Call them Banksters, it's as good a label as any...

 

by Craig Willms

They keep us divided, they keep us at each other's throats, they keep us fighting amongst ourselves. You can call them The Banksters, it's as good a name as any. They could be referred to as the Globalists as they certainly have orchestrated and benefited from the globalist agenda. They are a small but powerful group of men on both sides of the Atlantic that truly control the world, and they have for the better part of a century. National governments in most of the western nations are set up to transparently serve The Banksters. Most of our political leaders are just actors and pretenders - it is as they say, political theater. I suspect that the politicians know what they really are as they set out to stir the pot in order to keep us all jacked-up. They keep it hidden because in reward they become rich beyond their wildest dreams. 

The Banksters were on the cusp of 1984-style control of the world. Suppressed speech and social control through the use of surveillance with threats of incarceration already exists is some counties today. The advent of digital ID and a so-called cashless society is to be the final nail in our coffin. They obviously control global banking, they also control what we think and believe as they ultimately control the media and are the power behind the Internet ecosystem and of course, social media. As long as the hoi polloi are concentrating their ire on each other no one is looking at them. There are outliers and outsiders who keep challenging them. Think Vladimir Putin, think a Xi Jinping, think the Ayatollah among others. No surprise there. Now think Donald Trump! Yes indeed, it's not that Trump is in league with the others, but he is a sworn enemy of The Banksters just the same. Can The Banksters reach their objective of complete control before the veil is fully lifted? Time will tell.

They have, since the inception of the globalist age and before, used war among other actions to advance their cause. They manipulate money and currency until there's nothing left to squeeze out of any particular locality, then whip up a war, invading another sovereign nation to steal their resources. Rinse and repeat. For decades the U.S. has been their bludgeon. That is changing before our eyes. 

This is where Trump comes into the fray. If you've listened to what Trump has been saying for decades, long before he became the bloviator in chief, he's been decrying the globalist agenda that's been advanced by The Banksters for decades. His contention is that America is being ripped off and severely diminished as an industrial power. Coming on the heels of the America hating, socialist friendly Obama, Trump blundered toward the White House not really expecting to win, clearly. His bull in the china shop routine emboldened his detractors. The alarm bells rang among The Banksters and they jumped into action to stop him at all costs. No need to list all the schemes they used to discredit or incarcerate Trump, we only need to cite Russia Russia Russia. To a degree it certainly stymied him but it didn't seem to be enough to sink the ship. The conspiracy minded among us were not shocked when Covid-19 bloomed into existence just about the time the reelection machine was about to be revved up. It enabled the puppeteers to meddle with the 2020 election apparatus and rather suddenly Trump was out. The Banksters and their globalist cheerleaders had done it! Now with their dummy propped up behind the Resolute Desk the final push had begun.

In a twist of fate the marionette strings frayed and Biden fell off the rocking horse. With Covid-19 in the rearview the tide began to turn. It crashed down with a splash when Elon Musk purchased Twitter and removed the censorship shackles, showing that it could be done. It can't be overstated what this one move did to the narrative. Meanwhile Trump, having beaten back the dogs was poised to face Biden in a rematch. We all known what happened next.

With Trump back in power, the gloves came off. He and his team were ready this time, the learning curve behind them. The Globalist's agenda if not exposed to the light is at least being chased from the shadows. Britain and the rest of the European anti-Semites could hide behind "the Jews are controlling the world" for only so long, Trump is having none of it. The bottomless pit of U.S. arms and money was coming to an end. Trump wanted the wars to end, and if not ended, then U.S. weapons would be purchased not given away. 

Trump's team helped broker peace deals in several wars we weren't even being told about as well as the Hamas/Israeli war, all while giving the Iraqis a good thumping. For Ukraine and Russia there's been no lack of effort on Trump's part. He's not just saying things, he's doing things. 

The end of globalization is upon us. The world will still be a global marketplace but not dictated out of the European "club" in Davos Switzerland with its North American members. Via self-inflicted wounds Europe is destroying itself - Trump is merely helping them. With a hollowed out Europe gone as a global force it leaves only the U.S. and China. No other centers of gravity exist. One would hope you'd be rooting for the U.S. 

The Banksters won't go easy. Their network is immensely powerful. In all likelihood they'll outlast Trump and things will resume on the same trajectory as before the Trump-age. Before Trump their goal was to get their hands on Russia's resources (that's always been their goal). They foresaw a war between Russia and Ukraine draining Russia's war capacity with a bonus of the potentiality of Putin's government collapsing. They've been thwarting the push for peace at every turn. Ukraine is a sacrifice, The Banksters care nothing for Ukrainians. The corruption of Ukraine preceded Putin's invasion by a decade or two. It was NATO sabre rattling by the EU and the Americans that ultimately forced Putin to act when he did. Trump inherited this war, he didn't start it. 

Britain's military is currently training with Finland at the Russian border. Finland is a new NATO member but they have never been afraid of Russia - in fact they have been trading across the Russian border for hundreds of years. Now suddenly Finland is partnering with Britain in the event Russia invades? Something smells here. Britain has meddled in Russian affairs forever. Is it any wonder that the Russia Russia Russia affair was born in London and sold to Hillary Clinton to smear Trump in 2016. London is the financial center for The Banksters, so understand where this is all coming from. Putin is no saint, but he's been provoked and provoked and provoked again. 

The Trump administration has put The Banksters on notice. His detractors on both sides of the Atlantic think their hyper-rhetoric is a viable defense against his bloviating. They take the bait but Trump's rhetoric is merely to cover his consequential actions. Trump's real "warp speed" isn't a vaccination for Covid-19, it's thwarting The Banksters at every turn. Almost everything he's done in 10 months is with an eye toward dismantling their brand of globalism. 

Ten years has gone by since Trump walked down the escalator and he's still standing despite every thing they've thrown at him - including a bullet. He's currently targeting Venezuela. Why? The war on drugs? No, he's trying to interrupt the narco-money flow that serves The Banksters. The money that flows through the Caiman Islands and the Bahamas etc etc, is laundered and skimmed to benefit the globalist machine. The American media is ignoring it, if they can even comprehend it. Anything that can whip up hatred towards Trump benefits The Globalists. 

The media's reverence for the EU knows no bounds. They are willfully blind to the disharmony in every EU country as well as the UK. Average citizen's in Europe are so disheartened by what is happening to them that they actually pray for someone like Trump in their own countries. As with the Banksters, the EU elites are entrenched and powerful and seemingly do not care at all what the citizens want. 

Native born people want the mass immigration to stop. It is precisely what is destroying Europe as we know it. Biden's puppeteers had instituted the same strategy in the U.S. while claiming that only congressional legislation could stop illegal immigration. How convenient for them that Congress is totally dysfunctional and has been for decades. Obviously that presumption was false, Trump had the borders closed in a few short months.

The obvious conclusion to all this is that Western Civilization is being destroyed, and the native populations of Europe, North America and the Anglo world are being replaced. The upper crust and the university crowd scoff at this, but the rest of us have eyes. We can see how The Banksters through coordinated actions have discouraged white populations from reproducing. They pushed women wage war on maleness and not so subtly raised the cost of homes out of reach of young people. No harmony, no homes, no babies. It's beyond me why powerful white Europeans and their kindred spirits in America want this. Self hatred? Or do they think pliable populations of downtrodden immigrants will shut up and allow them their ivory towers to live like kings and queens while the rest live hand to mouth, gratefully so? Good luck with that.

Me, the conspiracy nut that I am, believe it's the final solution to Christianity and Judaism. The Devil's plan.

addendum: I do not posit that Donald Trump is some kind of hero or that he is above reproach. Frankly I wish he'd just shut up, I can't even listen to him for more than a minute or two. I am contending that he is doing what has to be done, however clumsily. The borders had to be closed. The hard leftism choking America had to be challenged. The military had to be rescued from wokism and social engineering. The corruption of USAID and other bottomless pit programs had to be stopped. Wars had to be stopped. Climate crisis nonsense had to be revealed for what it is, a fairytale and a grift. Transgenderism had to be called out. And The Banksters have to be resisted. The list goes on and on. These among many other serious issues had to be addressed and turned back toward reality. Our country was tumbling down the wrong path. Since Congress is doing nothing and hasn't for decades - someone has to act. 

What is True? The Narrative or Your Lying Eyes

 

by Craig Willms

What is true? Can you even know the truth? It's a real question, it's an important question, but ultimately it may prove to be unanswerable. Or is it as Jack Nicholson once declared, "You can't handle the truth!"

We hear the often-used quip 'there's only one truth'. Or this one, 'you're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts'. Is that so? Well, what is actually true? What are the facts? There are obvious truths like the fact that water is wet, and concrete is hard and so on. But even that's questionable, ice is water and it's not wet, and before concrete sets it's not hard. Truth is a slippery devil. 

Perhaps there are no simple truths. Who's to say. Setting aside the eternal questions and all the philosophical quagmires and just focusing on daily life "the truth" is even more perplexing. Looking at the news media, academia, the corporate and political arena the truth is nearly impossible to establish. Because of the Internet, I assume, with its access to many, many viewpoints, we've finally begun to ask questions that were historically stifled by the powers that be, the gatekeepers. It does not mean the truth has become clear, if anything it's more muddled than ever, but at least the subject is now open and is being examined. Many of the traditional icons of truth are being exposed as liars or charlatans. 

When are people going to think critically and take everything that comes from the news media with a grain of salt, instead of the holy grail. I can only speak to the American media but assume the rest of humanity is equally foolish. In America we've taken to calling the news media the alphabets. On one side, the blue side, we have ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, LAT, MSNBC, NBC, NYT, PBS, WaPo - the alphabets. On the other side, the red side, we have Fox News (or, that f_cking Fox News) and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. In the last thirty years we can add talk radio to this side. Radio? What's that? All kidding aside radio has declined exponentially in the modern era. It's gotten to the point where auto manufactures are not even going to include AM radio in new cars. Why cut AM radio? Could it be that's where talk radio exists?

Back in the day local newspapers and the three TV networks had the monopoly on the news we were fed. It was the pinnacle of trust in media, and the fact that they all said the same thing only solidified their lofty perch. What most people didn't know and still don't is that the media had been infiltrated long ago by the intelligence community (read CIA) which steers the media where they want it to go. They've only got in deeper as time passed. This isn't a goofy conspiracy theory it's been corroborated numerous times by people inside and outside the IC. It explains why the alphabets all work in lockstep within 'the narrative'. The narrative? A set of approved truths and beliefs. For sixty years now the narratives are always set by the left to the benefit of the Democratic Party. That f_ckng Fox News and talk radio became safe harbor for those resistant to the narrative, but they too were ultimately part of the narrative. 

The Internet age has opened the door for more discussion of more viewpoints allowing anti-narrative thoughts to get out. As podcasts and alternative news sources have proliferated the traditional media has lost a lot of clout, and rightly so. There is no more stranglehold on the news that's fit to print. There are numerous alternative narratives that are proliferated via the Internet, but none have their hooks in the greater culture like the major media, academia and corporate/government cabal. 

You would think that all these previously suppressed viewpoints would illuminate the truth, anything but. What this newfound scrutiny has exposed is the width and breadth of the approved narrative as the allowed truth. Stray from allowed truth and suffer the potential penalties of such misbehavior. The left's dominance for setting table for what is true may be coming to an end. The news media is the first to fall. Will academia be next?

The education industry from kindergarten to the Ivy League has become a cesspool of deception. This has been known for years. At the beginning the gate keepers of public education and state funded universities filtered what was taught with a decidedly pro-American slant. The negative aspects of American history were whitewashed or ignored completely. Schools were propaganda mills. Since the 1960's that has been turned completely on its head. In recent decades students are taught that the United States is the bane of the world. That is the current narrative. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Public primary education has been captured by the teacher's unions, and it serves the union's interests instead of the students. Parents are not welcome. In recent decades test scores have plummeted, and graduation rates have tanked particularly in the inner cities. Traditional subjects and courses were eliminated and culturally taboo subjects taught to younger and younger children. This fed the universities blank slates, young minds to be formed. The modern university is no longer a place for open discussion and an exchange of ideas. People who buck the narrative are cancelled and are run off campus. Those students who challenge the allowed beliefs are punished, eventually they either shut up or leave. The rest graduate with the narrative fully implanted.

Science and medicine are particularly touchy subjects. Science, the seeker of truth, is something to be admired. However, since so much of science is done by universities it had become captive to the narrative as well. Corporate and government interests have also stifled science by steering it into serving corporate profit or government control, as in the clout and regulation of the pharma business. Moreover, the science industrial complex as some have called it, is not involved in finding the truth as most people believe but interested only in the funding pipeline. To attract funding published articles in the prestige journals and university presses are paramount. There's a term for this that says it all - publish or perish. This leads to safe bets, not groundbreaking theories. In other words, don't rock the boat, and disavow and stifle anyone who dares propose disruptive new theories. Breakthroughs by oddball geniuses are becoming rare, because no one will fund the oddball. Is this science?

Science needs to be freed from this hamster wheel.

Corporate and political interests have bred a bottomless pit of untruth. There is no truth seeking, it's all deception, all the time. It's all designed to steer someone to buy a product or elect a so-called leader. The corporate/government cabal and the media that they control in turn control the narrative...

Controlled the narrative, that is. No longer. Things are changing.

It was Covid-19 that showed us glimpses of the truth. The mainstream media collectively revealed that they are the communication and propaganda arm of the corporate/government collective. Trust in media has fallen to its lowest point. It's not bouncing back as Covid fades. Science and medicine followed suit, "trust the science" was the command, which is whatever they said it was regardless of their own counter factual evidence. Rebel scientists and doctors were falsely discredited and, in some cases, fired for questioning the Covid narrative. Governments at all levels became megalomaniacal, threatening to smackdown anyone not following the lockdowns. Eventually, they demanded citizens submit to a potentially dangerous experimental vaccine (that wasn't a vaccine at all). Corporations fell in lockstep with the government and flooded the airwaves with ad after ad that spewed the Covid narrative at us 24/7. 

By the time of Covid social media had become the new way to communicate, and the traditional media didn't have the sway it once had. Social media companies prodded by the feds punished their users for daring to offer unapproved opinions. Here again government used its leverage overt and covert to force the large social media companies to comply. 

The skepticism of everything that we were being told was not suppressed. The gatekeepers were failing. Many doctors and scientists, influential people from all walks of life, used social media to counter the Covid narrative. Eventually, as Covid faded the evidence these people brought to our attention turned out to be true in many, many cases. The mainstream media is still hush hush, but the manipulation and lies, death and destruction of so many lives is all the proof needed to illuminate the nonsense, or better put - the danger of the narrative.

What is the narrative? It's not one thing, it's everything that supports leftism and degrades tradition, religion (except for Islam) and the United States, Western culture et al. Nothing demonstrates the depth of the insanity of the narrative like the transgender agenda. Beyond the belief that men can become women while still sporting a penis and should be allowed to use the little girl's bathroom, is the appalling practice of mutilating or poisoning young children who've decided they are not the sex they were born into. As if a child should be making such a dramatic life altering decision when they can't even decide which cartoon to watch. It's insane. Yet the narrative fosters an environment where doctors and health professionals around the world promote this abomination of the Hippocratic oath. It's not compassion, it's shameful.

The cultural narrative often flies in the face of evidence and actively retaliates against anyone who objects. Countless people, professionals and laymen alike have had there careers or prospects diminished because they pushed back on the approved narrative. Again the Covid saga illuminated what the keepers of the "truth" were capable of. Everyone suffered the lies and deception, but it backfired, and finally it can be called the nonsense that it is.

The demise of the narrative won't come easy, the damage that's been done is real, and the psychosis is deep for the true believers. The rest of us are corralled by it, whether we were paying attention or not. The populace became conditioned by the relentless repetition of the narrative from all corners. Setting the record straight will be a monumental task and it can go off the rails - in fact we can count on it going off the rails.

We can start by saying what we think, giving our opinion, arguing in good faith. Most importantly start listening to others that see it differently without resorting to draconian, Orwellian tactics in retaliation. Ironically, we can follow something the narrative has always shouted about, but for all the right reasons this time. We can stop the hate. In the end that's what the narrative is, hate, pure unadulterated hatred of anyone or anything that is not approved. 

America is not irredeemably racist. The police are not white supremacist brutalizers. The world is not going to end in three years six months and twenty-nine days due to climate change. Men, maleness and masculinity is not toxic. Conservatism is not fascism. Boys can't be real girls and girls can't be real boys. Illegal immigrants are not just undocumented workers. Conspiracy theorists are not necessarily nutcases. Appreciating a beautiful woman is not sexism, conversely a morbidly fat woman is not sexy. Profit isn't evil... This could go on and on, take any commonsense notion turn it on its head and you have the basis of the mainstream narrative.

Do we, as people, as human beings need a narrative to live by? I don't know, possibly, maybe. If we do, it can't be based on obvious mistruths. It can't be hemmed in by the cancellation of dissenters. The free exchange of ideas and opinions is essential, even the uncomfortable opinions. Just as important we can't impose the guilt of our ancestors on our citizens of today. These have been some of the tenets of the modern narrative. This narrative is collapsing, and rightly so. The worry is the ferocity of the pendulum swing. It's a valid concern but being that the gatekeepers of the dying narrative are still deeply entrenched in the culture the likelihood of slow, painful death is great. The pendulum has only begun on  its reverse swing.

The Harvest of Liberalism

It was on the radio that I heard a woman named Phyllis Kahn, a Minnesota state representative since 1972, declare that it was the Democrats that offered the best solution for new immigrants concerned about education. The talk show host pointed out that the Democrats have had a monopoly on education in this state for more than 4 decades. The largest district in the heart of liberal land - Minneapolis public schools -  has an embarrassing 50% graduation rate for all students and the worst graduation rate for African-American boys in the nation. The irony of her conjecture was lost on her, she simply wouldn't concede that the Democratic party was anything but "right" on education.

It made me consider the acute blindness of the left. In their closed minds their solutions for everything are simply right, there is no other way. Certainly nothing the right-wing or the libertarians believe should even be considered. Looking at the near total control leftist thought has over various institutions in American society and the condition of said institutions one would think there has to be a better way.

Taking education as previously mentioned, the left has total control over public schools and almost all public universities and colleges. Even private universities and colleges toe the liberal PC line in word and deed. Education is a massive slice of the American economy and vital to the well being of the society. By all accounts it's failing miserably. Public schools are one thing - there is still a small token of local control, but that too is waning under Common Core and Federal carrot and stick funding, but it's the college and university system that has turned into a near criminal enterprise.

Young people are herded into college with a promise of a good career and leave with a mountain of debt and a society that struggles produce a job for them let alone launch a career. The cost of a college education is out of reach for most families and is a direct result of government meddling in the funding. Public universities are nearly as expensive as private. A whole new category of for profit colleges have popped up to exploit the poor to get their hands on government tuition money which is then laid on the backs of those least likely to succeed. Our young - the next generation - are now serfs, beholden to the Federal government by virtue of debt wholly owned by Washington DC. What has happened to college education in the United States is shameful, if not criminal. None of this even speaks to the quality of the education - a whole different story.

None of it can be laid at the feet of conservatives or libertarians, none.

What else in this society is completely controlled by liberals and their leftist agenda's?

• the welfare legacy - poverty is now a higher % than in the 1960's when the war on poverty started
• the Federal bureaucracy - bloated, unaccountable, corrupt - need I go on?
• entertainment/Hollywood - producing one assault on the culture after another, representing America to the rest of the world while it dumbs down (or lies) to itself
• the mainstream news media - other than Fox News and talk radio (both parodies of conservative thought) the left owns all other media narratives
• health insurance - the newly minted ACA brought to you by the Democratic party is driving one nail into the coffin after another of 1/7th of the economy
• the art world - pure trash in art and music is held up as high art, those offended are the ones with the problem
• the race debate - race baiting and false hype drive the debate toward a full scale culture war, promoting victim-hood  instead of building on the real progress
• the environmental debate - a corrupt EPA and external forces conspire with environmental groups to stop American progress and development of its abundant natural resources
• the feminist debate - ditto the race debate
• and most importantly the language - Politically Correct speech stifles free the exchange of thought and ideas, everybody claims to hate PCism but everyone is forced to toe the line or be destroyed by it

None of these are controlled by right-wing or libertarian thought, none. Almost all of these are corrupt, mismanaged or divisive.

You can say then that big business, the banksters and corporate America is controlled by a right-wing agenda, but that's a mighty stretch. The biggest crony capitalists of the past 40 years have been Democrats, it's not even close. There is no truth to the lie that the Democrats are for the little guy and the Republicans are for big business. There isn't a dimes worth of difference any more. Big Business loves Big Government and its regulation and the stacking of the deck in their favor - who wouldn't? It keeps internal competition down. Neither has been bigger than it is today.

Every honest survey taken shows that the public thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction, that America is in decline. Education, culture and increasingly our finances are controlled by a leftist agenda bent on denuding America. In all its manifestations this is the harvest of liberalism. Seems pretty clear to me it's a rotten crop.

Who is to blame? I blame the conservatives, right-wingers and the libertarians. They offer nothing but leftism-lite. They can't articulate the virtues of freedom and liberty in a way that counters falsifiable nanny-state promises. Either they don't actually believe in individual liberty and self-determination or they are so beholden to their own cronies that they can only say so much, go so far before the lies are trotted out.

The truth is the elites on either side don't care what the public thinks or wants. The right-wingers can survive by pretending to stand up to the leftist agenda, fighting the good fight. The way things stand they have a pretty sweet life too. The left, whether they can or will admit it, are destroyers - destroyers of goodness and beauty in favor of ugliness and corruption.

Obviously America can be great and strong and thriving again. All the parts are in place. We have to be almost  ready to break free from leftist smiling liars and right-wing lying panty-waists. We have to be almost ready to crush political correctness and corporate cronyism. We have to be almost ready to scale back government intrusion into every nook and cranny of our lives.

We have to be that camel that can hold no more straw on its back.


Ugh

The Future of the future

The question of whether the future needs humans or not has been the subject of many a sci-fi novels and movies. It's not a ridiculous question at all considering the pace of technical innovation over the past 100 years. Factor in the movement of labor intensive jobs that helped create the vast American middle class to emerging countries and you can see that the future of the future in the West starts to look dicey for the average guy.

We've all seen entire industries transformed by technology. Consider the Internet in particular as a transformative force. While it has without a doubt created jobs for engineers, programmers and IT people it has wiped out or fundamentally changed the jobs of millions of others. Look at what Amazon.com has done to bookstores; any that are left are tiny specialty stores or big box stores that are in a fight for continued existence. Books are one thing, there is, of course, the music industry too. What ITunes alone has done makes it simply unrecognizable in relation to what it was just 10 years ago. The Amazon and ITunes juggernauts are slicing into electronic and discount department stores as well. The Amazon model is just one example of a fundamental shift in way commerce is getting done.

In his Takimag.com article "Useless Mouths" John Derbyshire tells of two industries that once were ubiquitous and indispensable that have been nearly replaced by software and the Internet. The tax preparation and travel agency industries are a shadow of what they once were. These are just the obvious ones. Think about how robots have transformed manufacturing in the heavy industries. As machines tirelessly take over simple repetitive jobs with more precision than their human counterparts a corporation would be doing themselves and their shareholders a disservice not to weed out unnecessary human workers.

Innovation is nothing new. The steam engine transformed work in the early industrial revolution. Suddenly one machine could do the work of hundreds of men. Since then countless inventions and technological developments have changed the landscape of the human workforce. The masses rolled with the changes, retrained and learned something new over and over. However, this won't go on forever, the pace of change, drastic change is accelerating and we have to wonder if we are at a major turning point for human labor.

What will happen to this society, to this culture as less and less people work because there just isn't anything for them to do. The very smart and very motivated will find their niche, but the majority of people are neither very smart nor very motivated. Even now the political element actively promoting dependency is making noises that joblessness is the new normal and that work is not necessarily for every one.

Is anyone really hailing this trend as the sign of civilizational progress? Not in so many words, but deeds speak much louder. Neither end of the political poles can claim the high ground, but one side clearly sees the decline of American economic supremacy as a good thing for the world. In the union hall and in the Democratic caucuses the decline in blue-collar work is often portrayed in near-apocalyptic terms - but it's not just blue collar jobs anymore. High skilled IT work is being off-shored at an astounding rate because modern high speed networks make it so easy. Those on the left see it as the "free market, capitalist" economy’s failure to supply good-paying jobs, and those on the right see a depressing sign that government over regulation and culture of dependency is killing the American work ethic and the American worker. The new normal indeed.

Nothing good can come with a huge population of under-educated young urban men living on the dole, idle hands and all. We have plenty of evidence that this destroys men, and in fact, entire cities - Detroit anyone... Does anyone see the trend reversing? Surely not if Washington DC and the mega-businesses that own it continue doing what they're doing.

Technology is going to continue advancing - as it should. Jobs that we trained for in the 90's and early 2000's will be replaced by advanced automation and soon enough by rudimentary AI itself . It doesn't mean that men and women without elite status have no place or purpose. One obvious solution is for the U.S. to increase the skill level of its labor force. If we are to attract high-technology businesses that produce goods with high-value-added content and good jobs, important jobs, the educational system and business are going to need to come together. This means the government/union stranglehold on education at all levels will have to end. That is the challenge. I wish I had a magic solution to break up the educational monopoly - perhaps it will be the Internet to the rescue, we'll just have to see.

Truth is that the average quality of a U.S. high school education is so low when compared to other wealthy countries and our own past, and unfortunately fewer and fewer college students pursue engineering and science-based courses. Today very few U.S. companies have formal apprenticeship or training programs, this needs to change, but it will take a real hard nosed business visionary that loves his country to plow through the educational fortress of the NEA and its affiliates. If a Google, Microsoft, Cisco, GM or Boeing developed their own post secondary system of technology education that didn't force mountains of debt on the potential workforce we might see a movement in the right direction. Maybe now these kinds of companies see no need for it because they just go overseas and pay less per head any way. That short sighted view ignores the fact the most creative and innovative people in the world are in America and Western Europe.

I would hate to see an America with even one more Detroit, Allentown or Gary, Indiana. If that's the future of the future I guess I'm glad I'm close to being an old man.



Ugh

Maximizing profits right into the poor house

It's not a stretch for the average guy to see that the world today is fouled up. We should not be surprised by the notion that it probably always has been. Pick any time in history and plunk yourself down. Unless you were a prince or a noblemen your life is hard, brutal and short. I say this to imply that life for the average guy has always been a struggle. With that we have to acknowledge today's hardships are relative. Americans by and large live better today than at any time in history. No matter how bad things have gotten in the past 60 or 70 years there was always the belief that things would get better. However, now for the first time in my 50 plus years I wonder whether a vast middle class will ever thrive again in America, because it isn't thriving now.

We are at an odd crossroads economically, socially and demographically where the workforce, wages and opportunities are shrinking in real terms for the traditional middle class. Where the well connected and wealthy in business and government have never seen better times. We are on the cusp of becoming a two-tiered society. The elites and the serfs.

Of course if you listen to the politician of your choice he is fighting for you like never before. I doubt it. The President does nothing helpful and blames the Republicans when nothing gets done. The Republicans pass bill after bill they know Harry Reid's Senate will never consider and then they blame the Democrats and the President. The sad fact is they are not fighting for anybody but themselves and their cronies. How is it that corporate profits just hit another all-time high, in absolute value and as a percent of the economy as a whole. The U.S. stock market just hit yet another record, after having a phenomenal year in 2013. What gives? If corporations and shareholders are making piles of money, and the Federal government is spending more than ever before why is (real) unemployment so high the economy still so bad?

In the name of maximizing profits the corporate chieftains are able to hold down payroll and keep more and more of the company's wealth for the execs and the shareholders while wages are at an all time low as a percentage of GDP. While wages as a percent of GDP doesn't tell the whole story workers continue to fall victim to technology advancements and efficiency improvements - it's not necessarily just simple greed. Still corporate managers aren't hiring because they feel they don't need to in this peculiar environment of high unemployment and increased automation. But is it short sighted? Is it sustainable? Maybe... But can their customers continue to afford their products if they fall further and further behind?

Does intense focus on profit and share price starve out the rest of the economy? Huge companies complain about higher taxes and more regulation but how does that explain these profits statements and stock prices? On the flip side taxation and regulation does smother small businesses and it's those same factors that create a barrier to entry and competition. Larger companies take advantage of the tax and regulatory environment to make it easier for them to lock out their competitors and maximize their profits. The deck is so ridiculously stacked in their favor that they have nothing to fear from upstarts. The inevitable result is everything becomes too big to fail. The problem is that it's the little companies that employ the majority of Americans an with regulation and taxes are smothering them, that job creation engine has been stripped. There are fewer small business start-ups, those that have closed are not being replaced, and as a consequence the wage and job growth we enjoyed has evaporated.

So, in the battle to balance capital vs labor things have tilted so far in favor of capital that labor is hardly a factor, certainly not a powerful factor. Unions aren't necessarily an answer anymore, so where does that leave labor? Who is advocating for the labor side of the equation? The government? How can government advocate for labor when government is in partnership with big business. Minimum wage? Yeah sure.

We live in system of rampant crony capitalism. We have now witnessed the result. The challenge for the powers that be is to pay the wretched (the rest of us) just enough to keep us from rioting, keep the "American Dream" fantasy alive, and distract us from recognizing the fact that we are becoming serfs.

The key, I think, is to be as apolitical as possible. Neither party is your friend in all of this. The middle class has been set adrift. The challenge now is to get the middle class to understand that they have suffered and need to do something to help re-assert an acceptable balance. Of course "do something" is the key, do what?


Ugh


==============================================

Inequality is like water, a part of life, but may, because of the size of its gaps, become toxic.

Guilty: born white, born male, born in America

The other day I was watching Downton Abby with my wife. One of the story arcs involved a budding relationship between a daughter of the aristocracy and a black jazz singer. It was a hidden relationship that was on the verge of being discovered and it was going to be scandalous. With Downton Abby being a period piece set in the 1920's who would be surprised that racism would rear its ugly head? But wait a minute... Just a darn minute... This was in Britain, not the USA. How could that be. I thought America was the most racist place on Earth. To learn that racism existed in England completely shattered my world view.

Once I recovered from the shock I started to think about the racism that really exists in America. Institutionally governments do not officially support racism - anymore. The fact is most institutions both government and non-government bend over backwards not to give even the appearance racism. Some go so far the other way that many white people lose out on opportunities they are well qualified for in favor of unqualified minorities. But who's gonna cry for the white guy.

No one is doubting that bigots exist across this land. African Americans are probably discriminated against every single day. That said, bigots exist across all lands everywhere on this Earth. Yeah, I know that's counter-intuitive for you living here in America since you've been told since forever that you are most racist, intolerant and nasty culture that has ever existed. Don't worry none of it is true, America is probably the most diverse and tolerant society that has ever existed. However, that does not fit the narrative the race-baiters want you to believe. Since the "r" word has lost it's punch due to over use the over arching theme that has found favor is that of white privilege.

White privilege says that due to the remnants of historical racism white people hold advantages in society that honor them over minorities in every possible scenario. Just like it's ridiculous to claim that bigotry doesn't exist, it's just as ridiculous to dispute the existence of white privilege at some level. Those of us who honestly go about our lives never giving in to the notion of white privilege because we don't personally condone or support it in any way still can't deny it's there. But beating whites over the head continuously with this sort of guilt trip is not going to help. People being people recoil when attacked, or lash out themselves. It would be far better to help the so-called privileged see where and if it actually exists in any given scenario.

Me being a white man I can't tell you what it's like to be a black man in this society. Who am I to say that they aren't discriminated against or feel discriminated against in any given situation. But to insinuate that I'm blind to white privilege because the way has always been paved with gold because of my white skin is dishonest, it's B.S. If I failed to become educated, failed to act in society with good manners and respectful language or committed serious transgressions that follow me through life I would expect to be discriminated against - and I would be. A white bum or criminal get's no special favor in polite society.

Every black man or woman I know who has done the things necessary to succeed has succeeded in their own right. Do they still face challenges? Probably. Who doesn't. I know a fine young white man who has worked really hard to become a fireman. He is now a qualified fireman and paramedic. He has been trying to get a full-time job as a fireman but has been basically told not even to bother trying to get on any of the big city departments near him. Why? Well because he's a white man. He looses out to untrained, uninitiated minorities and women every time. White privilege huh. But who's gonna cry for the white guy.

To think that somehow racism and prejudice is an American creation, born out of a legacy of slavery is intellectual dishonesty. African slavery and prejudicial bigotry against Africans predated America by centuries. So to is the notion that you can judge an entire race with such a broad brush and ascribe intellectual prowess or sloth-like values across the board. To think you can know what a person is like by the color of his skin - black or white - is ludicrous.

The idea of a colorblind society, the one that Martin Luther King dreamed of, died with the promotion of multiculturalism. Suddenly one culture was better than another and all cultures were better than American culture. At one time America was a melting pot of cultures that while excluding full participation of African descendants still included African culture into the booya. Today the multiculturalists have two views of white American culture, intolerant and privileged. The evidence is in all the text books school children are forced to read. Whites are guilty, Americans are guilty and above all men are guilty.

Things will never get better for a multi-racial society until multiculturalism is shown for the divisive and evil thing that it is. We are all in this together, let's stop the race-baiting, the race hustling and above all the bigotry of stereotyping any people by the color of their skin.


Ugh

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder

(I just don't want to see it)

I could never be a cop, especially a big city cop. Sure cops do extraordinary work at times, important work, work that needs to be done. Unfortunately they have to see the ugly side of humanity everyday, often the ugliest side. All too often cops see people on the worst day of their lives. I would become so depressed. I don't like ugly.

I don't like discordant music or poetry that doesn't rhyme. I don't like abstract art or so-called high fashion. I don't like (nearly all) public sculptures or 1960's architecture. I don't like ugly.

What is ugly? I'm not sure I can even describe it, but I know it when I see it. It can be something as inane as your favorite sports car with a hideous neon green paint job, to the full blown filth of urban decay. Like all things in this world everything has it's counterpart, with beauty you get ugly too.

Human beings can be ugly on the outside, that's just a fact. It's not that they're ugly that bothers me, it's when other people insist on trying to convince them they're not - they know they're ugly!!! However, it's the people who are ugly on the inside that you have to worry about, am I right?

I would make the world's worst movie producer. I happen to like happy endings, but I also like happy beginnings and happy middles too. Conflict can be so ugly. I realize that even schmaltzy romantic comedies need conflict. There is literally no entertainment value in movies that have no highs with the lows or conflict with the harmony. Good thing I'm not a movie producer.

I have a hard time with some TV shows too. Cable shows like Dirty Jobs where Mike Row engages in a series of jobs that are so down right ugly it is impossible for me to watch. Same for a show called Life After People which depicts the world after all humans are gone. It chronicles the pace at which nature consumes mankind's footprint. It's not that humans left an ugly world - it's that an unmaintained civilization turns ugly. While I rather enjoy those post-apocalyptic movies I just wish someone would take some time to clean things up a little, the apocalypse can be so untidy. Those various "picker" shows make me think I'd just as soon light a match to those disgusting sheds and barns as I would enter them and start picking stuff up. It's not just the quasi reality shows or disaster movies that are ugly to me. I thought the doctor show called House had as it's main character just about the ugliest human being I've ever witnessed.

Then there's music, the very essence of mathematical beauty and melodious harmony. It can be perverted into something grotesque and down right evil. I get that some people like devil metal - or whatever it's called - but it is ugly, ugly music. Same goes for hard core rap, it's ugly and harsh, rather unpleasant to listen to. While extreme jazz and long-haired classical music may not be my thing I can appreciate the beauty in it. Even country music and hip hop have elemental beauty to them. Years ago I couldn't figure out why whenever my teenage daughter was in my car I was so irritated... Now I realize it wasn't her - it was that ugly music that was blaring out of the radio.

The place where ugly is truly detrimental is in relationships and human interaction. We've all have ugly relations with people in our lives. Some people thrive on it. Some people like to fight. I'm not one of them. I'd rather everyone be happy, or at least for God's sake pretend they are happy. We can't escape ugly behavior, it's part of life. I think just about the ugliest thing I've ever seen was a man (if you want to call him that) who purposely picked at his wife in such a derogatory way that no matter what she said or did it was cause for getting smacked. That piece of %$@# thrived on ugly. To see this beautiful young woman so deeply humiliated and depreciated (and physically hurt) was more than I could take. I was too much a mouse to do anything about it. It was 30 years ago but I have never forgotten it. Wife beaters in my book are the second lowest form of life right after child abusers.

I used to like watching boxing matches, not any more. Mike Tyson made it a classless and ugly sport. Today boxing has all but been replaced by, get this, something so much more civilized, ultimate fighting. This is where two men get thrown into a cage and literally beat the snot out of each other. I'm not sure what is uglier, the modern day gladiators in the ring or the bloodthirsty audience cheering them on. It's disgusting in my book, pure ugly.

It's often said beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that's true, but then so is ugly. Sometimes people are just being polite or they are deluding themselves when it comes to things beautiful and ugly. Not every baby is beautiful, sorry moms. And little dogs with bulging eyes are not cute, they're ugly. A Siberian Husky with sky blue eyes, now that's a beautiful dog.

No one person has the final say on what's ugly and what's beautiful, but people should be honest with themselves, I'm just sayin'.



Ugh

Hell no GMO will never go

A product comes along - maybe a process is a better word - a process comes along that solves a number of problems plaguing modern man, huge problems, and instead of rejoicing and singing its praises the reactionary left cooks up a boogieman and riles the masses into a frenzy.

Once again the pro-science crowd who revels in accusing their religious and conservative opponents of being knuckle-dragging luddites ignore the facts, ignore the actual science and promulgate lies to further an anti-human agenda. GMO derangement rivals climate change hysteria for the pinnacle of all manufactured doomsday scenario's.

Just as the concept of global warming has caused the average person to change his or her behavior (as well as lightening his or her wallet) the reactionary left has succeeded in turning the advantaged class against a literal miracle that would help the world's disadvantaged in a most profound way.

GMO food and GMO crops have already changed the world for the better. Not one person has been poisoned, not one stream has been polluted, not one bird has fallen from the sky because of GMO. It may surprise you that every respected scientific organization that has studied GM crops including such institutions as the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization, and others have found GM crops both safe for humans for and the environment. Yes, it's impossible to prove anything is completely without risk, it's worth noting that none of these organizations is in the tank for big agribusiness, yet they all agree that there’s simply no evidence that it’s dangerous to eat genetically modified foods. Notoriously skeptical science-oriented publications including Nature and Scientific American have also concluded there’s just no evidence that GMOs are bad for us.

So why the hysteria. Frankly, excellent marketing by the same types who brought you two terms of Barack Obama, the tar and feathering of the Tea Party and conservatism in general. While both sides cherry-pick evidence to support the positions they expound, the left slathers on the pure emotion of scare tactics that seem to work every time.

So successful have been the scare mongers that entire continents have banned GMO's. Ignoring actual benefits that could save millions from malnutrition and death the scare tactics are having an effect on the very nations and regions that could benefit the most. GMO's offer the farmer, any farmer, a cost benefit by reducing chemical usage, fuel usage and potentially larger yields due to less loss to insects. There is also the benefit to the poorly nourished by the injection of nutrients - such as vitamin A into rice - grown in regions where the deficiencies have a profound impact on the poor.

It would seem that with 7 billion humans to feed with a couple billion of them going hungry day after day that the benefits of GM food would outweigh the bull horn people. But it doesn't look that way. I think there a couple of reasons for this that have nothing to do with rational arguments. First, it is very hard to get the masses to rally around big -business. Pop culture in the West has made big-business literally toxic, deserved or not. And yes sometimes it is deserved. I will not stand up for some of the practices of agri-giant Monsanto. They use blackmail tactics and lawyers to gain and maintain market share in a way that would make the mafia's protection racket look like a boy scout jamboree. Business does what business can get away with and Monsanto and the other giant agri-business players have the best politicians money can buy. It doesn't necessarily mean their products are dangerous.

Secondly, many nations and regions see big agri-business as an extension of the United States. Cutting off your nose to spite your face is a long held tradition when it comes to protecting the home town team from being swallowed or crushed. American business can be a bit of a bull in a China shop so to speak. It still doesn't mean their motives beyond making profit are purposely destructive. That makes no business sense at all.

Finally, just like with "Climate Change" my belief is that the leftists have a far more sinister set of motives than any evil corporation that has ever existed. The anti-GMO crowd rather than being out to protect humanity from evil is bent of the reduction of the human population by orders of magnitude from today's numbers. GMO has the potential of allowing us to feed the world, pulling billions out of mere subsistence to thriving abundance - just as a warmer world is better for the survival of human beings than a colder one.

I don't think GMO foods or crops will go away anymore than nuclear energy did with a similar onslaught. However, poor safety practices in places like Chernobyl and Fukushima give the doomsayers ammunition, and rightly so. GM products have to be tested and studied with extreme vigilance - and that is the sliver lining provided by the rabid opposition.



Put that GMO tobacco in your pipe and smoke it!



Ugh

PS: I have no stock (that I know of) in any agri-business. It's not that I trust big business all that much, I just distrust leftists that much more

Inferiority Complex: European Americans vs American Americans

It's not exactly news that Americans actually live in the Un-united States of America. We have Red States and Blue States, East Coast and Left Coast and whole lot of red-necks in between. The electorate as a whole over the last four or five national elections has been very close to a 50/50 split between the two parties. Then there are millions who don't consider themselves Republicans or Democrats - in fact those people may now be in the majority. But the real divide is between those who think we should be more like Europe and those who think we should be America, ruggedly independent and unique.

The Media and Hollywood mostly fall on the America-should-be-more-like-Europe side, and have been for decades. I think back to the James Bond movie in the 70's "Live and Let Die" where England was, of course, well represented by James Bond - the dashing Roger Moore in this case. America was represented by Sheriff J.W. Pepper a tobacco chewing red-neck Louisiana lawman. Actor Clifton James did an admirable job portraying every stereotype imaginable of the fat, stupid American. This treatment of a southern hick lawman was not written into the movie by accident. It was done to create a contrast, and that it did.

Millions of Americans see Sheriff J.W. Pepper as an apt representation of what America looks like to the rest of the world - and they may be right. I don't think it's accurate, but who am I to argue what others think.

I doubt Europeans care what I think of the trajectory of European culture. It makes me sad actually. It seems to me it's a culture that has decided on suicide. It's sad because so much of what makes America what it is comes straight from our European heritage. Many American's see our brash arrogance as an unfounded superiority complex while at the same time holding an attitude of our inferiority to our elders in the old world. The supposed European maturity and reasonableness stands in stark in contrast to the cowboy culture of can-do, no holds barred America.

Yes, there is probably some truth in that assessment, but what difference does it make when the writing is so clearly on the wall. In two crucial and critical areas Europe is throwing in the towel and therefore the wonderfulness of the mature and erudite European culture will cease to exist anyway. First, white Europeans have stopped having babies. No babies, no future. Having babies is a sign that the people believe in the culture and in the future. Obviously Europeans don't. Second, Europe has decided culturally on energy starvation. Without abundant energy and plenty of babies there can be no great future.

In America the pragmatic and sober in government and business have thus far thwarted the daffy Al Gore-rites. The shale gas and shale oil boom are beginning to transform the largest energy consumer into a legitimate big-time energy producer. If the Obama team can be held off for a few more years, there's an actual shot at something that has been thought an impossibility. That being energy independence from the Middle East. Now, I understand the global chess board will never actually let that happen, but having real leverage is plus for the U.S.

On the other score unlike much of Europe the U.S. is still a very religious country. Like it or not religion seems to help people believe in a future worth living. Religion is also family oriented and so is having babies. It's not to say there isn't a problem, white Americans aren't having enough babies either, but certainly far more than Europeans.

America is poised to grow, to achieve, to be relevant if Washington politics doesn't derail it, however I'm not so confident in the great European cultures. Right now Europe is a huge and relevant market, but the trajectory in terms of population, debt and energy is frightening.

Many Americans - the European Americans - see the health care systems and welfare systems in most European countries as something to be admired, without opening their eyes to the fact that they are unsustainable. Neither are they sustainable in this country without strong and robust economic growth. Current policies on both continents are not fostering strong and robust economic growth. Energy seems to be the difference - if the U.S. doesn't (completely) fall prey to the "climate change" insanity gripping Europe then America stands a chance.

How obvious does it have to be that alternative energy is a joke. They like to call it sustainable, but it cannot, will not ever sustain a modern economy. Wind and solar, both strategies that Europe has bet the farm on, are never going to be a consistent high output solutions. A child should be able to see that, yet the powers that be and apparently the people of Europe are willing to pay outrageous costs for some kind of feel good principle. Wind is just plain inconsistent and the Sun, well news flash, the Sun sets everyday - for many hours at a time.

The act of labeling CO2 as a dangerous pollutant may help them justify this insanity. It is not a pollutant but rather a vital element necessary for life on Earth.Water vapor is by far the greatest of all greenhouse gases, however mankind and his SUV's don't put water vapor into the atmosphere. Their SUV's do put CO2 into the air and thus the irrational focus on a trace element.

Sure plenty of American's believe this tripe too, but so far rational men have not allowed it to kill our future - so far. It's no coincidence that a number of large European companies - many from Germany - are building huge facilities in the U.S. precisely because of energy costs. Among the companies setting up shop in the U.S. we see Airbus going to Mobile, Alabama. Siemens, to Charlotte, North Carolina. BASF, to Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Michelin, to Greenville, South Carolina. BMZ GmbH, to Virginia Beach. SO.F.TER Group, to Lebanon, Tennessee. Prufrex Innovative Power Products, Virginia Beach, Virginia. Thomas Magnete GmbH to Brookfield, Wisconsin. Wacker Polysilicon, to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Kayser Automotive, to Fulton, Kentucky. British-based Rolls Royce to Prince George County, Virginia for producing engine parts. The Kűbler to Charlotte, North Carolina. The Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine AG to Corpus Christi, Texas. Royal Dutch Shell to Pennsylvania.

That's a veritable who's who of  major European companies. The German government in particular has committed to alternative energy, to the point of doubling down in recent years. Their corporations have taken notice. They may argue that lower labor costs can be found in many of these southern U.S. states, but even lower labor costs can be had in any number of places - it's reliable energy at reasonable costs that are attracting these German titans. I have also heard rumblings that some American companies are seriously considering bringing manufacturing home from China for the very same reason.

None of this will ever convince European American's that America need not emulate European socialism. It's not say there aren't many, many admirable things about Europe. The rat race pace of modern American life borders on it's own form of insanity, but we will mature, because our culture will survive. It's not that certain that great cultures of Europe will survive in any recognizable form.



Ugh




  

Sustainability: Sustain this

If there's one word that makes me cringe whenever I hear it that would be the word sustainability. It's usually followed by a good scolding or some half-truth on it's way to a bold-faced lie. It will be uttered in every "green" rant you'll ever hear, referenced over and over on the campaign trail and, of course, slathered all over print ads, radio and TV commercials like so much cheap perfume.

sustainability sus·tain·a·bil·i·ty [suh-stey-nuh-bil-i-tee]
noun
1.the ability to be sustained, supported, upheld, or confirmed.
2.Environmental Science. the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance: The committee is developing sustainability standards for products that use energy.


Now I'm pretty certain that point number 2 was added more recently. If I were to look at a dictionary from the 1960's or 1970's I doubt the point number 2 would be in there. Words take on new meanings all the time, but few have such deceit, such arrogance, such an aura of shame as the word sustainability does as used by the modern finger waggers.

Time and time again the finger waggers looking down their noses at the rest of us just trying to get on with our lives have been proven wrong. Dead wrong. I don't use the word "dead" lightly here...

Almost nothing brought to us by the modern liberal politically correct ruling elite is sustainable. Moreover, almost nothing they claim to be unsustainable actually is. Going back to 60's when the enviro movement got it's wings all their dire predictions have been wrong, and perversely almost all their remedies have cost the world billions of dollars and countless lives.

Starting with the ban on DDT to protect the sustainability of bald eagles the lies and distortions started:

(From various articles...)
As early as 1921, the journal Ecology reported that bald eagles were threatened with extinction – 22 years before DDT production even began. According to a report in the National Museum Bulletin, the bald eagle reportedly had vanished from New England by 1937 – 10 years before widespread use of the pesticide.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service attributed bald eagle population reductions to a “widespread loss of suitable habitat,” but noted that “illegal shooting continues to be the leading cause of direct mortality in both adult and immature bald eagles,” according to a 1978 report in the Endangered Species Tech Bulletin.

A 1984 National Wildlife Federation publication listed hunting, power line electrocution, collisions in flight and poisoning from eating ducks containing lead shot as the leading causes of eagle deaths.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists fed large doses of DDT to captive bald eagles for 112 days and concluded that “DDT residues encountered by eagles in the environment would not adversely affect eagles or their eggs...

On June 14, 1972 William Ruckelhaus, Administrator of the EPA, as a result of political pressure from environmental extremists, made a one man decision to ban the use of DDT in United States, a move that was illegal. He took this action ignoring 8,300 pages of testimony and the findings of the hearing examiner and most scientists and in the absence of any honest substantiating science.

Not to turn this into a exposé on DDT I use this to point out that on every single subject the enviro/sustainability Nazi's lie and ignore facts - and people die. Millions have died from malaria and other insect related diseases that could have been prevented by using DDT.

Paul Erlich's Population Bomb scenario couldn't have been farther off the mark. Oddly it has sustained a myth that the human population is out of control and has led to a pathos that is seeing millions of woman deny the notion of even entertaining the idea of motherhood. Born of this pathos in part is also the tragedy of the abortion culture.

Peak oil is another grand myth. It is constantly reported that new and fantastic oil reserves are being found, and new technology has opened up access to more resources than could have been imagined only a few years ago. Prices continue to rise not because of a supply problem, but because of a political problem - all driven by environmental lies. Technology advancements will eventually make the use of oil significantly decrease, but in the here and now the vast majority of the people suffer high prices while just a few get filthy rich. Don't think the filthy rich dislike it that way.

More to the point about sustainability and leftist politically correct elites is what they have done to great unwashed in North America and Europe where this evil was born. What is sustainable about the morons and idiots being passed through the monopoly of public education? What is sustainable about the vast welfare state being aggressively promoted by left-wing? What is sustainable about the cost of the higher education and the "university-industrial complex"? What is sustainable about massive immigration into job-starved economies? What is sustainable about government spending that eats more and more of a nation's GDP? What is sustainable about a regulatory and tax environment that favors giant corporations over Mom and Pop's little world on Main Street? What is sustainable about the crony-capitalism that promotes the denuding of the West's industrial might in favor of cheap labor in Asia?

It's actually unfair to lay this all at the feet of leftism, the modern right-wing offers just token opposition and might as well be reclassified leftist-lite.

The trendy lie these days is the myth of man-caused global warming - or climate change as they like to call it. Climate change is a fact. It has been changing, sometimes dramatically, since the beginning of time. The perverse aspect of this whole made up debate is that even if man is in some small way responsible for rising temperatures the prescribed remedy when boiled down to it's essence is massive human depopulation of the planet. This is the end goal of the sustainability crowd, and it is based on lies.  

There is so little truth, because the elites have made it all relative. There can be no truth if everything is relative. All that's left is lies. What is sustainable about lies? Nothing.




But I could be wrong.


Ugh

What woman want and other unknowables...

I'm only half joking with this blogpost title. Being a man in a long term relationship (pretty good one I guess) I ultimately have no idea what women want and I likely never will. It's because what they say they want and what they actually want - deep down - are often entirely contradictory. The truth is most woman will agree with that statement.

I stumbled upon a fascinating blog the other day and read with great interest because the subject was essentially about the "bad boy" syndrome. Most of us safe, reliable beta males know exactly what that means whether we understand it or not. This article was about today's ultimate bad boys - Muslim men. You can read the whole thing here.

While the article is written by a Christian woman and is centered on the feminist movement's love affair with Islam I thought some of the underlying insights from a woman's perspective were fascinating. Regardless of the fact that most woman would deny many of these assertions if you've lived with a woman or women long enough you know there is truth in there.

FTA: random statements
- - inside, women are like children looking for limits 
- - she wants to have the security of being put in her place
- - they are seeking someone who will put them in their place and pass their fitness tests
- - women want to be in submission, but they tend not to want to do it without some fitness testing
- - a man can’t really pass a woman’s fitness test if at the end of the day he does not have any power
- - seeks a worthy man who is strong enough to keep her safe if she cedes control in order to follow him

These assertions (from a woman) at first seem shocking to our modern post-feminized mindset, yet they are buried deep within an evolutionary psychology that pre-dates the feminist movement by tens of thousands of years. What the feminist movement has accomplished by emasculating modern society mostly via political correctness prevents most men from ever passing the fitness test. Modern government, urbanization and high technology has aided in this transformation. Today's modern man is not generally called on to physically defend the family or kill game for food or even conquer the land. Hell, he isn't even able to fix the damn car without advanced training. So today's women either settle (and I mean settle) for a beta, never marry and become cat ladies or go lesbian. Or they seek an often tormented, destructive life of chasing alphas - the bad boys.

In her article Sunshine Mary draws the distinction between what she calls the White Knight - this being white Christian men in modern Western society (in other words the devil himself) - and Muslim men. Now, I believe most Western women have no interest in Islam itself, but they way Muslim men act toward women is strikingly similar to the infamous bad boy in Western culture. That Muslim men are frequently tall, dark and handsome doesn't hurt. It's the aloofness and the absence of any semblance of male neediness combined with the willingness to use coercion and violence that is like an aphrodisiac. Add the infidelity that is literally expected of the bad boy and he is simply irresistible. Her constant dread that she is yesterdays news keeps her striving to please him in every way regardless of how he responds.

Women who settle for safe, comfortable beta males often let themselves go physically and have little interest in housework or cooking or sex. Their "yes dear" husbands do nothing to instill dread and often fall into the same rut. They too let themselves go and find solace in sports and drinking or some other activity that separates them from their wives. This while the media and society fills both their heads with images and stories of the triumph of alpha males and the fruits of their conquests.

It has gotten so bad that men are constantly told in commercials that they need a drug to get back what feminism and the modern world has taken from them - their hard-ons. One, you never see overweight, dopey mamma's boys in those commercials, and two, try to imagine erectile dysfunction TV commercials running in Muslim countries - not gonna happen.

A huge problem for women these days is that the pool of qualified men that can even take the fitness test is dwindling before their eyes. This problem is exasperated as they age because what they have to offer in a mans eyes fades. Without any "manly jobs" (face it there are very few actual full-time positions for firemen) a young man without a college degree has few prospects of achieving an earning potential that even get's him in the door. It's hard to blame women for that. She has needs, and the security of high earner sharing her bed is often paramount.

Young men around the world have retreated to their parents basements to play video games. They've gone K through12 doped up on Ritalin because they, well, they acted like boys. Now college doesn't want them, manufacturing plants have left the country and the trades are over-stocked with cheap immigrant labor. It's hard to blame young men for that. They get their needs met in their mom's kitchen and of course broadband Internet porn.

And so the TV and radio commercials for online dating web sites blare morning and night. In the end very few ever measure up. Young men aren't interested in overweight, demanding women and young women aren't interested in man-boys that live in their mom's basement. What a world we have created.

As a self confessed beta male and having once been a "yes, dear" husband I think the solution is that men are going to have be a hybrid... Alpha-when-you-need-to-be. Take charge of your life with confidence. There are times being assertive and sensitive, aloof and attentive all at the same time is going to be required. You will have to set yourself up socially and economically to demonstrate your manliness and status without being a full-time jerk. Hopefully you won't have to resort to violence ever, but be wary of anger. Alpha males are rarely angry men. I don't know if woman like violence as Sunshine Mary asserts, but I am sure that women don't like anger.


But I could be wrong.



Ugh
 

Tolerant of Intolerance, or Not

Watching the celebrities (clips) on E! last night as they regaled in the splendor of the theatrical reading of "8" was just precious. Indeed, "8" is the play that uses the actual transcript of the hearing on California's Prop 8.  These A-List celebrities are all so enlightened and tolerant - and beautiful. Martin Sheen declares "this is such an important issue, it was thrilling to be a part of it". The issue is of course gay marriage and the constitutional clause Californian's inserted as a way of getting around the state legislature by constitutionally declaring marriage is between one man and one woman. California allows for civil unions, but that, of course, is not good enough. Whatever.

The thing that struck me was some actress declaring that Kirk Cameron, also and actor, has no right having a differing opinion. She has no tolerance for intolerance. Yes, of course it's a circular argument. No matter, you just can't have a different opinion when it comes to gay issues. It will, in one way or the other, destroy you. Gay issues are the absolute pinnacle of PC which places tolerance above all else. Hollywood if nothing else is PC - when it suits them.

Personally, I don't give a damn about gay this or homosexual that. Live and let live. I doubt gay individuals choose their proclivities. If and when the gay marriage issue appears on a ballot before me I will not cast a vote one way or the other. They are what they are. I've got nothing to say about it.

I don't like the ultra pushy types (on any issue really) and the insistence that you can't say one thing about any of "their" issues that is one iota out of line with their agenda or you are an intolerant homophobe that must be destroyed. I find that rather intolerant and frankly a load of crap.

Their is evil intent on both sides of gay issues, and I am choosing not to aid evil. You can't live in this modern world without facing evil situations and even participating however peripherally in evil machinations, but you can choose to not be the devil's helpmate. Steering clear of these debates is best way to thwart the enemy.


CW

Not so fast...

I have commented on several occasions in this space about the seemingly rapid decline of the United States as the preeminent power on the planet. In influence, innovation, economic and military dominance America still has no rival.  I have been guilty of missing the same thing many others have missed. America is the Himalaya's to the rest of the world's Appalachians. America in every respect is simply huge. Our economy is 25% of the entire world's GDP and it has been for decades. Our military is the most advanced, best trained and the most supremely capable fighting force the world has ever known. Our universities, research centers and corporations bring miracle technologies and medicines to the world that create untold wealth and save uncounted lives. It's actually hard to quantify the impact this one nation (the good, and sometimes the bad) has on the world.

In many ways it's not that America is coming down from Everest it's that the Appalachians have now become the Rockies.

It was just 40 years ago that we thought it was all coming to an end. The economic mess in the West and the rising confidence of Soviet communist expansion was supposed to see America crumble. It didn't happen. Instead the Soviet Union collapsed. America rebuilt it's military and it's confidence. In the late 80's and the 90's it was the Japanese that were going to own the world. They took our consumer electronic business and very nearly the auto industry - as well as many famous New York skyscrapers. At the time many thought America was done, a mere shell of what it once was. But that was wrong too. Japan is now entering its second lost decade and is rapidly falling behind its chief Asian rival.

For the last 15 years we have watched the ascent of China as it took a huge slice of the West's manufacturing base with its endless supply of cheap labor. The Chinese, by embracing capitalistic tendencies, have rocketed past Japan and Germany economically and threaten America's dominance as an influence peddler. In fact, 2012 America looks rather bleak with regards to the unemployment and the public debt situation.

But is it really so?

On the surface America looks like a tumultuous mess. Tea Parties, Occupy movements, bitter elections and a 50/50 red/blue split that offers the casual observer an ugly picture of discontent. The hatred of Obama and the uber-liberals on the one side is only matched by the hatred of Bush and neo-cons on the other. Unemployment and rising prices for the staples of food and fuel multiplied by the decline in home values has created the sharpest downward spiral in wealth seen in decades. Economically there has not been this level of misery since the Great Depression. It's bad right now, there is no denying that.

On the other hand China looks like the picture of calm and confidence. Enjoying nearly double digit economic growth year after year after year has put China in the driver's seat. Busily building world class cities and infrastructure while becoming a military power to boot has resulted in rising influence internationally. They sit on billions in foreign currency and a trade surplus never before seen in modern times. To the outside world there is seemingly little political strife and the central planning by a powerful one-party system seems to work pretty well.

But does it?

In America the roiling sea of distraction masks what is a remarkably stable society. Orderly -  if spirited - political campaigns result in a transfer of power that requires no bloodshed. Americans get up and go to work, by and large follow the rules and get things done. The Tea Party movement is far from radical or dangerous to the authorities - the same is largely true of the Occupiers except they are much messier and more uncouth. In truth America is the picture of stability in these extremely trying times.

China, while seeming cool and confident on the surface - the part the outside world sees - is actually a seething mess underneath. The dirt poor living in the interior have nothing except the pollution after effects of the rapid expansion of the coastal cities. Even in the wealthy cosmopolitan cities there is great discontent over wages and working conditions. Chinese consumers watch endless piles of consumer goods that they make shipped off the America and Europe with little left over for them. We hear only snippets of the news of massive riots on a scale we can scarcely imagine. What the West perceives as confident one-party rule and the certainty that comes with it is actually a paranoid club of bullies and dictators. The only way to get ahead is corruption, bribery and cheating.

These are a great people, capable of so much more. The Chinese people have only scratched the surface of what they can do - but their system is incapable of unleashing the true potential locked up inside.

In spite of everything the Chinese people are a happier lot than Americans right now. Americans are discontented - and maybe we always have been - because we know there are so many more possibilities, we have glimpsed them. Our corrupt government and their corporate benefactors have skewed everything. The Chinese simply expect less of their corrupt institutions. A vast majority of Americans feel the country and the culture is heading in the wrong direction.China on the other hand is plodding however indelicately away from their oppressive past.

America unfortunately is being led by a man who sees America's decline as the only solution equalizing the human experience. He could not be more wrong. We are voluntarily cutting off our noses to spite our faces. We have seen what can be done by unleashing human potential. Our imperfect but mostly free culture has spawned the most powerful nation in human history. It was no accident. We are letting it be squandered by ideological maggots (on both sides). Our system while not as paranoid and corrupt as China's is heading in that direction. The political and corporate corruption in Washington DC in 2012 is beyond sickening - and it's dangerous.

The world is craving leaders. Many were fooled into believing we elected someone who was different in 2008. Someone ready to throw out derision and work toward a functional (if contentious) body politic. Instead we have a petulant, ideological man-child offering very little leadership or inspiration. He offers only decline. What the world needs now is some real hope and change.



CW

Upper Middle Class Disconnect

In Charles Murray's new book "Coming Apart: The State of White America" much is being made his concept of the new upper middle class in America. In the past the folks that ultimately reached the upper middle class were still affected by the quintessential American experience. These people created small businesses or fought their way up the corporate ladder and by the sweat of their brow became successful. Murray submits the notion that this is largely gone today, disappearing over the last 50 years as America becomes more socialist, more European.

As the decades since 1960 passed a child from a middle class or an upper middle class family where the traditional patriarchal structure put them through college (or handed them the business outright) never experienced normal rites of passage. From getting one's hands dirty working for minimum wage to partaking in traditional activities like hunting or even fishing are largely foreign to the yuppies of the day.

Personally it's a bit more complicated in my mind than pitting the often liberal, well educated, well off segment of Urbana against the notions of 1960's America. I haven't read the book yet - I don't think it's been officially released yet - and I'm sure Murray treats it as such, but the book's little survey to do just that demands some examination.

Here are the questions (my response and comments in bold red)

1. Have you ever worked on a factory floor? NO
By 1981 when I entered the work force factories were closing on a daily basis, young men need not apply
2. Have you ever held a job that caused a part of your body to hurt at the end of the day? YES
Landscaping
3. Have you seen last year's mega-hit movie, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon"? NO
Crap movies are crap movies, this means nothing
4. Can you name this NASCAR champion? NO
NASCAR may be a massive sport, but I've got better things to do with my time, for God's sake there's paint drying and grass growing somewhere
5. In the past five years, have you been fishing or hunting? YES
Not nearly often enough
6. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian?YES
Several
7. During the past year, have you stocked your own fridge with domestic mass-market beer? NO
My wife and I don't drink. This question is designed to see if you are an import snob. Bogus on the face of it. Mass market beers were all there were in the 60's and 70's, today there are many domestic and import beers that are far better
8. Do you now have a close friend with whom you have strong and wide-ranging political disagreement? YES
Several. This question wants to declare that  hard core liberals will not fraternize with sub-human conservatives. This may be so???
9. Have you eaten at an Applebee's, TGI Friday's, or Outback Steakhouse in the past year? YES
Apparently to the upper class snooty types these restaurants are far too pedestrian. Bogus question
10. Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck? NO
A minivan, yes. A pickup truck is next to mother and apple pie, you are just not American if you don't have one.
11. Have you ever attended a Kiwanis or Rotary Club meeting, or a gathering at a union local? NO 
Fraternal organizations and even unions are waning in America and many think it's because government has stepped in and usurped these functions, there may be truth in that. Clubs in general have diminished and big time sports and sports bars may have had a lot to do with it
12. Have you ever participated in a parade that did not involve global warming, gay rights, or a war protest? NO
Do Tea Party rally's count as parades? I went to one of them
13. Since leaving school, have you worn a uniform as part of your job? YES
I was an installer of voice and data cabling
14. Have you ever ridden on a Greyhound or Trailways bus? NO
I have traveled by Amtrak - buses suck
15. Did you ever watch an "Oprah" show all the way through? GOD, NO
Shouldn't the question have been about Jerry Springer? 
16. Did you or your spouse ever serve in the armed forces? NO
When the Vietnam war ended the draft was long gone and the military had a terrible reputation. Very few of us went that way in the late seventies/early eighties
17. Did you grow up in a family in which the chief breadwinner was not in a managerial position or high-prestige occupation (defined as dentist, physician, architect, attorney, engineer, scientist, or college professor)? YES
If you lived in a home with college educated parents then the expectation to go to college was high, there was no such expectation in my home. Oddly all seven of us attended some college, technical school, or higher education - eventually 
18. Have you ever lived for at least a year as an adult in an American neighborhood in which the majority of your nearest 50 neighbors probably did not have college degrees? YES
Still do
19. Have you ever had a close friend who could seldom get better than Cs in high school even if he or she tried hard? YES
Do not even understand the relevance of this question
20. During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes? YES


One commenter on Powerline.com added these questions which in many ways are more honest and to the point:

Do you think New Yorker cartoons are funny? NO
Playboy cartoons are funny
How many different labels of wine have you drank in the last 30 days? NONE

Wine knowledge fascinates me, being a teetotaler I just can't get into it 

How many times have you been to a theme park for vacation? NONE
How many polo matches have you attended in your life? ONE
Was at a work convention and this was one of the planned offsite activities  - it was a blast
Can you find the plumbing section in a Home Depot or Lowe's without asking someone for help? YES
How many quarters of NFL football did you watch last season? A LOT
How many hours of NPR do you listen to each week? SEVERAL
Here's the deal about NPR - once in a while you will be informed if you keep your liberal bullshit filters up. And you won't be assaulted by commercials at 120db's between obnoxious conservative platitudes (yes, conservatives spew bullshit too at times)
Can you identify the architectural style of your home? NO
Have you ever flown in a private jet? YES
A corporate jet w/8 seats, very, very cool.
Have you ever changed a tire? YES
If not your are either non-mechanical or you can afford a service that does it for you  - either way you should be ashamed, right?

I scored 10 of 20 on the first set of 20 which put me on the cusp of this new upper middle class in America (the only thing keeping me out was the "upper" part). I think it's flawed to certain degree because things other than creeping socialism and crony capitalism have changed the landscape - technology being chief among them. It just reinforces the notion that the vast middle class is under assault in America. A robust middle class is the one thing that is absolutely historical about the American experiment. Never before has there been anything like it. I think Charles Murray will pointing that out with this book, looking forward to reading it.


CW