Current Events

There's been a lot on my mind, but I find myself inarticulate with dismay at the incompetence and irrationality of, well, the news and suchlike. You've heard how moslems in Paris are blocking off whole streets and holding whatever the moslem version of religious services are called. Native, real French are stuck in their homes, not allowed or daring to leave. Public services of any faith are unlawful in France, a secular benefit of The Revolution. But the PC apologists dasn't confront the alien. Only the traditional, Western traditional is verboten. What ever is to become of France. So sad.

And there were massive riots in Great Britain, disaffected youths, unskilled, undisciplined, entitled, useless. Surprised at the relatively stiff sentences they've been handed by the overwhelmingly leftist magistrates. Whose policy is to let "first offenders" (by which is meant first-time caught) walk. Only murderers, and self-defenders, go to jail in England. And now, a passing fad no doubt, a few rioters. Still, it's a twitch in the right direction, and away from the left, gauche, sinister.

And something about the EPA, trying to forbid fracking. You now, cuz oil is bad? Better to get it from Venezuela, at a premium cost plus terror? So it seems. Cuz Chavez will protect the environment so much more than Americans. Victor Davis Hanson has a phenomenal reputation among conservatives, and he absolutely extols the new energy technologies ... the salvation of America ... a new golden age. Energy Independence is like the Philosopher's Stone. As opposed to funneling money to terrorists. Well? Somewhere in there, the EPA, patriotism needs to have a presence. We are not citizens of the world, if for no other reason then that the world has no government ... heaven forfend.

Another way we subsidize terrorism is via the drug industry. I mean illicit drugs. Is it $50 billion, or $100 billion? More? Annually? From America alone? That's sort of insane. The cartels have become much more corporate nowadays -- not so much blowing up airliners as subverting whole governments. Well, I'd do it too, if I were a monster. We, decent people, want monsters to be stupid and crude. They've smartened up, like any well-run corporation, and figured out that profit is the bottom line. No duh. And in their corporate interest is that there be a number of terrorist states ... that is, lawless, from which cartels can operate safely. Get it? Drugs and terror are effectively the same thing.

If we buy their oil, we empower them. If we buy their drugs, we empower them. Seems obvious. I thought for a moment about the math of the thing. 100 billion dollars divided by 300 million Americans. But it's not all Americans who use drugs. Hm, let's see ... let's just guess we're talking about appropriate adults, say half the population, and 20% of "Americans" identify themselves as liberal, and we'll say half of them are the drug users. What is that, 15 million? No one can ever really know for sure that 150 divided by 5 divided by 2 is, but we'll just suppose it's 15 million. Who are sending 100 billion dollars to monsters. Nearly $7000 a year per liberal, on coke. Seems like a lot. Seems like a misallocation of welfare payments.

In a sense, the lefties are right. It's not the terrorists. It's us. Paying them.

More public flogging, please.

These past few weeks I've been grappling with the sad intimation that it falls upon me, for the next 10 to 20 years, to take care of my aged mother. I had sort of been thinking I'd like to have another family, but I have such an unskillful personality, and such poor social skills, and I am profoundly untrusting, and private, that I can't envision a situation where I trick some fertile female into loving me. And I really don't want to be a sixty year old mamma's boy. It was pretty depressing for a while there, facing this potential future. I'm still sort of angry about it, not that I can blame anyone else. It weighs on me. Trapped by duty. Self-sacrifice is noble, in someone else. In me it blows chunks.

My experience has been that God does not rescue anyone. He seems to enjoy making us go through hardships. Some shit about it making us stronger. But mercy would have been nice, you know, being rescued, from our own follies even, let along from the general evil of the world. Every life ends in death, though -- hopefully in a timely manner, but inevitably in loss and grief. To depend on the intellectual construct, that we are saved from unseen hardships, so don't know about them ... that takes a lot of faith, and I'd like proof, once in a while.

Well. We must be thankful for the blessings that we know about. Because ingratitude is as ugly as injustice. Same thing, in fact.

J