Pondering the disaster unfolding in Los Angeles, I am reminded of the 1966 movie Fahrenheit 451, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. The film is a masterpiece of the dystopian/futuristic genre. It portrays a society in which the job of the fire department is to light fires, specifically for the purpose of burning forbidden books.
And here we are. The job of the state and local government in California, apparently, is to ensure that fires break out, and when they do, that the people and equipment for extinguishing them have been degraded as much as possible. The accomplishments of the leadership thus far: malfunctioning reservoirs; precious water channeled into the ocean; empty hydrants; routine brush-clearing protocols ignored; criminals, drug addicts, and lunatics (“homeless”) running amok and starting fires; essential equipment sent to Ukraine; funding diverted to woke insanity; a mayor who has the intellectual prowess of a gerbil; and last but not least, fat lesbians making sure that ability is the least important qualification required for the post of “firefighter.” The dystopia has arrived. We are in it. As an author of dystopian fiction, I am concerned that my vocation will be mooted by reality. If things continue on their current trajectory, it will soon be impossible to write a novel like Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World. It is already problematic. How can one depict horrors that await us in a future society when those horrors are happening right now? The synopsis on Amazon for Huxley’s Brave New World declares that the book is “a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order.” Well, we’re about, what, eighty percent of the way there? We often hear that such-and-such government policy, or new piece of woke terminology, is “Orwellian.” What adjective do we use when everything is Orwellian? At that point, the term is useless; the outbreaks of depravity that plague us are no longer outbreaks, but rather the norm. Walking in the rain, you can say “I’m getting wet,” but if you jump in the pool, the phrase loses its meaning. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a mentally retarded black lesbian struggling to lift a fire hose—forever.
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Recent headlines have informed a wider audience that Muslim rape gangs are running amok in Britain. This has been known for some time, but it took the power and reach of Elon Musk and others to catapult the issue to prominence.
This sickening chapter in the destruction of old Blighty is not strictly about pedophilia, although the rape and torture victims are very young. Nor is the core issue Muslim degeneracy, although clearly we are witnessing an open display of such. Rather, the crux of the matter is the purposeful importation of primitive Third World tribes as bioweapons to degrade and destroy the native population. The importation of human bioweapons into Europe sprang from the same psychopathic brains that gave us lockdowns, transgender madness, death jabs, and totalitarian measures to “save democracy.” All of these are cut from the same ideological cloth. All are weapons of war. Chaos has been the intent from the outset. Multiculti benetton kumbaya diversity blah blah blah—Fuhgeddaboudit. The results of planting these savages in the middle of England (or France, Germany, Sweden, etc.) are predictable with 100% accuracy. The 1400 years of Islamic history make it crystal clear as to what we could expect. Throw the "South Asian" rapists in prison and throw away the key. But don't blame them for this mess. They're pawns in the game. Muslims are gonna Muslim; a leopard can’t change its spots. Disruptions, often violent, will occur whenever you transplant a distinct and unified group into a culture with significantly different values, beliefs, and behavioral patterns. If your clean and safe Arizona town suddenly receives a huge influx of woke Leftist wealthy white Californians, you will soon be experiencing crime, social disarray, and urban blight. Conversely, if Pakistan suddenly became twenty percent Norwegian, there would be outbreaks of nonviolence, rule of law, personal responsibility, and orderly commerce. There is no mystery in any of this. I lived part of my childhood in London; that was back in the early 1970s. It might as well have been on a different planet. The city was safe and pleasant. I could travel alone or with a friend to any neighborhood, at any time of day, without the slightest fear. I don’t think that young people today could imagine that such a thing were possible. I grieve for the old London, and the rest of Europe, which is teetering on the edge of the precipice. We in America are heading for a similar fate, though possibly not quite as rapidly. But on both sides of the pond, unless there are drastic changes, all roads lead to extinction of European man. If Europe, our homeland, goes under, it will be a catastrophe, and will make it even more difficult for North America to keep its head above water. For decades, the U.S. Deep State has been advancing the woke agenda around the world, including the subversion of efforts to stop “refugees” and “migrants” (i.e., the bioweapons) from pouring into European countries. Presumably, with the incoming Trump Administration, this shameful chapter in American history will come to an end. The American foreign policy and espionage establishment is in love with “color revolution” and regime change. What we need is a new kind of regime change, one that liberates the people from treasonous Leftist leaders who are bent on the annihilation of their own nations. Many in the U.S. are hopeful that the incoming administration can solve the problem of inflation. This scourge continues to cause heartache for the population, particularly individuals and families with low income and without assets.
As with so many other issues, the first step in any serious campaign to resolve the dilemma is to correctly identify the problem, without political propaganda and other extraneous inputs. Our rulers can begin by admitting the extent of the damage. Government statistics on price increases (and unemployment) are nothing less than fraudulent. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that prices are not rising by three percent annually, or whatever similar ridiculous figure is being proffered by the sorcerers in Washington. Moreover, in addition to nominal price, there are other manifestations of decreasing purchasing power that need to be included in the equation. One of these is shrinkflation, the shrinking of quantity for a given item. We have all done the supermarket double-take when encountering, say, a bar of chocolate that is suddenly smaller than it had always been. The price, of course, remains the same or rises. A related phenomenon is crapflation. This means reduction of quality for a given item. One day, out of the blue, you receive a shoddier product, or inferior ingredients, but, once again, at the same or higher price. It’s just another way to hide the erosion of purchasing power. So what exactly is this “inflation”? It is not, as our Leftist friends would have us believe, a cabal of cigar-smoking capitalists in the back room of Kroger headquarters, rubbing their hands together and guffawing as they greedily jack up the price of milk. Rather, consider the word itself. Something has been inflated; think of tire pressure. And that something is the money supply. This used to be common knowledge. My 1991 Webster’s Dictionary defines inflation as “an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods resulting in a substantial and continuing rise in the general price level.” Today, Webster’s still conveys the general idea, but with some obfuscation: “A continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services” [emphasis mine; also note the flipping of the order, and the absence of the word “substantial”]. The American Heritage dictionary just buries its head in the sand: “A persistent increase in the level of consumer prices or a persistent decline in the purchasing power of money.” Going further up the causal chain, the expansion of the money supply is primarily the result of “money printing” by means of an inscrutable process involving the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the banks. Much of this takes place to either fund the obscene Federal deficits or to goose the stock and housing markets. Incidentally, the money supply has approximately doubled in the last ten years, with the magic printing press conjuring around eleven trillion dollars into existence. Yes, that’s trillion with a “t.” Increasing prices can never be reversed until this monetary hocus-pocus is ended. Here we have the crux of the matter. Compared to this, every other factor is minor. If they double the quantity of something, what do they expect will happen to its price? That’s right, it will be cut in half. Would any sane and honest person deny that the purchasing power of the dollar has been cut in half since 2015? But yes, there are some other factors contributing to price increases, usually due to government overreach. One obvious instance is government regulation. Automobiles, for example, are far more expensive than need be, due to the onerous safety, emission, and mileage requirements that are now out of control. Then there are the downstream effects of government subsidies and other market interventions, which create artificial demand and speculation, which drives up prices. Suppressing the interest rate has led to the perversely-valued real estate market, as well as a host of other bubbles and malinvestment across the economy. Another case of market intervention is government-backed student loans. Allowed to feed at this bottomless government trough, colleges and universities can keep hiking tuition; after all, the money is always there. Incentives for competition and efficiency have effectively been destroyed. (And the Leftist propaganda machine has its ideological hatchery fully funded.) Another factor is crime. In addition to successful shoplifiting, prevention of such is a significant expense that is passed on to the consumer. Viewing the security personnel at my local Walmart, one would think they are guarding a top-secret military installation. Let us not forget the spreading plague of idiocy and incompetence. This leads to defective products, lousy repairs, wasted time, and other ill effects that in the end, all cost money. The deteriorating quality of the population also makes neighborhoods, or even entire cities, unlivable. This shrinks the available decent living space, driving up demand for housing and amenities in the zones with "good schools." In summary, I hope the incoming Trump Administration has the stomach to tell it like it is. Otherwise, the world of monetary make-believe will continue on its merry way. One of the most disconcerting signs of our society’s decay has been the proliferation of tattoos. And it only seems to be getting worse.
I grew up in the America and England of the 1960s and 70s. The only “ink” I recall seeing at that time was on veterans of the navy (typically a relatively small image of an anchor or mermaid), and survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. That was it. Never a conspicuously visible, multicolored, “artistic” design. To imagine such a thing being common, and on women no less, would have been to enter the realm of science fiction. For thousands of years, tattoos have been the mark of the slave, the criminal, and the pirate. In short, the dregs of society. This is reflected in the Bible, which in Leviticus 19:28 states, “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” The prohibition is presented in the context of warnings against prostituting one’s daughter, wizardry, mediums, sacrifices to Moloch, and other sickly, idolatrous, and barbaric customs. To permanently engrave one’s body with ink is to spit in the face of God and man alike. In the current era, one peculiar aspect of the phenomenon is its appearance across the socioeconomic spectrum. If it were limited to the lowest classes, we might consider it to be a strictly vulgar pursuit, to appear street-tough and repellant. But when a young lady at Princeton, from an upper-class family involved in molding the cultural, political, and economic shape of the nation, thinks that inscribing on her body the mark of the slave is “cool,” what are we to expect from our elites? Nothing good, for sure. It’s one more strike against our youth. They have become dumbed down, humorless, self-hating, and uncultured; we poison them with psychotropic drugs, mutilate their genitals, and ruin their health and adulterate their DNA (or simply murder them) with safe and effective injections. Are tattoos their cry for help, or rather their proudly-displayed badge of membership in a new race of botched, confused, and profoundly ugly subhumans? Please indulge me for a moment; I need to get this off my chest. There are a few things about our everyday life that just annoy the hell out of me. Here is a list, in no particular order:
1. Sloppy/inappropriate dress. People, circulating in public, who look as if they just rolled out of bed. Colors and patterns in the most abhorrent taste. A grown man, in an upscale restaurant, wearing a football jersey and those ridiculous three-quarter-length shorts that make him look like a toddler. Women wearing tights that show every nook and cranny of their (usually) disgusting physique. Fat women with clothing that emphasizes their most unattractive characteristics. 2. Bodily mutilation. Tattoos, piercings, and Lord knows what else. I’ll be writing a separate post about this in the near future. 3. Dull faces. You know, that catatonic expression. Many years in the making; now exacerbated by (a) the scamdemic, with its extended isolation, and vax-induced brain fog; and (b) social interaction taking place increasingly on line. 4. Uptalk. Enunciating a statement as if it were a question; constant rising intonation. Especially annoying on men. Makes them sound like little girls. 5. Substitutions for “you’re welcome.” These include “of course” and “no problem.” The other day, in a shop, a young lady (with all kinds of metal protruding from her face) was helpful, and I thanked her. The response: “Of course,” said with a look of feigned surprise, and a little artificial giggle. 6. No sense of humor. In the Before Times, one could usually engage in mildly amusing banter with random strangers. This has become increasingly difficult. 7. Constant fussing with phones. Two people sitting together in a restaurant, each absorbed in his phone. Sitting with someone who shows you a photo of every object that comes up in conversation, or feels compelled to “google” every topic right there on the spot. Related to this: the annoying assumption that everybody and their grandmother has a smart phone, texts, scans, etc. etc. “Just scan your blah-blah code into the reader.” When I inform them that I don’t even have a phone, I get the catatonic look. Thank heavens I grew up without cell phones and computers. 8. After paying in cash, cashier struggles to make change. Here is yet another result of the online/electronic lifestyle, not to mention substandard education. The computer (in whatever form) does all necessary calculations. Even worse: you approach the cashier with your bag of dog food, or whatever. “Can I get a phone number?” or “Are you a discount-club member?” Good grief. Can I just pay for the goddamn dog food? 9. Awful customer service. Or lack thereof. On the phone, the ubiquitous Filipina. Endless automated prompts that lead you around in a circle. 10. Terrible quality. Nothing seems to work quite right. As commenter Mary Contrary over at Samizdata put it, “the general enshittification of everything.” 11. Loud and obnoxious music. I go to the supermarket at seven in the morning to beat the crowds, and they have some demented rap music blasting from the loudspeakers. 12. Left-turn scofflaws. I’m waiting at a red light. It turns green, but I have to wait for a succession of cars in the oncoming left-turn lane, who are all turning left despite their signal being red. Often I see a convoy of up to four cars running the red light, one after the other. Please feel free to share your own pet peeves. Since November 5th, the blogosphere has been abuzz with the question, can President Trump and his associates prevent the Titanic from sinking? Like everyone else, I felt a rush of excitement and optimism after the election. For various reasons, however, my optimism has been tempered (though not eliminated). To sum it up: I’ll believe it when I see it.
Western civilization is in free fall. There are vast forces at work, larger than life, possibly biblical in scope. This means that the task of saving the West is nothing short of monumental. Many on our side, “conservatives” for lack of a better term, live in a fairyland where America is a constitutional republic, essentially resembling the framework of 1950, but with a few harsh problems that need to be addressed. They think that these problems can be solved within the legacy political structures and rules of procedure. Unfortunately, this is no longer possible. Conservatives believe that policy disputes can be resolved, as in 1950, through open debate and the marketplace of ideas. They fail to comprehend that the Left has declared war on us, and they pay no heed to such things. Thus we witness the pathetic spectacle of influential conservative websites filled with articles about such-and-such congressman or pundit verbally “destroying,” in a congressional hearing or media interview, some spokesman of the Deep State. As if this would cause the “destroyed” person to alter his behavior in the slightest. The conservative seems not to realize that talk, debate, articles, speeches, reasoning, logic, shame, integrity, etc. have no impact whatsoever on the other side. Will the Trump administration take the necessary steps to impose accountability and consequences on the criminals currently running the country? Will they merely be “fired,” or will they go to jail? This is a decisive test. If no one is sent to prison within, say, six months of the new administration, then we may declare “business as usual,” and watch as the Swamp rolls merrily along. Another test will be the ability to rein in the clown show going by the name of “judiciary.” For decades now, they have been legislating from the bench, striking down government policy at whim while inventing new legal principles that have no basis in law. What will Border Czar Tom Homan do when a federal judge decides he doesn't like a deportation order, and nullifies it? Will Mr. Homan still retain his pitbull persona and ignore the illegal nullification, or will he hold a press conference and vow to appeal, gee whiz by golly, “all the way to the Supreme Court”? A further test, this one in the realm of health policy, was suggested by the investment guru Edward Dowd. In an interview with Neil Oliver, they pondered the likelihood of the government being able to impose accountability and consequences on the perpetrators of the Covid crimes. Dowd’s test was that all mRNA-based “vaccines” be recalled from the market within six months of the new administration. If this happens, we have hope that consequences are on the way. If not, then we know it’s business as usual. [In the Dowd interview, fast forward to 44:04 for this topic. But I recommend watching the whole thing. You'll get to hear about Dowd's impressive statistical analysis of excess death and disability following the rollout of the jabs.] Ultimately, our fate will be decided by the current power struggle among competing factions of America’s “elites.” Donald Trump was able to win the election, adequately suppressing the voting shenanigans of the Democrats, by virtue of his backing by a disenchanted segment of the Establishment. The grass-roots MAGA crowd is insignificant compared to the elite faction that ensured the victory. RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, their less visible peers, and even Trump himself, are old-style liberals who are horrified by the excesses of the Left. These are smart people; they know that America and the West are collapsing, in every domain. They believe that they can manage that collapse, and roll Leftist practise back to 1980 or so, the latest date at which the zeitgeist could reasonably be called “liberal,” in the classic sense of the word. To that I say: if only. But I fear that they, as well as the conservatives, underestimate the odious nature of the Deep State, and its utter lack of restraint. By contrast, the habitual restraint of the American “right wing” is, and will continue to be, interpreted as weakness to be exploited. If Trump & Co. succeed—patching the hull of the Titanic and towing her to port—we may be fortunate enough to see a tolerably livable country. But to truly save the West, and ignite any kind of renaissance, the entire rotten edifice of collectivist ideology must be discredited. This means uprooting its most fundamental myths, first and foremost equality. |
Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. Archives
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Interesting viewpointsAce of Spades |