 Brethren, I wanted to write this as a sort of companion piece to what I was talking about the other day. I touched on it a bit then, but there are three main points that I think really merit hammering home:
There is no one more disgusted by the Public than those of us who must deal with It- with them- on a regular basis. And brethren, let me tell you- stereotypes don’t come out of nowhere. Just as there’s more merit to the stereotype of the overalls- clad, MAGA- hat- wearing redneck sitting gape- mouthed in front of Fox News than we like to admit, there is equal accuracy in the stereotypes that get social media accounts suspended and their operators doxxed and canceled. The lowest class of society are not only exempt from paying taxes, they’re subsidized by their betters. When charity is outsourced to government- no matter what level of government it is- two things are inevitable. One, the undeserving will always get some, if not most, of those resources; and two, it will always and inevitably be weaponized. This is why I cannot support any government welfare; it is impossible to design a system that is immune to being gamed, that won’t snowball past sustainability, and that won’t be weaponized by the ruling class. And yet, it is as dangerous to say this publicly as it is to acknowledge that humans are by nature a hierarchal species. Egalitarianism is inherently utopian. Egalitarianism is just as much a lie as any other utopian delusion. I have utmost respect for the Founders, but Thomas Jefferson was wrong when he wrote that all men are created equal. We have but to look at the World IQ Map to see that. (I will, however, concede that he could not have known that those words would take on such a life of their own, and break free of the context in which they were written.) I don’t have a better system to propose than the one put forth by the Founders,but I think we can all agree at this point that the one they incepted is well and truly dead. The Republic of the Founders died in 1865. It pains me to admit that the leftists are correct about anything, but they are correct that the Stars & Stripes is the flag of the American Empire. Brethren, I don’t know about you, but the moment I had that epiphany, every scintilla of affection for the Stars & Stripes that propaganda had instilled in me died on the spot. I still have love and respect for the Betsy Ross flag, and for the Battle Flag, but the American Empire is such a monstrosity that not even nostalgia can redeem its flag for me. And if you have this same sentiment but feel guilty for it, please know that there is no good reason why you should. Indeed, you should scrutinize the motives of anyone who says differently. The Stars & Stripes is the flag that flew over the Union armies as they invaded Southern States that had done their best to secede peacefully. (Yes, we’ve been taught that it was Southern soldiers at Fort Sumter who fired on Union forces first, but anyone who knows for sure is long dead, and history taught by the victor is suspect at best. I am not convinced that it was the South who fired first. Even if they did, the Yankees shouldn’t have been there in the first place- their presence was in and of itself a provocation.) History as taught in the publicly funded school systems should be questioned at the very least. The primary goal of the public school system is not to teach its students useful information, or even to create good citizens. The primary goal of the current American school system, no matter which school system it is, is to train its subjects in obedience to authority. Either students will learn to submit to authority or they’ll be started down the incarceration pipeline, but either way they will be formed and trained to navigate a society in which they are not expected or allowed to exercise a degree of autonomy which could correctly be termed freedom. Nor will they ever. It will take longer than the lifetime of anyone now living to restore what was lost 161 years ago, if such a thing is even possible. I say collapse is assured because the critical percentage of the population that must be in agreement for true social change, or for drastic action, will never approve of the extreme measures that would be necessary to forestall catastrophe. The catastrophe may not take the form of total collapse- and given how many nukes we have, I hope and pray it doesn’t- but we’re already in a steep decline, and I think everyone agrees at this point that the status quo cannot and will not hold. Look at welfare obligations. Look at the national debt. These financial burdens alone are more than can be fulfilled. As one contributor to the most recent issue of Islander magazine pointed out, debts that can’t be paid won’t be. If I ever see a penny of Social Security money- which I won’t- it will have been drastically devalued from what it was worth when it was extorted from me. Yet I have no doubt that I will be expected to act as the Boomers do, to be grateful to have even that much, to believe that the pittance given to me is the same money that I paid in instead of money extorted from my nieces and nephews and their peers. Same with Medicare. Do you know, brethren, that the entire healthcare industry revolves around Medicare and Medicaid policy? That government money is what really funds the healthcare industry. That’s why it’s so dysfunctional. Everybody wants to gripe about how broken healthcare is- and it is completely broken, don’t get me wrong- but the reason is because government pulls the puppet strings through money. Obamacare exacerbated the problem, but the fundamental issue was already there. I mention Medicaid, too, because the people who qualify for Medicaid use medical services as disproportionally as they use every other social service. The people on Medicaid are almost certainly also going to be on SNAP- Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, more commonly known as EBT or food stamps- and collecting whatever other forms of welfare for which they are eligible. That welfare, by the by, is why this segment of the population bother having children at all. And what wretched creatures most of those poor children are! I know one medic who was called out for a sick child and arrived to find the mother on her phone, seemingly indifferent to the suffering of her visibly sick toddler. When he asked if she had given the child any Tylenol, the mother responded in a tone that suggested he was stupid for even asking the question, “No, that’s your job.” This attitude is typical of the segment of the population that utilizes these programs, especially in urban environments. Welfare queens are not a myth. I myself, at 19 years old and making so little money as a grocery store bagger that I had 3 roommates and kept a box of emergency food in my closet, once saw a family pay for groceries including steak and lobster with EBT, and when I loaded their groceries, it was into an Escalade. I have taken payments for wedding cakes that were paid for with EBT. Friends of mine who worked in the Deli took payments for cold cut and sandwich platters- cold, because hot food doesn’t qualify- with EBT. Brethren, I was raised in a household that teetered between upper working class and lower middle class depending on what the economy was doing and whether my dad worked any hurricanes that year, but I myself have been solidly working class my entire adult life. I’ve gone hungry to pay bills. I’ve had to save receipts for optional purchases until the return window passed, just to be sure I could actually afford it. When I looked into whether I qualified for any of those programs, I didn’t. I still don’t, and despite working in the healthcare industry, I can’t afford health insurance. Despite making the most money I’ve ever made, I still live paycheck to paycheck. Actually less, given that I have debt. Debt, which is essentially impossible to avoid if you want to own land, a home, or make any purchase of a comparable scale. You need credit to do that, and while not paying utility bills on time will tank your credit, actually paying them doesn’t build it. The entirety of the current paradigm is designed to train and incentivize the population to be fat, lazy, stupid, and most of all complacent. It is designed to funnel and trap all but the ruling class in perpetual debt. Our current system is, in a word, usury. There is a very good reason you don’t see that word used publicly, and why the people who try to are punished so severely for it. Between that, and the snowballing welfare obligations and social degredation since the 1960s, we’ve passed the point of no return. There is no political solution. There is no rescue coming. The ruling class have ensured that rescue would necessarily be tyrannical, and once such means had been accepted, there would be no coming back from them. It’s over, in other words. Has been for a while. I know it’s hard to accept. But this is the world in which we live. The world in which we were raised, the world we were taught to navigate, is well and truly dead. We are best served by seeing, and accepting, reality as it is. And so, brethren, I will tell you time and time again: prepare. Things are bad, and they will get worse. The rising cost of living, the increasing pressures on farmers and individuals who own even a little bit of land- it’s bad, and it’s going to get worse. The ruling class has no incentive to do anything but increase the pressure- slowly at first, and then faster. As you’ve probably noticed, they’re speeding up. The Boomers are dying, and as a group, they’re going to squeeze every last benefit from the rest of society that they can, right up to the last second. The Millennials are weak, cringe, and contemptible as a generation. The Zoomers are hardly better. There will be no rescue. The decline will continue, and whatever resistance wasn’t killed in the womb will be killed before it can mature. There will be more Lindsay Clancys. And while there will be noble men who try to stand against this, any success they have will be limited. I mentioned the Bronze Age Collapse previously- Ramses III was a pharaoh during this time, and one worthy of the name. In better times, he probably would have been one of Egypt’s great rulers; as it is, he presided over a decline. The best he could do for his people was to blunt the worst of it for them, and keep them from fading from the historical records like many of their less fortunate contemporaries. We start from a much better position than those ancients. While we are in decline, our prosperity was so much greater than theirs that even our poorest can, with proper management of resources, slowly accrue useful things to pass on to our heirs. So brethren, I urge you again and continually: build practical skills. As much as you can, learn about plumbing and sanitation. Learn about electricity. Learn about carpentry. Learn to sew. Learn to cook. Learn to grow. Learn to hunt. Learn to fish. Learn CPR and first aid. Participate in your community where you can. Going to church, volunteering with fire departments, participating in HAM and citizen radio groups- all of these things help build relevant relationships and skills, and give you a way to start building a network of useful connections. It also helps open up opportunities for barter with trustworthy people. Do these things, and teach your children to do them too. The ruling class is going to train and incentivize your children to be as fat, lazy, stupid, and complacent as the rest of the Public if you let them. For the sake of your children’s future, and everything you hold dear, don’t let them! The current default is contemptible. If you want strong, resilient children, you’re going to have to make them. And you’re going to have to instill in them an antipathy toward the current paradigm, in which victimhood is currency and weakness is incentivized in every way. Fortitude is the single most valuable thing you can instill in your children. Even without a lot of money, you can start building a cache of resources for them. Look for deals on things like solar ovens, physical media, and manual tools. Look for physical copies of reference books for useful skills. Most of these will be older works. It’s refreshing to even skim them- I got a copy of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration a while back, and started laughing within the first couple of sentences at how completely politically incorrect it was. The ruling classes are very good at propaganda, and shape publicly acceptable language through every means. It’s good to expose yourself to works written prior to the current norm. Not least of all because things have been bad before. Maybe not in this particular way, but freedom is constantly eroded; it is not the historical norm for common people to enjoy peace and prosperity. This is a good thing to keep in mind when you start getting demoralized- because it’s natural and inevitable to get demoralized, and disheartened, and want to stop struggling quite so much. The main reason people embrace tyranny is because it’s easier. Being a person worthy of autonomy is hard work. (This is, incidentally, why democracy can’t work. Normies are consensus machines and easily manipulated by default. Even when you know this, and even when you recognize when it’s happening, it’s hard to fight the impulse. Or instinct, I guess I should say.) But it’s worth it. This is what humans are meant to do: take care of our families and our people, build things, create beauty, and strive to leave a better legacy for our children. Too many people take the easy way out, and refuse to put in the hard work to better themselves. But when you do, there’s a unique satisfaction in it. Just like there’s a timeless coziness in cradling a warm cup in your hands and appreciating the home you’ve created for yourself, there’s a sort of bone- deep rightness when you look at work produced by your own hands and find it good. This is what we were meant to do. So brethren, work on relevant skills, share your blessings with the deserving, and sleep with the peace of one who is acting in accordance with God and nature.
1 Comment
 Brethren, It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m about to make up for that, so get yourselves some water and maybe some snacks. The crazy cat lady has wandered out of the trailer park to yap at you again. It’s become a habit for me to put on YouTube videos while I’m doing chores, and three in particular prompted me to write you today. The first was commentary on how out of touch influencers have become. I had to laugh, because it’s not just the influencers - they might be the most visibly ridiculous about it, but there’s an entire class of people out there, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who have no idea what the real world looks like. The second was a video about the Bronze Age Collapse. This was the period in antiquity in which the most advanced civilizations of the age - the Minoans, the Myceneans, the Hittites, among others - all suffered existential catastrophes, with the aforementioned ones falling completely, and others - Egypt, Assyria, Babylon- transforming themselves almost completely in order to survive. A third video featured an archaeologist and historian specializing in that region and time period, one Eric Cline, providing seven rules - or lessons, I would call them - that he takes away from the Bronze Age collapse. I’ll address those first. So, my take on Mr. Cline’s rules for civilizations facing collapse: 1. Have multiple contingency plans in place. This is something on which Mr. Cline and I agree. Mr. Cline mentions resilience in the video. There’s a book, Green Wizardry by John Michael Greer, that presents efficiency and redundance as mutually exclusive. Greer also points out that Americans historically favored the latter over the former, but that’s changed (for the worse, I would argue). I’ll get into it more later, but as someone who spent a decade working in a grocery store, I saw this prioritization of efficiency and its consequences in real time. 2. Cultivate resilience to invasion. I agree that cultivating resistance to invasion is a good thing. I also can’t help but notice that our rulers are doing the exact opposite of that, and have been for decades. Arguably, more decades than anyone on this earth has been alive - Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus in 1883, and while the Hart-Cellar act wasn’t passed until 1965, Emanuel Cellar had been pushing for it since the 1920s. Depending on how you look at it, brethren, all of us were betrayed before we were even born. 3. Be self sufficient, but avoid alienating allies. Agreed. I would say this dovetails nicely with “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” 4. Be innovative and inventive. Agreed, to a certain extent. And you don’t get there by weaponizing the chilling effect. 5. Prepare for extreme weather. While Mr. Cline uses the opportunity to pay obeisance to the current hegemon on climate change, he also specifically mentions hurricanes. As a daughter of the Gulf Southeast, I can confirm that you can and should, regardless of how destitute you may be, prepare however you can for a hurricane. And since there is no part of the US in general and the South in particular that is exempt from natural disasters, every household should have a plan for those disasters which can be reasonably expected. 6. Have a secure water supply. Here he mentions California specifically, and its disputes with its neighbors over water rights. Jokes about socialism aside, this is also something to keep in mind if you’re fortunate enough to be in the market for land and/ or a home - whence will your water come? If your local utility goes down for whatever reason, or your well runs dry, will you know what to do? Do you have the knowledge and means to purify water in the aftermath of a natural disaster? 7. Keep the working class happy. The ruling class are doing their best to insulate themselves from this need by utilizing technology - insert reference to Flock cameras here - but that’s nothing new. Governments have been surveilling their populations by whatever means were available to them for as long as governments have existed. What’s new in the modern age is the extent to which people have made themselves vulnerable to this, what with the “smart” devices and allowing exactly the rapacious hominids into office who ought to have been kept furthest from any sort of power. The Bronze Age collapse may be thousands of years past, but human nature has not changed fundamentally in the ages since. If anything, our more advanced technology and higher standards of living have enabled vast swathes of the population to live in delusion, in a way that would have killed them in pretty much any other era. The influencers that first video commentator mentioned are one such group. I doubt a single one of the twits chattering at her camera while doing makeup, or repeatedly using the word “simulation” to describe her experience in a grocery store, would be able to survive on her own merits in an age when doing so would entail actual work - or, if I may be so crude, work beyond opening her legs. (Though it may be argued that opening their lives to the Internet in the way that many, if not most, of them do is even worse.) And now that I’ve mentioned grocery stores, I’ll expand on what I mentioned about them earlier. I worked in a grocery store bakery for years. In that time, I saw less and less actually made in the store - and the ways in which customers inquiring about the change asked about it mattered. Management could get around giving a forthright answer by saying that the product was “baked” in the store, or by answering in the affirmative when a customer asked if something was “made” in the store. As far as management was concerned, a product was “made” in the store if it wasn’t delivered packaged and ready to be put straight on the shelf. No, the way to get management to admit that something was shipped in pretty much already made was to ask if it had been “mixed” in-store. In the time I was there, at least a couple of different kinds of bread went from being made entirely on-site to getting shipped in partially baked, since someone figured out that they could put in twice the amount of yeast and still get rise when the bread was baked in-store. It was more cost effective for them to do it that way, since it freed up more time for the bakers, but they still got the benefits of customers smelling fresh baked bread and seeing personnel removing it from the oven. Some stores even have fans that waft the scent of freshly-baked product further out of the bakery. Another thing I saw in my years there was more and more automation of the ordering system, and less supplies kept on hand. This was one of many metastizations of JITT out of manufacturing. JITT stands for Just In Time Transportation. It refers to a system in which just enough supplies are kept on hand to last you until your next shipment of supplies. It’s a very efficient system, but not at all redundant. If that next shipment doesn’t arrive on time, if the order isn’t right, if just one thing goes wrong, you have a problem. And in transitioning to this system, we often did. This was made worse by the ordering system being designed to track which supplies were being used and ordering based on what the data suggested would be needed. In theory it should have saved time, but in practice it necessitated a lot of overtime from the manager, assistant manager, and one brown-nosed baker with managerial ambitions. The line from management there was the same as the line from management from a hospital where I worked, whenever I asked for a shift partner because the workload wasn’t safe for just one person to be handling it: Please bear with it for just a little longer. I just need data to take to upper management. I just need numbers to back up my request. Lower and middle management weren’t seen as competent professionals running departments. They were seen as functionaries. And my own manager wasn’t the only person from whom I saw this in the hospital. Doctors were treated much the same. The hospital switched over to a new charting system while I was there; and while I never had to chart, and never saw the system myself, from what I heard doctors had to check symptoms on a checklist, and the program would suggest tests to run. If a doctor chose not to run that test, they had to input their reason why. When I heard that, I was powerfully reminded of something I once read in the introduction of a book called The Coming Plague. Author Laurie Garrett wrote about her uncle, a WW2 medic and doctor, and the apprehensions of himself and his colleagues in turning over the field to successors who had never had to practice in a time before antibiotics, who had diagnostic tools at their disposal which meant that they had never had to develop the finely-tuned diagnostic sense of the elder doctors, and who had never seen polio. Those apprehensions were well-founded. In some ways, the Third Worlders who have seen things like smallpox or measles are better prepared for medical training than their more sheltered classmates. It’s the same problem we’ve seen in the arts: creatives who had seen war, or at least had to earn a living through hard work before their art was good enough to make them self-sufficient, made better art than "nepo-babies" who have lived in a money bubble their entire lives. Which brings me back to the first point I wanted to make: there’s an entire class of society that has no idea what the real world looks like. It boggled my mind to realize that there are hundreds of thousands, or more probably millions, of people just in this country who honestly believe that every single human being who exists wants to, and deserves the opportunity to, live a dignified life. Not all of them are able to articulate it. Not all of them realize that this is the reason they vote the way they do, why they’re so susceptible to propaganda, why their overabundance of empathy is so readily weaponized against them. But they’re out there. They’re out there, and they vote. These are the people who give money to beggars, who vote for welfare, who virtue signal at any and every opportunity, and think themselves good people for it. These are the people who take SSRIs to help them quash the knowledge, deep down, that they aren’t good people and that they aren't helping. Introspection would help them more, but they find “affirming” therapists so they aren’t pushed to do any, because beneficial introspection hurts. It hurts to look at yourself and identify the areas in which you’re wanting, in which you’re not good enough. It’s hard to actually better yourself. It’s so much easier to use “self care” as an excuse to do what you want, to buy what you want, and to act in accordance with your nature. It’s so much harder to choose to be better. And that’s just with the weak-willed who go along with the prevailing ideology. It’s so much worse with those who are actually mentally ill. Instead of being helped, they’re being enabled. I hate it when people call addiction a disease. I refuse to. Not because this is incorrect - it does function like one. But part of the reason medical personnel and the public are pushed by the ruling class to use the word “disease” for addiction is to lessen the stigma associated with it, and to lessen the role of personal responsibility in its management. Addiction is a failed coping mechanism; nothing more, nothing less. Society isn’t willing to admit that the reasons people become addicts require a lot of introspection, and a tremendous amount of willpower, to correct. It’s not as simple as giving them a lifelong prescription and calling them cured. And hardly anyone is willing to admit that no one else can do it for them. If an addict is to be anything more than an addict, they must understand why they turned to addiction, face whatever drove them to it, and commit to not using that addiction as an escape and a coping mechanism for their problems for the rest of their lives. Because that’s yet another thing society isn’t willing to admit - an addict will forevermore be an addict. The want will always be there, and the addict has to choose every day to turn away from it. When stressed, they might have to choose every single moment of every day to turn away from it. I bring up addiction with mental illness because both require enablers, and society in general has been far too willing to enable those suffering with both or either for far too long. This is what outsourcing social functions to the government has done. The truth is, welfare shouldn’t have any place in government. Boomers will pitch a fit when told this - don’t speak ill of Medicare in front of a Boomer unless you want spittle flying at your face - but that doesn’t make it untrue. And even otherwise reasonable people will bend over backwards to find excuses for their pet programs when presented with the mere suggestion. “Social Security would’ve worked if Congress hadn’t gotten their hands on it.” “Social Security is just me getting out what I paid in.” “If I didn’t have Medicare, I wouldn’t be able to afford any healthcare at all.” Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that gives those who have aged out of the workforce a pittance of what they paid in - inflation doesn’t benefit the working class. Beneficiaries aren’t getting their own money back. They’re getting what’s being paid into it now, money extorted from their heirs. Congress was always going to get their hands on it. Congressmen don’t become Congressmen because they’re principled, at least not anymore. There is no way to protect any program from being pilfered by politicians and bureaucrats. The only way to keep politicians and bureaucrats from stealing government money is to keep the government on such a shoestring budget and under such close watch that they literally can’t steal from it. Another thing society is unwilling to admit is that not everyone deserves charity. One reason why the homeless often spurn shelters is because shelters have rules. A homeless addict, a lot of the time, would rather call 911 and go to a hospital than go to a shelter when the weather is too bad for them to remain on the street. And when they get in the hospital, laws requiring staff to provide care means that those same "people" can abuse medical workers to a ridiculous degree, sometimes involving permanent injury, before anything is done about it. Polite society is not ready to admit that not everything human-shaped is worthy of being called human. The ways in which society traditionally dispensed charity - through churches and social groups - meant that there was a standard to which those seeking help had to rise (or at least to appear like they did, or were trying). Laws justifiably prohibiting government from discriminating amongst its citizens in distribution of resources to which they are entitled means that the unworthy are enabled to become resource sponges - contributing nothing, absorbing everything they can. Do you have any idea, brethren, how many of your tax dollars subsidize addiction? And not just narcotics or alcohol. Do you have any idea just how many medical personnel and firefighters are injured every year in treating bariatrics? It’s not even the eating themselves to death with which I take umbrage. It’s that someone can eat themselves to death, and maim others in the doing. Not because they’re trying to, but because moving a bariatric patient is more dangerous than anyone who hasn’t had to do it could realize. With this, as with alcoholism, as with opiate addiction, they are enabled. And not just in the obvious ways. The FDA is a joke. There’s a revolving door between Big Pharma and the FDA. Both government and the moneyed interests that own it have incentive to keep the population fat, lazy, stupid, and most of all, complacent. There’s no telling anymore what’s in your food, even if you make it yourself. Hell, even if you grow it yourself, because how are you to know exactly what is in the air and in the rain? Though at the very least, it’s not as damaging as what’s in the grocery store. The Amish certainly don’t have the same rate of obesity as the rest of the population. (And honestly, I’m starting to think they were right about technology in general, if not electricity in particular.) There are other things, too. Hormonal birth control was implemented without any long term studies (at least to my knowledge) of what using it for the duration of a woman’s reproductive years will do to her. The horrors of unrestrained transgender ideology has shown what irresponsible use of hormones can do to the human body. So why are we so cavalier in the use of hormonal birth control? It’s become ubiquitous in general society, and that should be terrifying. I said all of that to say this: our rulers hate us, and they act like it. The most recent edition of Islander magazine asked: What is to be done? I perhaps lack the intellect to find their answer particularly coherent, but my own remains what it has been for as long as I’ve seen fit to heed the question: Take care of your own, become as independent as you can, and do your best to make your home a beautiful refuge for you and your loved ones. Develop and refine practical skills. Read things that grow your mind, avoid brain-rot, savor simple pleasures, take joy in what you build. And when you can’t help but worry, when it feels like too much and you can’t quite banish the anxiety: pray. A civilization’s fall can’t be stopped by just one person, but we can each look after our own little corner of the world, and make it a better place. When you do that, it has a ripple effect. Is it grand? No. But it doesn’t have to be. Being grand is overrated. It’s better to be worthy. Worthy of your name, worthy of your heritage, worthy of the blessings left to you by your forebears and given to you by God. Go forth, brethren, and proveyourselves worthy. |
