Category: Deep Thoughts

Call To Arms

Deep Thoughts, Resistance

At the Federalist Society, a speech from Bari Weiss which outlines the issue facing us at this time, and reminds us of our collective duty to save civilization.  As she rightly says:

When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.

It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis—one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since Sept 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.

Read the whole damn thing, because you must.

It’s not just Jews who are at risk.  We are all at risk, every one of us who claims to be civilized.

Required Viewing

Deep Thoughts, Good Stuff

Almost every speech or article by Victor Davis Hanson is worth one’s attention, but his speech on George S. Patton is absolutely filled with all sorts of relevance in today’s society.

Specifically, VDH comments on the unease with which civilized societies view (and treat) their warriors — and he’s absolutely correct.  (By the way, the sainted Omar Bradley doesn’t come out very well, which alone makes it worth watching.)

(You only have to watch the first 40 minutes or so to get the full flavor.)

Actual Meanings

Deep Thoughts

I have to admit that I’ve missed Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom these past few years — Jeff was one of the First Wave of bloggers, and his writings were always interesting, not to say educational.

As is his latest post.  Witness:

At its essence, stakeholder capitalism is Marxian capitalism run through a lens of business ethics. It is the attempt to maintain authoritarian control over capitalism by forcing upon the Invisible Hand a Velvet Glove, then using that glove, which hides an iron fist, to pound the world into adopting values that both assert and maintain its worldview. It is Theory applied to markets, marketing, wealth creation and management, and an overall globalized ethos of required and policed “virtue,” with the end goal being — as it always is under the discourses of cultural Marxist thought — power: who has it, who controls it, and who uses it for their own ends most effectively and ruthlessly.

Seldom have I seen varied metaphors blended so seamlessly into a single argument.

And the well-stated zinger:

In the stakeholder capitalist system, investors aren’t — or at least, they shouldn’t be — solely interested in profits driven by production and consumption. And this is because to the stakeholder capitalist, itself a euphemism for collectivist corporatist, “it is well proven that our current form of Capitalism is inherently unsustainable because it requires endless growth on a planet with finite resources.”

Of course, none of this is “well proven” — the history of shareholder capitalism suggests the opposite, in fact, as innovation has led to the production of more and more out of less and less — but whether this is or isn’t the material case is incidental to those who are working on this inorganic worldwide paradigm shift commonly known as The Great Reset.

Read the whole thing, because it’s protean.

The Tightening Spiral

Deep Thoughts, Resistance

Bear with me while a gather all sorts of straws, political, social and policy.  Some will have links you can follow, most won’t because you’d have to have been in a coma not to have seen them.

So Government — our own and furriners’ both — have all sorts of rules they wish to impose on us (and from here on I’m going to use “they” to describe them, just for reasons of brevity and laziness — but we all know who “they” are).  Let’s start with one, pretty much picked at random.

They want to end sales of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines, and make us all switch to electric-powered ones.  Leaving aside the fact that as far as the trucking industry is concerned, this can never happen no matter how massive the regulation, we all know that this is not going to happen (explanation, as if any were needed, is here).  But to add to the idiocy, they have imposed all sorts of unrealistic, nonsensical and impossible deadlines to all of this, because:

There isn’t enough electricity — and won’t be enough electricity, ever — to power their future of universal electric car usage.  Why is that?  Well, for one thing, they hate nuclear power (based on outdated 1970s-era fears), are closing existing ones and will not allow new ones to be built by dint of strangling environmental regulation (passed because of said 1970s-era fears).  Then, to add to that, they have forced the existing electricity supply to become unstable by insisting on unreliable and variable generation sources such as solar and wind power.  Of course, existing fuel sources such as oil. coal and natural gas are also being phased out because they are “dirty” (they aren’t, in the case of natgas, and as far as oil and coal are concerned, much much less so than in decades past) — but as with nuclear power, the rules are being drawn up as though old technologies are still being used (they aren’t, except in the Third World / China — which is another whole essay in itself).  And if people want to generate their own electricity?  Silly rabbits: US Agency Advances New Rule Targeting Portable Gas-Powered Generators. (It’s a poxy paywall, but the headline says it all, really.)

So how is this pixie dust “new” electricity to be stored?  Why, in batteries, of course — to be specific, in lithium batteries which are so far the most efficient storage medium.  The only problem, of course, is that lithium needs to be mined (a really dirty industry) and even assuming there are vast reserves of lithium, the number of batteries needed to power a universe of cars is exponentially larger than the small number of batteries available — but that means MOAR MINING which means MOAR DIRTY.  And given how dirty mining is, that would be a problem, yes?

No.  Because — wait for it — they will limit lithium mining, also by regulation, by enforcing recycling (where have we heard this before?) and by reducing battery size.

Now take all the above into consideration, and see where this is going.  Reduced power supply, reduced power consumption, reduced fuel supply:  a tightening spiral, which leads to my final question:

JUST HOW DO THEY THINK THIS IS ALL GOING TO END?

If there’s one thing we know, it’s that increased pressure without escape mechanisms will eventually cause explosion.  It’s true in physics, it’s true in nature and it’s true, lest we forget, in humanity.

Volcanoes erupt when the pressure of expanding gas and magma becomes too much for the Earth’s crust to prevent.  The English once executed their king because his rule became too tyrannical to bear.  (Side note:  when the Cromwellian republic also became too tyrannical, they brought back the kingdom, but the next king was a much gentler and more controllable one than his father was.)

Here’s the historical truism when it comes to tyranny, and it’s true for all totalitarian regimes:

Totalitarian states suppress their peoples and impose misery on them.  When the people rebel against that suppression and misery, the State uses that as an excuse to suppress them yet further, and increase the misery thereby.

But at some point the dictator will be executed, the soviet will be cast out (by force if necessary), and the walls will be brought down.

Sic semper tyrannis.

I just hope I’m still alive to see that day, to help reload the machine guns, and to hold the coats of the gunners while refilling their tray of martinis.

Accident Of Birth

Deep Thoughts

Sarah writes about her decision to leave Portugal and take the Big Swim to Murka, and along the way she quotes Somerset Maugham:

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.”

A friend once described me thus:  “Kim was born American — he just happened to be in the wrong country at the time.”

It’s even closer than that.  Right after my parents married in the early 1950s, my Dad (a civil engineer) got an offer — full-time job, permanent residence — in Canada.  He accepted the gig, and they were all ready to move when my Mom discovered she was pregnant (with me).  She was too scared to bring up a child in a strange country, far from friends and family, and so they changed their plans.

So I was born in South Africa, and for the first thirty years of my life there I felt rootless, with no ties to the country of my birth, just as Maugham describes above.  When I went back to South Africa in 2017 for the first time since the Great Wetback Episode in the mid-1980s I drove around Johannesburg, knowing every single street and suburb, and even went back to the house where I’d grown up from age 3 until I finally left it at age 24.

And I still didn’t feel at home.  It was as though I was looking at some place I’d seen in someone else’s movie:  very familiar, but not mine.

Unlike Sarah, for whom Colorado was the shining city on the hill, I had no “ideal” place to go to when I came Over Here;  I ended up living variously in Chicago, North Jersey, Austin and now, Dallas;  but none of them really felt like home, or a place where I’d dreamed of living either consciously or subconsciously.  I will admit that living in the city of Chicago (as opposed to the ‘burbs) probably came the closest, in that the North Side was very similar to where I lived in Johannesburg — apartments and houses, and literally walking distance away from downtown in both cases.  But Chicago was never my beau ideal  either.

Strangely, the places which did strike a chord with me were the West Country in England — many times I would look at a place (town, village, house, whatever) and think, “Wow, I could live there“, but of course that was impossible;  and the other place was Connecticut, which is so close to England (New England, duh) that it was scary.  But as with Old England, the liberal politics and societal foolishness (guns, etc.) of New England pushed me away from Connecticut.

I guess Texas is about it.  Unless something in my circumstances changes radically, I’m probably going to end my life here — not an altogether unpleasant prospect, by the way, except for the torrid summers and the fact that getting anywhere Not Texas requires considerable travel.

And I guess, too, that I’m getting too old to make that massive change in my circumstances.  Moving here from Africa:  massive.  Moving from place to place within the U.S.:  difficult at times, but bearable.  But my last move (from Lakeview to Plano) was over twenty years ago, and I very much doubt that I’d consider making a big move again, even if finances permitted it (they don’t).

And that’s enough introspection.  I think I’ll go to the range.  That, at least, is one of the huge advantages of Texas.