. And no, tech development is not something you an just create out of thin air by wishing it. The cold equations of physics are bitches that won’t move.
So, the various cities, states and countries happily jumping aboard the ban fossil fuels bandwagon are all on board to kill millions of people of famine and cold or heat. Atrocities.
And do they believe absurdities?
Ooh, boy, do they ever. Their minds are a collection of things that were never true with all the depth of a comic book for toddlers.
All of these people, who look at normal humans with hatred — humans are a plague upon the Earth, you know — and do acts of casual destruction, like pour out milk in the grocery store, or destroy art, or glue themselves to roads, or pass legislation forbidding fossil fuel want to kill you and yours. In their minds, the perfect world starts with destroying humanity.
Some delude themselves about the extent of the destruction it would entail, but a lot — I have in mind an elderly, seemingly kindly SF fan, who once started talking glowingly about “Earth changes” and his eyes shone, and he became animated about how billions needed to die, so we could have a better humanity and a better future — do and rejoice in this.
The absurdities this hatred for humanity rests on, are puerile, even stupider than “if only everyone.”
When someone starts talking about the necessity to eliminate most of humanity, interrogate their motives. Chances are they are inane, a tissue of lies and wishful thinking.
Resting on nothing but an unearned assumption of superiority.
*Look, I’m an old woman, so let me get the health talk out of the way first. This one is definitely not auto-immune as younger son had it first — and is just getting over it after two weeks — and now Dan has caught it from me. I’m better today. Yesterday the thought of crossing the room to get a book, say, was too much effort. Today I managed the dishes, a load of laundry and intend to sort clothes. The house is a screaming pigsty, but it will wait till tomorrow. Yes, I feel like I can, but I won’t. I know better. I roasted a chicken yesterday, and we’ll eat on it for three days easy, (It’s a roaster) then make the leftover into pot pie. So…. we’re fine, and I think head is clear enough to write, as opposed to yesterday. There will be nappage. FIL still lingers between life and death. Dan saw him on his last lucid day, so that’s good. Some deaths are difficult, just as some births are. Prayers requested.– SAH*
Please, when reading this post, take in account that I’m just on the very beginning of coming back from a URI, which means depressive is a state of being.
However, over the last few months, I’ve come to observe something strange.
To give a little blog history: one of the first commenters here was BobtheRegisteredFool. I’ve come to actually think well of him over the years, and these days his comments, except for the occasional slip, not only make sense but are often amazingly insightful.
However, when he first came to us — he now admits — he wasn’t doing well mentally, emotionally and perhaps spiritually. He’s dealt with it overtime, so this is not a put down, but I’m wondering if when he came to us he was a good sensor for clown car meeting dumpster fire ahead.
I mean, when he first got here, Bob often tried to incite war with Canada. Supposing — ! — we deal with ourselves, and restore freedom, this is now almost inevitable, as they sink deeper into the morass of New and Improved Cuba! (Who knew the illusions of sixties hippies could lead to this, eh? Castro’s bastard trying to emulate daddy in the great North?) Considering that communism created starvation in tropical Cuba, surrounded by an ocean full of edibles, imagine what it will do to Canada. By the time we uncluster ourselves, it might not be so much a war, as a mercy invasion.
He also urged war with Mexico, partly to stop the drug trade. I’ll note war on the cartels is now on the agenda should Trump get elected again and this time make it stick. (I’ll note that I don’t even disagree with this. One of my last days in Denver, we got stuck behind a car with custom body work that declared the driver’s allegiance to the Sinaloa cartel. When that is out in public, imagine how bad it is.)
I don’t see where a war on cartels, doesn’t involve a war with Mexico, considering the cartels hold on Mexico.
Whether that will lead to also giving junkies the death penalty, I don’t know, I wouldn’t think so, but in Bob’s world, anything is possible.
Also, whether or not we’re going to preemptively nuke other countries, is a mystery. I mean, we probably wouldn’t do it under a Republican admin, but under this one? Your guess is as good as mine.
In fact, ladies and gentlemen, this being Bob’s world, I advise you to drink a bottle of Scotch then hit yourself on the head with a mallet, then consider what comes next.
That’s probably the truth.
I woke up this morning and looked at the Bongino Report and…. well….
With the understanding this is half in jest, half in WTF World? and a realization that this illness might indeed have come to me at the right time, because I can’t do much more than this stuff…..
Lean back and enjoy the ride. Be ready to react if some glimmer of sanity presents.
Meanwhile:
It’s Bob’s World. We just live in it.
Or at least not dead. I’m not even — really == worse I just had a really bad cough over night, so didn’t sleep much, (mostly because I’d forgotten to buy cough syrup after the great coughening induced by blood pressure meds.)
And this morning I was really, really odd. I felt I couldn’t even. So this is the first time I got online all day.
I’m assured from watching this crud progress with younger son that the cough is the last stage and might drag three days, but I’ll be sure to have cough syrup on hand so I can sleep tonight.
Please forgive me. Worst part, I didn’t even write. Just grumpy and blah, and coughing.
I will do promo post tomorrow.
Have you ever been in a car crash? I have. It was a nothing thing — okay, it totaled the car, but I walked away — but it’s at the basis of my driving anxiety. Sometimes I manage the anxiety. Sometimes I’m incapable to and don’t drive for years at a time.
Which is stupid, because I know what caused that crash. We’d moved an hour and a half away. We’d left my car at the old place, and drove back to get it on Saturday morning very early. So early I forgot my glasses on the bedside table. I have hellish astigmatism. In fact, back then I wasn’t nearsighted. I only wore glasses because of the astigmatism. I became aware I didn’t have my glasses on halfway there, and I drove back fine, being extra careful. Except ten minutes from the new home, a bunch of cars had got between Dan and I, and I was afraid he’d turn, and I wouldn’t make the turn at a light. So I rushed. And the experience of it is that a telephone pole jumped in front of the car. Of course, it was the astigmatism giving that illusion.
But the experience was everything is fine, everything is fine, oh, sh*t! And by then it was too late to do anything about it. In my mind, it is hours between realizing I was going to hit and there was nothing I could do, and actually hitting and destroying the car.
Sounds stopped, there was an unnatural silence, and time became taffy, extending indefinitely.
As a country, we’ve been locked there since 2020. Which probably also explains how you feel. Tired and anxious, and often hopeless.
Because you can tap the brakes and try to turn the wheel all you want to. It’s too late to change. There’s nothing you can do except anticipate how bad it will be, and hoping you walk away.
Only it’s more like a crash in WWI, which, yes, sometimes you could walk away from, but not often. And you could burn to death in the crash far more than in the car.
If you feel like what happened this week makes it more likely that we’ll be consumed by fire in the wreckage, you wouldn’t be wrong.
But there’s not much you can do. Except anticipate the crash and maybe make it more survivable by positioning yourself slightly differently, clenching or not clenching, moving slightly back so the airbag doesn’t kill you.
All you can do is think through likely — remember LIKELY. No, going back to the middle ages is not likely, unless we get hit by the Sweet Meteor of Doom — scenarios and anticipate what you’ll need, and what to do.
Looking at my experience with a car crash, above, some other things to take from it:
Until then, hang lose. And pray the Republic doesn’t catch fire in the crash. And we don’t all perish in it.
There will be a post after this, but not April Fools.
This one is a brief update on everything: FIL still lingering, though at the stage that you have to check the monitor to make sure he’s still breathing. He stopped being responsive, etc. once husband had left. We don’t wish him death, but there is pain involved and he’s doped out of his mind, and it’s just…. lingering.
Meanwhile cold/flu/wtf I got from younger son (he’s such a SHARING boy) has progressed past the fever stage, which means I slept…. uh…. a lot. I’m sitting here in my nightgown contemplating showering. Right now, the big issue is coughing and my voice going away.
I’m not 100% but writing SHOULD happen today. Fortunately it’s a sitting down and moving only fingers position. So not exactly tiring. And before you all yell at me yes, ma’ams and sirs and aardvarks, I will be taking a midday nap.
Of course, the crazy brain went “No fever! Let’s clean and finish unpacking!”
To be fair both need to be done before the kittens get here, but also I’m not stupid, so no.
I’ll finish this not an April Fool’s Post with links to April Fools of Yesteryear for those with an insatiable apetite.
