Before we get into the good stuff, I want to provide a consumer alert of sorts.
Be careful where you fill up. Pay attention to how much your getting on the meter vs how much you think you should get.
I can estimate how much my tank will take to well within a gallon one way or another. Recently, I went to a Murphy’s at just a hair below half a tank. The needle was still touching the half tank line. For my truck, Ram 2500, 26 gallon tank, that would top off at just over 13 gallons. I allowed for 12.5 to 14 gallons. I even thought 14.5 if the meter was a bit dodgy. I stopped the fill when THE METER said 20 gallons. My tank was still not topped off.
I looked for a state calibration sticker. There may have been one, but I couldn’t find it. Just be familiar with how your tank takes on fuel. Most of you probably are. Remember, when a station is considerably below the competitions, there might be a shady reason for it.
In my case I was planning to save $.05/gal. That was wiped out many, MANY times over.
The more things change…the more they revert to the Dark Ages.
We’ve not evolved much from the time that the Church was the government. We’ve just gotten the priestly vestments off the official podium and replaced it with a business suit. As hard as the thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment1 tried to rid us of mystic “leaders”, we have created a bureaucracy fueled by Byzantine nonsense so complex that even the people who dominate it don’t understand it. They just know how to exploit it to keep you stupid.
Thomas Jefferson once said - I’m paraphrasing - all laws should be written so that a common man could read it and comprehend it…while running. The idea is that a society ruled by the will of the governed is only legitimate if EVERYONE knows what is being done on their name.
Sadly, we are double vexed here. First, because of the built-in advantages lawyer/politicians have in writing things in a “lawyerly” fashion, they can claim that only THEY can understand the true meaning of their documents. This mirrors perfectly the clerics who insisted they alone could understand the Bible, and therefore outlawed the citizen reading it.
When a citizen, like your humble host, gets uppity, the lawyers (modern mystics) can discredit the uppity views by saying the uppity guy isn’t among the mystics, and therefore can’t understand the meaning of their words.
The other edge of the vexation lies in the fact that more than half the population will not grasp the first five paragraphs of this article. So in a sense, because of our intellectual laziness and our disinterest in the things the mystics do to us, the previous paragraph is correct.
There is a term for this. It is the “tyranny of expertise”. You can’t be right about the simplest, most observable point on things like “climate change” or freedom of speech. You can’t possibly have a legitimate argument against government spending. None of this is possible because you are not an “expert”. You cavort not among the mystics.
And most people buy this nonsense. Many actively support it to feel powerful. That is absurd, of course, because those who do that make of themselves the worst of victims.
When the average citizen reads at an 8th grade level,2 and since the greatest amount of reading by a citizen centers around box scores and gossip and entertainment, the mystics feel invincible.
Can that change? Maybe. Jefferson also said that it is healthy if the government fears the governed. He also said that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”. Be assured that the modern day mystics, lawyers and politicians, and the cronies that own them, are indeed tyrants and no longer deserve to sit in seats of power.
But unless we have enough literate and engaged patriots, then the mystics live without a healthy fear.
I will use a line that sets my teeth on edge whenever a Lefty uses it on social media, because they always use it then they are 100% wrong, but it applies here. Educate yourself.
Speaking as I did, of the Climate Scam…
Earlier I spoke of things observable - things we know to be true, but are told not to believe them. Last month, a new study emerged by people WHO ARE experts. It completely un-settles that which you were told was settled science: GW/CC.
The fact is that anyone with eyes and a smart phone knows there is no emerging pattern of hurricanes or any other weather event that portends climate dome of any sort. The mystics had simply found a new scam upon which to base new seizures of power. They have used the tyranny of “expertise” to shout down anyone who got uppity about what they were seeing with their own eyes.
To wit
Have you ever noticed when watching weather reports, especially during the winter, how the temperature is always a few degrees warmer in the cities than in surrounding areas? Keep that in mind as you watch the video linked by a button in the text.
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We don’t have to agree. But we should learn to laugh more.
See the whole shmear by smashing the button!
Punks roam your streets. Your mayor is happy about that.
I have often laughed at people who live by, or instill in others, a sense of class envy. It is among the most childish aspects of the modern Left. It paves the road for wasteful, useless ideas like universal income, paying people to breed and not work, modern monetary theory (MMT) and my favorite self-zeroing scam, a mandated minimum wage.
When I see this nonsense rear its idiotic head, I take pains to call out the purveyor. But this week leaves me gobsmacked at how class envy has evolved. Let’s tease it out.
Grab and go: The new urban shopping spree.
We’ve all seen the videos now. Gangs of young adults and teenagers, male and female. Usually black, sometimes Hispanic, maybe a few Asian.3 They attack stores, nowadays high-end, big box joints, and grab everything they can carry out. It is looting, with the blessing of the state, in broad daylight.
Someday, merchants will tire of this. Perhaps there will be a large man, hired by the store, standing at the exits with Louisville Sluggers cocked and ready for the first looter through the door. Instantly, the problem will end, IF THE STORES PROTECT THE BOUNCERS. But the looting must stop!
More disturbing than the disgusting looting, is the justification (lame excuses) offered by the Left for its occurrence. We’ve been told these punks are acting out because of racism. Or they are are doing it so they can eat. Then the ace excuse, the stores can afford it.
I’ll start with the third excuse first, then we’ll tie them all into a neat bow.
These RICH stores can afford the looting.
This is one example you’ll see here of the ignorance of economics rife among idiots who consider themselves elite and are the governing class in too many of our cities. These excuse makers are by no definition “elite”. They are to a person, lazy, ignorant, corrupt bums. They are happily trashing their own cities, watching their citizens reduced to worthless punks, then going for cocktails. The Barry Obiden regime (now in their third term), along with media are happy to give them cover.
These people are now saying the stores are rich. They can afford the losses. They have insurance. People are worth more than things. AND… If they don’t like the looting and the laws that say it’s okay to steal $900 at a time and if arrested, you’re released the same day, the stores can pay to create a referendum to fight the laws.
There are people, perhaps even people reading this right now, who will think this all makes perfect sense! So snowed under are we with nonsense tarted up to be clear thinking, some often can’t see the obvious.
But the simplest fact that must be realized is laws should never have been written inviting punks to take that which is not theirs to begin with. The Cities never should have put the store owners, rich or not, in a position where they have to fight City Hall to change laws that never should have been written.
In some cases, the government-endorsed crimes are not even protected by law. They are just policies of lazy, Lefty DA’s and prosecutors who stand athwart existing law. Much of this has to do with plans these jackwagons have for you in the near future. But to see those plans, you need to hit this button. It’s in the second segment.
None of the looters are Jean Valjean.
Among the most pathetic reactions to mass looting came from a barmaid we know as AOC. She took to her IPhone to tell us that these people were just stealing food so they could eat. She was lying, of course. This barmaid, named after a war monger and a genocidal explorer4, knows the looters are doing smash and grabs in high-end jewelry stores and fencing the booty. They are also hitting lower end stores and selling stuff on Ebay. Some are happily insulting the stores they loot by selling the stuff on the street across from the stores they knock over.
In the Hollywood version of Les Miserable, the kindly priest sees something good in a man who did time for actually stealing bread. Even after the convict steals from him, he goes the extra mile and helps him further, giving him more stuff.
William F. Buckley reduced the value of Hollywood morality in his review of the film True Confessions. “It used to be that Hollywood priests were Bing Crosby, going his way and making ours lighter; or Spencer Tracy, telling the Dead-End kid he was a good boy after all, with transmutational effect; or Ingred Bergman, raising money for the bells of St. Mary’s and while at it, tingling the chimes within the human spirit. Most people, I should think, knew that this was romance; that in real life Bing Crosby neglected his children, Spencer Tracy kept a mistress, and Ingrid Bergman not only looked after orphans, but produced them.”
Sadly, I believe Buckley is wrong about one thing. Most people didn’t see these old films as romantic. To far too many people, the message was concrete. I am old enough to remember the nuns pounding the message into us as if it were gospel. To be sure, the average viewer today would see these characters as dated. But they see the newer and more sophisticated productions like Le Miserble, with Liam Nesson as reflecting reality, in the same way my grandmother bought Bing’s routine.
If all these worthless punks were running into supermarkets and just grabbing bread and some meat and milk for their family, we’d be closer to a Going My Way approach to dealing with it.
But in the videos none of them are. This isn’t survival. It’s big business. The punks are stealing and selling, then stealing again. They do it brazenly because they know the lazy bums in City Hall see their entire constituency as being these punks. They DO NOT care about those they claim to serve.
And then there’s the obvious response to the “stealing to eat” crap. We have programs for that. Unless you are hopelessly schezophrenic or living in a cave, you have access to housing, food and money. That qualifiers for this go up routinely, as do the payouts. But I’ve heard excuses made over the years that on that kind of money you can’t have the high-end stuff. Oh, boo-hooo.
Racism? Really?
The most spurious defense the mass looting is using racism. It’s the easy go-to for the intellectually vapid or the smarmy politician exploiting same. Most of these kids have never encountered REAL racism in their lives. By meaningful, I mean from anyone of any value in their lives. Many have been taught a non-existent version of the concept by rap artists and race hustlers. But other than a racial epithet shouted by a drunk on a street corner or from a Billy Bob in a social media post (should one survive for more than a few minutes), the vast majority of these kids have only been protected from everything, including challenges they’d be better off exposed to, by the rule of law.
Further, there is more than one race involved in the looting fad, so there’s that.
No, these punks, kids and adults alike, are not doing anything based on any of the excuses offered. They do it because they have been given incentive to do it and because the same people offering the incentives failed to teach them to read, much less live like productive, honest citizens.
The pretense of victimhood is not a point of pride.
Solutions
I can only offer solutions you will except if you are not one of the criminally negligent politicians that run this nation, especially those in the cities. If you are an excuse maker, you will not benefit either.
But if you are a citizen tired of seeing the fabric of society unraveling, if you are a person who is tired of their race being labeled as helpless and hopeless, then you need to advance the right message.
Say this to every youth and young adult you know. These things you steal are not yours! You are not entitled to them! You don’t deserve to have them! There is no excuse for the looting! If you put half the effort into becoming better people as you do the looting and selling, you can become worthy of respect. You can earn a respectable living. If not, you should pay the consequences. No excuses!
The Age of Enlightenment finally died out around the time of Woodrow Wilson and has not returned. Perhaps it’s time to bring it back. But when I look around, I don’t see too many people who would appreciate it, much less understand it.
That means a lot less than it did even 20 years ago, considering what we send to high school these days.
There may be white gangs doing it too. I just have yet to see that. The race really doesn’t matter except as it is dictated by geography. If this trend continues, you’ll see lots and lots of white punks participating. Kids who live in swanky neighborhoods will head into the city to loot and the politicians will make the same stupid excuses for it.
If you go in for this kind of subjective history.
Lawyers and Political Whores: The Modern Mystics