A small sampling of the good stuff coming out of the Davos gathering:

• Tracking every individual to make sure they don't eat meat or buy the wrong products.
• Pills which will "phone home" as to whether the person took them.
• A global surveillance system to "prevent pandemics".
• The "WEF" now has its own rifle-armed police force, with beautiful orange arm patches.

Klaus Schwab says that it's important that these elites act "on behalf of the community." I guess that's why they are also proposing all of these referendums, so people can vote about all of these things about to be done to for them. Right?

It's too bad I'm not a Lefty. All of these selfless, rational, helpful global elites want exactly the same things the Democrats do! That's how I know I'm on the wrong side of history.

A few weeks ago, I had wifey drive me to the emergency room at 4:00am due to what I thought in the moment must have been a heart attack: couldn't breathe, and extreme chest pressure. A gamut of negative tests plus doctor discussions have led me to adjust my hypothesis that it was a panic attack.

Yesterday, I had a stress test plus echocardiogram. My resting pulse is only around 50 so it took me fourteen minutes, the final portion of which involved essentially sprinting up hill, just to get my heart rate to the desired 170. The people involved were impressed by my relative fitness: "I'll be honest, it's very rare that we get someone running in here."

Feeling optimistic, I was surprised by a phone call this morning indicating that the test revealed abnormalities. I now have a June 17 follow-up with a cardiologist. Thankfully, my healthcare clinic uses an online system where they publish pretty much everything for the patient: it's phenomenal transparency! Sure enough, the full report was there when I looked-- here is the summary:



I've had mildly elevated blood pressure for almost a decade due to the practically absurd levels of stress I'm under on a daily basis, to the point where I've been in a constant dream-like state of derealization for that entire period-- but I've been able to mostly control the blood pressure by managing my weight.

Based on what I see online, this left ventricular hypertrophy of mine is probably caused by this protracted period of high blood pressure, and can be reversed with medication. I'm not sure what to make about the ischemia reference in the last bullet: all "ischemia" means is "reduced blood flow". It's not clear to me how that fits into the larger picture: do I have a blockage? Further tests probably warranted.

I've also had some kind of arrhythmia, a sort of palpitation, for the past ten-odd years. My regular doctor at the time plausibly wrote it off with "cut down on the caffeine". But now it's looking like there is indeed some larger, underlying issue.

Either way, in the next few weeks I think I'll find myself shifting from no medications to two: some kind of anti-anxiety solution, plus a blood pressure pill of some sort.

This is the best description of the Creepy Joe regime I've yet seen, compliments of Victor Davis Hanson. From the article, bold emphasis is mine:



In other news, Tom Woods had an excellent guest on-- an American expat who has been living in China for many years. He answered a bunch of questions, such as whether China actually has "ghost cities", whether they really do have access to the internet proper, and as the video's title suggests, what's up with the "social credit system"?

Unsurprisingly, the Western propagandized caricature seems to be a mix of truths, half-truths, and lies. Reminds me of my brother's best friend-- he spent his whole childhood there, half of his family is still there, and for the life of him he can't comprehend where most of the things said about China in the West even originate: no one he knows who has lived there their whole lives has never encountered any of these things.

All of that said, it is possible that the guest is living in an "expat bubble", so-to-speak. That said, I'd like to see more of this kind of discussion: get people on from China, Russia, Iran, and so forth, to get their sides of the stories.

In yet other news, turns out a group simulated a "monkey pox" global outbreak back in March 2021. Boy this is becoming a familiar formula. The timing is interesting: the media is pushing this "monkey pox" thing right as this is going on. It would be an interesting way to put a global government in place: engineer plus release a weird virus, and simultaneously get nation states to sign their sovereignty over to a supranational body, run by a Communist incidentally, which has total control "during a pandemic", and which is hereafter the declared permanent state of the world (there will always be disease!).

Finally and as a fun way to distract myself from the world, the new Nissan Z is getting pretty much universal acclaim. My current favorite car YouTube channel, "Savage Geese", actually preferred the way the Z drives more than the car I'm leaning towards, the GR Supra: their take is that the Supra's front end is a little vague, and so the car tends to rotate a little too much as the driver fumbles a bit trying to hit the apex-- whereas the new Z feels that bit more precise, and thus its rotation is more gradual and predictable.

All of that said, this is with the $51k "performance" trim's limited slip differential-- which the $40k model does not have. They emphasize that the diff is absolutely integral to how the new car drives versus the viscous version in my 350z or in the 370z-- which leads me to believe the base model new Z could potentially have radically different dynamics than what is being written by pretty much everyone (as Nissan gave the entire media the higher-end trim).

According to Kristen Lee, who pleasantly writes more like the "old white dude" car journalists I used to enjoy than the cuckfaced, soy boy, establishment lap dog current car "journalists", reinforces my view here that the Z feels more like a heavy grand tourer-- just like my 350z-- while the Supra is more exciting and bonkers. I'll probably never buy another car for myself, given how little I drive: for this last one, I want something exciting and bonkers.

Although-- back to reality now, from the fun distraction-- it's really annoying how the entire automobile punditry talks like how it's inevitably the "end" of the internal combustion engined car: sort of like the sun and the moon rising and falling. I even had a co-worker tell me once, "Electric cars are the future." I asked him why. He replied, "Because they're the future!"

There is no natural reason why the new Z has to be "the end of an era": there could (and should!) be another "new Z" after this one, and then another new one after that. The internal combustion engine is the best way to transport people and goods, and it's not even close. The only reason we're talking about external combustion engine cars at all is because governments have bayonets shoved into the spinal cords of car manufacturers and consumers. They want everyone into these 100% computerized cars (with remote kill switches!) so they can be not only tracked, but punished if they go against the regime.

Because external combustion engined cars are even worse from an environmental standpoint-- even worse "carbon dioxide concern", plus the mass-strip mining of rare Earth minerals-- it will be a bait and switch: as soon as they got everyone into the "electric cars", they would say "Hey guess what, these electric cars are terrible, so now it's mass transit only." Then that same co-worker plus all of the "journalists" will tell me we've always been at war with Eurasia, and that "mass transit is the future!"

This entire current state of affairs is not natural, it is not "inevitable", and it can and probably will be reversed, once the entire country has rolling blackouts and the external combustion engined food trucks have no external combustion output available via which to be charged! A famine would bring a swift end to our current "leaders", and the "electric car" nonsense along with it.

I've been keeping a keen eye open for which events may catalyze this cycle's mega-crisis, and being made aware of this makes everything else look like noise: handing over national sovereignty to the "W.H.O." could very well be a major turning point in world history-- the foundation upon which a global, hegemonic technocracy will be built.

Remember the video I did about how good art arrives through spontaneity, and that the more you force a work into an ideological straitjacket, the worse it becomes? Take a look at this: it's a piece of software which essentially auto-generates characters-- primarily so that they are all non-white, and non-male. Notice how there is no "political affiliation" dimension in their model. Why not just take it a step further and have AI auto-generate the game itself, to be as "woke" as possible? It could procedurally create the environments, the writing, the mechanics, and so forth. I'm sure such an approach would produce many timeless classics.

Some of the thread comments are interesting: "We've approved the new end boss in WoW, sir! It hit all the checkpoints in the diversity tool! Zey're black, gender fluid, breasts but no bottom surgery, missing both legs, blind in one eye, gay on the male days, asexual on the female days, with BPD and mid to high functioning autism!" Or: "The moment this shit becomes prevalent in Japanese games is the moment I drop the hobby entirely." Or: "Got to give those affirmative action people something to do, I guess this is what they come up with."

Which dovetails nicely into this clip. I'm not sure why David Jaffe has such a strong take on the topic, but he's entitled to his opinion, and I'm sure there is some truth in it. I've been impressed, and not in the right way, by the lack-- no, almost complete absence-- of notable software to play on my Series X. But I think there is a bigger issue than Phil Spencer, since he's probably not that involved in the day-to-day ground level stuff anyway. Rather, I think it has to do with the radical Leftist cultures at the development companies.

When John Carmack was writing the Wolf3D, Doom, and Quake engines, he would quite literally sit up all night. Bobby Prince even composed songs about it. Or look up what The Oliver Twins went through while producing their games: months-on-end of four hours of sleep per night, living in 90 deg F shed. Making games is hard: you have to be one hundred percent devoted to it: live and breath it. You need a really candid atmosphere, where people are comfortable saying virtually anything to each other: positive, negative, jokes, chop busting... the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Incidentally, this is why I don't work in game development: I decided to get married and raise kids instead. You almost can't do both, and be successful. Being a game developer is a bit like being a priest: you have to be all in.

Today's game companies instead are focusing on eliminating crunch, "cleaning up" the environment, no "inappropriate" jokes, corporate-style benefit packages... the kind of environment you see in HR pamphlet photos, with a pristine office and a crazy haired black lady talking to a white thot, while sipping coffee, not doing a lick of work. It's fine to have an environment like that-- but don't expect to be shipping working games even remotely on time, or for those games to have any personality or spirit put into them.

Then you add this extreme push for ideological purity, where the already not totally engaged artists and writers can't put "pen to paper" on what they actually want to make without the material going through the HR diversity commission's checklist... plus, a company's hard-won profits are being spent paying not people who will add value-- like top-notch programmers, who are almost always white males-- but "diversity hires" who subtract value by being hurdles to game production.

It all adds up.

Just to pick on one of Microsoft's companies: my son tells me that Mojang has seven hundred employees-- yet they can't even produce new content items for an existing game on time, let alone any new products. When you see people from their company interviewed, they are blue-haired SJW types. The redhead nerdy guy-- the one person who seems to have technical chops-- is apparently over there writing books now, not working on game code.

And perhaps all of this is ok: maybe it's ok to have short hours and a low-key, non-controversial work environment, in exchange for "meh", vanilla, politically-correct games which get delayed numerous times. But returning to the David Jaffe clip now, game consumers want to have their cake and eat it too: they want a "woke"-friendly work environment, with the output such an environment is incapable of producing.

I'm over half-way through this six hour documentary about Adolf Hitler, and so far it's absolutely superb. There are two sides to every story, and I'd only heard one side. Despite its title, more than half of the material actually has nothing to do with Hitler, and is more like a thorough recitation of the war itself-- but not framed through a "History Channel" absolutely unquestioning, blindly trusting, uncritical pro-West perspective. I've learned a lot about the various battles, and the geopolitics involved.

All of the below may be true. None of it may be true. There are a hundred claims-- fifty each from "The Allies" and the documentary makers-- which would need to be fact-checked one at a time. Since we've all heard the Western take a million times, as a counterbalance let me provide a tiny sampling from the other side of the story. I'll let you evaluate which sets of facts seem more plausible.


Sampling of the Documentary

To begin with, and one thing the makers emphasize-- this is nothing new to me incidentally, as I've done extensive independent research into this area myself-- is just how evil Stalin was. He must have been one of the top three or five most evil people to have ever walked the face of the planet. The fact that "The Allies" were siding with him, sending him billions of USD in aid, is not a good look. Winston Churchill repeatedly called genocidal maniac Stalin "Uncle Joe". Don't forget, Churchill also fought in the Boer War. Look that one up sometime. Want to know where the Germans got the layouts for their Concentration Camps?

More on Churchill: declassified documents from Britain show that Hitler repeatedly offered peace terms to that country, and that Churchill turned them down over and over. Why? Because Britain had interests in Indo-China, and the Japanese had struck a deal with the French-- if I recall correctly-- to take over some of that that country's Indo-China territory. So Churchill was dead-set on pulling the US into the war, on that basis-- to get the US embroiled in the Pacific, to indirectly protect British interests there from the Japanese. If he'd accepted a peace deal with Germany, he would have lost his leverage over the US.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt-- not Stalin levels of evil, but still a highly duplicitous and conniving figure-- desperately wanted the US to enter the war as well, but polls overwhelmingly showed that the public did not want to get involved in what they saw as an internal European matter. Thus, Roosevelt repeatedly provoked both Germany and Japan via sanctions, oil embargos, and so forth. I'd always heard that he basically knew Pearl Harbor would be attacked, ahead of time. But it was even crazier than that: in the documentary, they show several newspaper headlines: "Japan may attack this weekend." Common knowledge!

Truth, as it turns out, is stranger than fiction.

Other interesting notes: several of Hitler's highest ranking Generals were Jews, as was one of his closest friends, who was also his chauffeur. He had nothing against Jews, per se, but as a group they had plunged Berlin into total, nauseating hedonism, controlling over fifty percent of the media, most of the banks, and all of the media interests, despite being two percent of the population. The first thing he did when he consolidated power was take all pornography plus Communist literature, and toss it into huge bonfires. Next thing he did was negotiate an exchange program, so that German Jews could voluntarily transfer themselves and their wealth to Palestine.

The next thing he did was make usury illegal: in fact, that's one of the twenty five planks of the Nazi platform.

The result was that Germany went into an unprecedented golden age, not just in terms of material prosperity, but in terms of moral standards as well. About his racial views, he had no issues with non-Germanic people at all: rather, his view was "let the German race reach its peak mental, moral, and physical strength-- and let's hope the other races do the same thing for themselves." If true, it reminds me of how Communists twisted Ayn Rand's words and philosophy, because she was politically inconvenient.

Much of Hitler's army were non-Germanic people. He had significant contingents of Muslims, for example, in the SS. In fact, the documentary makers show photographs of special Qurans he'd sent them, with beautiful metal covers, emblazoned with the Nazi and SS emblems.

Hitler didn't "invade" Austria. Austria was part of Germany, and got ripped away as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler was invited into Austria, and was greeted with huge parades, everyone throwing flowers at him. Symbolically, he had Austrian armies move the other way into German cities, to show a two-way unification. The reason he invaded Poland was because Germans were being slaughtered in East Prussia, and he needed to reconstitute the land bridge-- another set of territory taken away after the first World War.

He was a big believer in pre-emptive strikes: he went into France because "The Allies" were massing for an imminent invasion, right on his border. Later, he attacked the Soviets for the same reason: Stalin was obviously preparing to invade Europe from the East, and Hitler saw it as his duty to keep the Bolsheviks out. Where Hitler rewarded and was adored by his men, the demonstrably blood-thirsty Bolsheviks were so brutal that, under Stalin's orders, if anyone was caught retreating even one step, no matter the circumstances, they would be shot in the head on the spot.

As the Germans progressed into Soviet territory, villagers were blessing them, thrilled to no end to be liberated from the brutal Bolsheviks, who had confiscated their crops, farming equipment, and who consequently caused forty million of them to die of starvation, with many having resorted to cannibalism.

Similarly, after the disasters on the Eastern front, during retreat the Germans took as many refugees with them as possible. The documentary has first-hand written, actor-narrated commentary from some of them, explaining how to the refugees, Hitler and the Germans were like angels from heaven, saving them from the hellish, unbelievably brutal Soviet reign of terror.

One of these refugees explained that the scariest part about the retreat was the massive Typhus outbreak which occurred. She explained that when she and the other refugees arrived at camp-- I believe she said it was Auschwitz, but I may have that wrong-- the Germans shaved all of the refugees' heads, put them in showers, and then ran their clothes through delousing chambers, using Zyklon B as the agent.

After the war, she was totally confused by the stories of "gas chambers" and mass murders: "The shower heads they showed on television were immediately familiar to me: they were showers, identical to the one I was in! And the 'gas chambers' were just where they deloused the clothes. Clothes which were still contaminated after delousing, they would burn away in a series of ovens. Yes, they had us crammed into bunk beds-- it was either that or sleep outside."

This is just one woman's testimony of course-- but it rings more true to me than the "gas chamber" stories, which seem incredibly implausible to me. There is an excellent article here explaining how the delousing rooms worked, in great detail. It's all right in the open. The rooms even had signage, labeling their purpose. The whole story seems like a 1940s-equivalent of "Assad's chlorine bombs".


Tentative Conclusions

And maybe this is the point where we need to circle back to what I said in the opening paragraphs of this blog post: I don't know what the truth is. But based on the digging I have done, and based on what I've seen in my forty years with my own eyes and ears regarding real-time evolving contemporary events, the documentary take rings much more true to me than what I was taught in school as a child.

I was taught that Hitler was a maniacal, batshit crazy mad man-- no evidence presented-- who was indiscriminately throwing people into ovens for fun, and who wanted to take over the entire world for no stated or explained purpose at all. And if it weren't for the noble United States and Great Britain, he would have succeeded. The documentary, by contrast, paints Hitler as being a complex individual, with varied motives easily articulated in his own writings, and plausibly based on his own life's experiences.

It's like reading a "Sesame Street" children's book written for two year olds, versus a reference work written for adults. Maybe the toddler book is a more accurate reflection of reality-- and I reserve the right to change my mind later as I continue to come into new knowledge. But the comparison isn't flattering, as I sit here typing right now.

From what I can see, Hitler was a phenomenal and extraordinarily popular leader, who had the interests of his own people in mind. He was surrounded on one side by shady, double-dealing Western leaders, and by the brutal Stalinists on the other. These forces conspired to goad him into a well-meaning war, which he would ultimately lose. These forces then bombed Germany into oblivion, then bombed the rubble into more rubble, then turned around and wrote the "Sesame Street" history books.

To me, it seems like the same thing is going on with the West and Putin today.

Just like Germany before them, the Soviet Union was stripped of its ethnic territory by the West. Repeatedly provoked and falling under abuse, Putin finds himself in the identical position as Hitler before him: re-constitute land bridges to save his countrymen. Meanwhile, Russia and Putin himself is the target of an arm-waving, absolutely hysterical character assassination propaganda campaign, painting him as a one-dimensional paper-thin mad man, with no plausible human motives or nuance. This campaign consists of a combination of outright lies, lies of omission, and the mixing of facts with fictions.

I even read today that Beijing Biden brought back the Lend-Lease Act-- you can't make this stuff up! It's like the West is using the exact same playbook which they followed in the 1930s. Except this time, the target of their manipulations has the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

This isn't to say that Hitler and Putin are guiltless: they are both police state dictators. And it's easy to poke holes in some of the Nazi platform planks, such as the expansionism to which they claimed they were entitled (from where do they derive the authority?). But the truth is more complicated than a "My Little Pony" episode. The claims made against them are truly sensational. Meanwhile, the Western leaders are undoubtedly even worse: they are intellectually bankrupt, and seem to relentlessly hide their true motives.

Excellent article here about impending food shortages. Thanks to the graces of God and the wisdom he imparted to me, I'm pretty hedged against this for three reasons: I moved my family to the boonies, where we can grow enormous "borderline fields" gardens, if it comes to that; I work for a large employer which tends to benefit from rough times; my home is multi-generational, so we can pool our incomes to offset rising prices. I should also be able to contribute back to the community here via food and time donations.

I specifically liked this bit from the article:



Changing topics, I saw a pair of leaked "Forza Motorsport 8" screenshots in my feeds this morning. Here is one of them. In motorsports, there are hardly any black people at all-- but here in Gaslight Leftoid La-La Land, there are not just black drivers, but-- my favorite archetype-- crazy-haired black ladies too! I wonder if the game will have a "Bubba Wallace DLC Pack" story mode, where the black characters mistake door pulls for nooses?

This gaslighting works. Tell a lie enough, and people will start to believe it.

I recently saw a survey, which revealed Americans vastly over-estimate the size of ethnic minority groups. For the record, America is not "becoming more diverse"-- blacks represent about the same percentage now as they did thirty-plus years ago. The only group which has grown relative to whites are hispanics, and a lot of that simply comes down to the sieve-like Southern border, because rich white Leftists want illegal alien María to clean their house on the cheap, or Diego to come over and replace their roof.

Nothing against hispanics. I get along with them better than I do white people most of the time. But immigration needs to be legal.

Gaslighting is not a nice thing to do to people. It's sick.

On this note, as a society we've been gaslit for so long now, I'd almost forgotten what it was like to not be. When The Twatter staff very recently started burning the evidence before the new Sheriff could arrive, the suddenly-reversed algorithms saw the Right-wing people I follow on BitChute and elsewhere getting hundreds of "Likes" and "Re-Tweets" on all of their posts, in matters of hours or even minutes, after years of no traction.

The whole world is like some dystopian "Star Trek" episode, where "reality" consists of holograms-- then at the end of the episode, they destroy the hologram generators, and here they were on the ship's bridge the whole time. Like the world's worst theme park, I think Gaslight Land has just about run its course, and reality is about to re-assert itself. There will be no more time for nonsense.

It makes me sad to say it, but the white Leftoid atheist urbanites who don't own cars, have no food supply of their own, are squashed into high-density apartment housing, are not part of church communities, and who work on the multi-billion dollar plantation farms which own their development studios and which will throw them under the bus at the first sign of trouble, are in for a really rough ride if the grocery store shelves go bare. The least of their concerns will be putting black women on the front lines of World War II, or on race tracks.

I wonder if the Democrats have "The Fourth Turning" theory advocates speaking at their seminars, or if the book is required reading material for their card-carrying members?

The Democrats have been attempting to create a uniparty system, with a "largest in human history" state apparatus behind it, featuring arms designed around censoring all lie-exposing discourse that would steer people away from this establishment. During each and every one of these steps, they steep the justifications in "Civic Duty"-style language, telling "us" how "we" need to make sacrifices, just like how people did during World War II.

It's our "Civic Duty" to support "Black Lives Matter"; to oppose Justice Kavanaugh; to wear face diapers; to get the clot shots; to support Ukraine. Every one of these events, and then some, are framed as obligatory moral crusades, which must be supported ASAP. Anyone who chooses not to participate is shamed, ridiculed, "doxxed", and has their livelihoods destroyed.

An example I just read yesterday involved one of their nutjobs explaining how the country should have one party, with one candidate, which everyone can unify around.

The authors of "The Fourth Turning" predicted this push in the last section of their book. They explain that during every crisis era, civic life is renewed, governments are granted tons of power, and the society-- willingly or otherwise-- coalesces around a new set of values, enforced by the state. They explain that the political movements which move in step with this trend are the ones likely to take control. The outcome can either be favorable, or a Fascist-style dictatorship.

They also explain that benefits should be shifted from the elderly, to the young, during a crisis period (and then in the opposite direction during a high). Meanwhile the crisis, they describe, is when the infrastructure of the next cycle should be laid.

Whether instinctively or by design, the Democrats seem to understand where we are in this cycle. Their choice of values is totally nonsensical, which is why they aren't catching on. But at least they are presenting a holistic world view, attempting to fulfill the need the young have for making some kind of sacrifice, or being "heroes" in some way. They are also non-stop talking about forgiving student loan debt, and about building infrastructure (again, around a nonsensical "climate change" value however).

If the overall cycle theory is correct, it poses a problem for Conservatives: according to the authors, now is not the time for individualistic-centered Libertarianism. Rather, Conservatives should be proposing a competing civic model, with its own set of values for which young people can throw themselves on the sacrificial altar.

The authors-- in 1997, anticipating the condition we're now in-- proposed that such a model could be centered around being honest with people about the State being utterly unable to fulfill its obligations, and so frame the shared sacrifice as everyone rebuilding the country's infrastructure and entitlements, but in a balanced budget sort of way.

Most of the country's Conservative leaders-- Ron DeSantis, Rand Paul, and Tom Massie, to name just a few-- seem more oriented around reacting to and putting the kibosh on the Democrat's dystopian, global-technocracy police state ambitions. This is a good thing. But they shouldn't be as purely reactionary: they perhaps need to paint a holistic, competing civic model.

Funniest thing I've read in awhile: in the wake of Elon Musk buying The Twatter, Lazio fans have started a new running joke by en masse sending him messages like this:

• "Dear Elon Musk, here is a new challenge for you: after Twitter, buy Lazio."
• "Dear Elon, why don't you buy Lazio too? It's the first team in Rome. Think about it!"
• "Hey Elon, would you buy Lazio too? It has the same colors as Twitter, come on."

Makes my morning!

I haven't been writing much on here because I haven't had much to say! Just watching the American crisis implosion continue. I've been giving some thought to which of the "new values regime" we should tolerate, and which things should definitively be chucked into the ocean. Increasingly I think I'm going to be a sort of intermediary between the Boomers and the Millennials. I'm warming up to the task. That said, I think lots of those values will automatically disappear out of necessity once the impending disaster occurs. There won't be time for nonsense anymore.

My kids were baptized in a beautiful way during Mass this past Sunday. I will take them to Confession this Saturday, and they will have First Communion on Sunday.

Other than that, I've been continuing to work my way through "Horizon Forbidden West". Wonderful game, it's been getting better and better as I've progressed. I also have a couple of Switch reviews I need to write: "Pathway", plus the Neo Geo Pocket Color collection. I should do pictures of the latter, the Limited Run collector's edition is pretty special.

The battle between the Right and the Left isn't about "free speech or not": the battle is about who gets to control the censorship. How do I know?

The Elon Musk, Twatter circus has given me lots of opportunity to perform an experiment on Righties: "Hey, I hear you want a free speech platform-- I know of this great website called 'Gab', you should check it out. It's quite literally the best case scenario of what you want, and it already exists! You can go sign up for an account, right now."

One hundred percent of the time so far, I've either gotten nervous mumbles, weird excuse making, or word barf that's indistinguishable from the Left: "But, muh Jews! And people... say racist things!" My next message goes something like, "That's ok, you can go there and start a pro-Israel group! That's the beauty! No one will stop you. It also has a robust mute feature."

Crickets. That's where the conversation dies. I haven't yet gotten a reply beyond this point.

None of this surprises me. Many years ago I had a small handful of "Conservatives" that used to get upset and confront me because I would write principled, logically consistent things on this blog. They've all since long stopped reading-- in other words, if you're reading this, I'm not referring to you. That was when I realized that most people on the Right are not serious about liberal values: they say they are, but they are just as authoritarian as the Lefties.

By and large, the difference between the Right and the Left are mere quibbling about certain values. And even then there is a lot of overlap. That's why Republicans get into office, and usually do the same things the Democrats do. The Right doesn't want a free speech platform-- they want a Twatter that they control.

Some guy came up with a clever way to import and export data into and out of Fuze. The Switch just expects HID data over USB. As long as the Fuze editor is receiving characters in the proper encoding, it doesn't care how they're generated.

What this guy does is plug an Arduino into the Switch USB port in lieu of a keyboard. He wrote a little program on the Arduino which sends a "QR code on steroids"-generating code snippet. That Fuze snippet then encodes the rest of the Fuze source into an image. That image can then be scanned in on some other device like a laptop, and decoded back into Fuze source for backup or sharing.

This is why I'm not a huge fan of boycotting companies, generally: large corporations have tens of thousands of employees, most of whom disagree with upper management, and the two or three bozos who run the social media accounts. It used to be that fringe lunatics were called just that, and told to go away. Now, those people are given the megaphones.

But, I'm seeing that starting to change: just take a look at school board meetings. Cultural Marxism is not long for this world. As I wrote here, the Left are desperately trying to drag everyone towards the "new values" regime-- but things are different this time. They are failing, and will ultimately fail totally. And thank goodness for that. Their views are repugnant.

Incidentally, I was talking to my family today about how preachy and moralistic everything is. I rarely watch television, but when I am subjected to it, every single commercial is interracial families with plinking piano music and slow motion fly-bys two inches from people's faces, lecturing you about values.

I don't care so much if people have different values. If they want to kneel down to and pay reparations from their own money to blacks, teach their kids that that people can magically become potted plants and that there are six hundred "genders", and use their own money to voluntarily buy an external combustion engine car, then fine-- that's their prerogative. But leave me out of it.

When my kids and I made "Dredge" for the Wireframe contest, we didn't fill the game with Christian iconography, have a bunch of female characters in the kitchen making sandwiches for the male characters, or portray dark-furred characters as low-IQ violent drug dealers. What we did make was a game with cats fighting a guinea pig with glasses. Never in a million years would we have even dreamed of shoving a world view on our audience, just to piss them off.

It never even remotely would occur to me to make a commercial, a video game, a movie, or anything else for the express purpose of constant "high horse" moralization. It's like they literally can't help themselves! I don't understand it-- I'm not wired that way. There are two things you don't discuss with customers and co-workers: politics and religion. But then again, I'm not a Boomer or a Millennial.

The only places I talk politics are on this blog-- duh, that's the point of this web site-- and with my wife or mom, in the privacy of our own homes. I wish others would follow that model too.

I'm in one of the worst sleeping spells of my entire life. There is something about my new room which is making it impossible to sleep for more than four or five hours per night. I'm wondering if there is a "Feng Shui" explanation, perhaps involving me sleeping on a mattress on the floor.

My Kunio collection review is up. It's funny how the Western releases of these games had the "Kunio" parts wallpapered over. It'd be like having a "Sonic the Hedgehog" game, with the release making no mention of the name "Sonic" anywhere, and with a product title of "Fast Jump Running" or something.

The Switch is turning into the ultimate platform for playing these kinds of compilations. To name just a few, there is "Turrican Flashback", this Kunio collection, the Castlevania one, and the upcoming TMNT compilation.

This is what I saw walking out of the store today. Photographs don't even capture it because the sense of depth and proportion is lost-- but it gives a rough idea anyway.



This will probably be my last year owning it-- I'll be sad to see it go. But if the GR Supra comes down to actual MSRP pricing later this year, I'll love that new car even more.

Subaru may have lost their way, but here comes Toyota to salvage the situation: this is everything the new WRX should have been.

I've had my heart set on the incoming manual transmission Supra-- but I do enjoy my wife's 2014 WRX, and this would not only be an improvement over that, but it would be infinitely more practical for where I live now, with the heavy snow. Plus Supras are pushing sixty thousand USD at this point, whereas this GR Corolla will undoubtedly be in the thirties-- granted, I can easily afford such an expensive car, given my financial situation.

Speaking of cars, night driving in Gran Turismo 7 is surreal.

I'm still playing through it and haven't yet written a review-- but that hasn't stopped me from assembling the coolest screenshots I've taken in the "Horizon Forbidden West" photo mode. Click on any of them for a larger version. Additionally, as I'm wont to do, I made a montage of gameplay clips, showing off some funny moments along with the game's amazing graphics.

It was unthinkable for Italy to not qualify for a World Cup Finals. There are no words in the English language-- or probably in the Italian one either-- to describe not playing in two successive tournaments. It's beyond unthinkable: it's impossible. Yet here we are. Italy will have not played in the World Cup Finals for a now-minimum of twelve years-- a competition they have won an incredible four times!

What has happened?

It's a generational thing. Take a look at the squad which was victorious in the 2006 tournament. They were an Italian "Gen X" squad, with a median and average birth year of 1977. Cynical, chippy, and focused on literal nipple-tweaking antics which successfully antagonized their opponents, they were built around a 4-2-3-1, winning ticky-tack fouls, then counter attacking when their opposition would inevitably make a frustration-borne mistake. That tournament famously ended with a Zinedine Zidane so irate that he head-butted "Gen X'er" Marco Materrazi!

For me, that's what made Italy so fun to watch: it was a team cut from the same cloth as my own personality: pragmatic, authority-smirking, and realistic.

I remember hearing traditional Italian culture described as, "Only an idiot works harder than he has to." I also recall Gianni Brera in the 1970's explaining how, in his view, Italians weren't the most robust people, and that counter attacking football was suited to both their culture, and their physical limitations as compared to other European nations. The "Gen X" brand of Italian was effective because it was in harmony with the conventional Italian character..

As the squad gradually phased from "Gen X" to "Millennial", so did the style of play. The inward, pessimistic, pragmatic approach slowly gave way to a "heroic" outward 4-3-3 focus on flourish, ball retention, and passing movements. As this happened, the team started to lose its identity. As if to prove my point, in yesterday's aftermath I've heard many pundits reflect with great exasperation, "Why is it that opponents of Italy are now playing 'Italian', and defeating Italy?", and "At least Catenaccio got us results."

In a sport with margins so thin that a single split-second moment can decide defeat or victory, it turns out that being a naively idealistic, emasculated, wimpy, second-rate "poor man's Barcelona" is simply not going to cut it for Italy. It's in total opposition to the Italian character, psyche, and tradition. It worked for the very brief window required to win the Euros, when it caught opponents off guard-- "that was Italy we just played?"-- but was so unsustainable it couldn't even survive into the following year!

Some major soul searching is required: what do the words "Italian football" mean? What do they represent? What differentiates-- or used to-- the Italian character and style of play from all the other countries in the world? Will simply being an unnatural, watered-down clone of other countries be enough to bring victory when there is no margin for error?

Maybe this hypothesis of mine will be right, or wrong. We'll see as time progresses. Unfortunately, we have a long ways to wait until the 2026 cycle. And who knows: in the end, maybe this is just what Italy deserves, with the way their citizenship went bonkers mad and Fascist-style authoritarian during the WuFlu nonsense. They have bigger societal and psychological issues than just football.

This was extremely difficult to read. Look at the picture of him from 1989, then juxtapose that with what they did to him. His crime was having taken a selfie. It's just like I wrote here. It took this patriot an experience like what he had, to make the realization:



America is the country that the establishment is telling you other countries are. The sooner we come to grips with this fact, the sooner we can course correct.

In this post I wondered why we've seemingly never progressed into the crisis period, much less out of it. Rather, we're in an unraveling phase which spans four decades, it having started in the nineties. It continues today, picking up more and more steam as it goes. What's different about this cycle than others before it?

In previous cycles going back thousands of years, information was carefully controlled by the Prophets. They would lie, craft narratives, and engage in mass brainwashing. No one knew any better. Most people couldn't read. Printing presses were expensive. And so on. The Heroes would gobble these narratives up, then push the world towards the new values during the crisis window. The culture would emerge from the crisis window in lock step behind the new regime.

What's different this time is the internet, and smartphones.

For the first time in human history, the Prophet-Hero narratives can be deconstructed and factually analyzed. Ordinary people are "on the ground" recording every small bit of minutiae, then streaming all of it in real-time to a global audience with the touch of a button. And because the internet is decentralized, when the Prophet-Hero axis tries to shut down one web site, three more sprout up in its place.

Today's Boomer-Millennials cooperative is desperately trying to shove everybody bayonet-first into the new Cultural Marxist values. But for the first time ever, there is a critical mass-- a majority even!-- who have the means to make up their own minds. They are rejecting the new values! The "new values" media is often caught saying the quiet part out loud: "These web sites are not supposed to be telling people how to think: that's our job!"

Now people can do their own research. Is it true that the clot shots are "safe and effective"? Is it true that George Floyd was strangled by a cop and died by suffocation? Is it true that Ukraine is a bastion of freedom, and that Russia is irrational and unprovoked? And on and on. With the internet and smartphones, there is no way the official, phony JFK assassination narrative would have been bought, were such an event to happen today.

I don't think most Leftists understand this generational theory. But on some intuitive, instinctive level they know that things are going "not according to the usual plan" in some way that they can't quite put their fingers on. That's why they are getting increasingly unhinged, desperate, and authoritarian.

"That which can't go on forever, won't." It will be interesting to see what happens over the next five and ten years. Because I suspect this will be looked back on as a "broken" cycle, such as we had during the American Civil War when there were only three archetypes.

1997's "The Fourth Turning" is a seminal book, and there are so many good things to say about their model that one could probably write a shorter "meta book", about the book itself. But here I've plucked out a couple of things which really caught my eye. Maybe I'll do more posts like this in the future as I continue to work my way through the work.

Skim through this post of mine, from last year. In it I wondered if there had ever been a culture which had subverted itself. I also reflected on how I liked old people back when I was a kid, but not in adulthood. This chart answers both of those questions:



According to the authors' model, history repeats in patterns of four, twenty-odd year, single generation-long segments. Every eighty-odd years there is a major crisis, and the cycle starts over.

A crisis occurs, and a "Hero" generation fights and somehow resolves the crisis, either for good or for bad. Their own kids-- an "Artist" generation-- come of age during the crisis: so they are hugely overprotected, as their childhood is fearful and anxiety-ridden as they watch the adults in their lives scramble, with bombs potentially dropping or genocides being committed-- or whichever form that particular crisis takes.

Sensitive and wishy-washy, this "Artist" generation underprotects its own kids, because the crisis is resolved and the world is comparatively safe. Also, not wanting to have their children be "under the thumb" like they were as kids, or for their kids to have a childhood filled with worldly conflict like theirs was, they spoil and overindulge their kids. This produces a "Prophet" generation.

These "Prophets" rebel against their own apathetic parents and the values of their grandparents-- the "old order". Arrogant and hubristic, they deliberately subvert their own cultural norms. In their righteous furor, they raise their own kids-- a "Nomad" generation-- in a sort of lecturing kind of way, while simultaneously giving them very little practical life direction or supervision. This leads to these children being kind of "checked out", amoral, and apathetic.

By now things are starting to unravel in culture due to the meddling of the "Prophets". The "Nomads" go on to have kids of their own in a much riskier, crime-filled, unstable environment. As such, they overprotect their children. But the children, looking for strength, find it in their self-righteous hubristic grandparents. As such, they start to adopt those values, and become activistic.

As they grow into young adulthood society essentially collapses, and they become the new "Hero" generation which resolves the conflict in one way or another. During this time they give birth to a another "of age during the crisis" batch of children-- new "Artists"-- and the whole cycle starts over.

Recent generations:

• Hero: Greatest Generation, i.e. "G.I.".
• Artist: Silent Generation.
• Prophet: Boomers.
• Nomad: Generation X.
• Hero: Millennial.
• Artist: Generation Z.
• Prophet: Generation Alpha.

The answer to the question "has there ever been a culture which subverts itself" is "yes"-- in fact, once every eighty years, throughout the entire recorded history of mankind! The book's authors give tons of examples, going back to the Romans and even back to the time of Moses.

The reason I liked old people during my childhood but not during my adulthood, is because the old people were a different generation! When I was growing up in the 1980s, the sensitive "Artist"-types were the half-retired ones driving my school bus, with the "Hero" guys making up the elderly. In adulthood, the people older than me were increasingly represented by the "Prophet" Boomers-- a preachy generation I struggle to get along with to this day.

In this post I discuss how I don't fit into either "Generation X" or "Millennial"-- hence why sociologists have somewhat recently coined the term "Xennial". According to the authors' chart above, I'm significantly more "Generation X" than "Millennial". I was and am:

• Reputation as child: good. (Hero)
• Coming of age: alienating. (Nomad)
• Primary focus: self-sufficiency. (Nomad)
• Young adulthood: competing. (Nomad)
• Transition in midlife: frenetic to exhausted. (Nomad)
• How it is nurtured: Overprotective. (Hero)
• How it nurtures: Overprotective. (Nomad)

Even the bottom-most portion of the table-- the "savvy, practical, liberty, survival, honor" and so forth-- fits me much more accurately. By contrast, the "selfless, unreflective, overbold, community" Millennial items just don't fit. I am not a "collegial, expansive, empowering world builder", to put it mildly! In fact, I roll my eyes at all of those things.

This also explains part of why contemporary video games annoy me so much: they are made for the cringey, eye-roll inducing values of the "Hero" Millennials. Whereas my favorite games, like "Star Control 2" or "Guardian War", are more abstract and absurd. Likewise, my favorite films-- movies such as "Blade Runner" and "Apocalypse Now"-- have these brooding sort of monotone anti-heroes, and themes where there are no "good guys".

Changing gears a bit: probably every cycle participant in history thinks "things will be different this time"-- but perhaps something has broken the model, or at least greatly extended the "unraveling" period? Read this passage:



Is not the paragraph starting "In linear time..." exactly what we are seeing today, down to the very last letter? It's like the unraveling cycle in the 1990s got "frozen in place", and just kept accelerating! We should be well into concluding the "crisis" by this time, but it seems like it hasn't even truly started yet.

Furthermore, I'm struggling to see how the Millennials are going to resolve much of anything: they were so overprotected that most of them are thin-skinned to the point that they can't even function on a day-to-day basis. Many of them can't even figure out if they are boys or girls, for Pete's sake. They are "pharmacologically disabled", as I once humorously heard them described.

And from what I've seen of the ones who actually are having kids, they are the most intense "helicopter parents" I've ever seen, to the point of being totally irrational-- which seems to break the model as "Heroes" usually underprotect their kids. I know one Millennial who takes a picture of his kid every single day, and keeps this exhaustive diary of when the child poops. It's weird and obsessive.

This behavior lends credence to the fact that the "unraveling period" never ended when it should have, and just kept accelerating. So rather than the Millennial's kids becoming "Artists", it's like they'll be "Heroes +"-- a second consecutive "Hero" generation-- because they are being overprotected to an absurd degree. From what I've heard about contemporary school children, they are even more thin-skinned and neurotic than their parents!

In any event, America is indeed "veering totally out of control along a bizarre centrifugal path." Maybe as an exercise I'll try to track down more recent writings from the book's authors, to see if they've adapted their model, or have reflections about the post-1990's state of affairs.

The entire cradle-to-grave American experience for the past four generations of its citizens has been framed through the lens of "prevented Germany and Japan from taking over the world". Because of that it's nearly impossible for even the most skeptical Americans to perceive their country from the outside. But I want to challenge my readers with just that exercise.

I am about to present to you a bulleted list of the United States's activities over the past twenty-plus years. As you read through this list, I challenge you to blank your existing yankee doodle, apple pie preconceptions about your country, and instead think about how you would perceive America if you were Chinese, or Russian, or even from Finland or Somalia or Japan, or nearly anywhere else.

Or if that's too difficult, imagine that I'm describing Russia or Iran or China with these bullets: what would you think about those countries? Would they seem like positive forces and freedom-loving bastions of democracy? Or conversely, would they seem like malevolent, destabilizing forces seeding discord and chaos everywhere they went?

• Invaded and occupied sovereign Afghanistan for twenty years, then abandoned it and US citizens, handing the Taliban eighty billion dollars in military equipment. Lied repeatedly about whether Taliban would take over.


• Invaded Libya, overthrew Gaddafi, set the country back to the stone age, with open air slave markets. Hillary Clinton laughingly bragged: "We came, we saw, he died."


• Waged war against Syria, tried incessantly to overthrow Assad. Put Damascus in ruins. Major refugee crisis flooded Europe. ISIS took over the Middle East. US worked with rebels to stage a false flag chemical attack in attempt to take over the country, then repeatedly lied about it. Russia and China intervened to prevent chaos.


• Has been funding a Saudi-led war against Yemen, creating a massive humanitarian crisis.


• Invaded Iraq, turned it from a stable country into a terrorism-fueled power vacuum. Used the existence of biological "weapons of mass destruction" as the pretext. None were actually there, lied about it incessantly.


• Funded the actual creation of biological "weapons of mass destruction" in Ukraine, right on Russia's border.


• Funded the "gain of function" creation of the WuFlu in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Repeatedly lied about it. Virus got lose, killing many, used as a cover by governments worldwide for a global violation of basic human rights, such as denial of food, health care, employment, practice of religion, forced house arrest, and free speech-- fundamental abuses so vast and thorough that it boggles the mind. Led to a dramatic rise of the WEF's cabal influence.


• Colluded with legally immune multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies to "Warp Speed" the creation of experimental, animal trial-failing drugs, then mass-injected their own population with them, creating a crisis of healthy age people and even young children dying from heart inflammation. Ran a massive, domestic psy-ops propaganda campaign to not just cover the scandal up, but to demonize people who exercised "my body, my choice" by declining the shots.


• Worked for decades to deliberately provoke Russia: repeatedly crossed line after line, adding countries to NATO, closing off geography Russia needs to protect itself from invasion, housing biological weapons on Russia's border, refusing to negotiate on a level playing field. Executed a 2014 coup in Ukraine to install a pro-West puppet leader, just to antagonize the Kremlin. Lindsey Graham and John McCain met with military leaders there, then: "Your fight is our fight."


• Has been running non-stop KGB-style agitprop against its own citizens for decades, demonizing and belittling one ethnic group (whites) while promoting another (blacks), using "Operation Mockingbird" stooges in Hollywood and late night television to push anti-Christian, destructive gay lifestyles and hedonism that would make Sodomites blush. Creating de facto legal double standards and even denying health care based on ethnicity.


• Allowed pro-establishment domestic terrorists to burn down its own cities for political gain of the establishment. Jailed and threw away the keys for people who peacefully protested against the establishment at the capitol building.


• Installed a senile puppet elderly man with Alzheimer's into power so that a hidden cabal could institute wildly unpopular, radical domestic reforms against the democratic will of its own people. Ran cover for and encouraged rampant election fraud, using its own WuFlu virus creation as an excuse to mass-use mail-in ballots, then certified the obviously cuckoo results.


• Actively suppresses free speech against its own citizens. Colludes with a tiny group of elite, multi-billion dollar technology companies to censor all information which paints the establishment in a negative light. Suppresses freedom of the press by intimidating and spying on anti-establishment members of the media.

And this isn't even a complete list, I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of other things-- but you get the idea. I don't bring all of this up just to attack America: rather, my goal is to rouse Americans to just how nasty and rotten their own country has gotten.

America is the Russia, the China, the Iran that you're told are so evil! America is the actual bogey man! You are the bad guys! Yes Hans, "We are the baddies."

Until we all come to grips with this hugely uncomfortable, almost impossible to digest fact, no matter how tough of a pill it is to swallow-- and believe, it's not easy for even me to cut through the bull shit and come to grips with and wrap my arms around it-- there will never be meaningful changes or reforms.

The United States can go back to its small government, free market-loving, prosperous, Christian-values "friendship with all, entangling alliances with none" roots from days far yonder. We can emerge from this Fourth Turning in a positive way. But like a spouse in denial about an abusive relationship, until the average American steps out of the haze and into broad daylight, this kind of huge change is impossible.

Remember the addition update I gave back in December? A couple of days ago things got so far that I was able to move into my room, and start using the new bathroom! Click on any of the pictures for larger versions.

This first batch respectively: my room; the view looking out my bedroom door, where you can see up the steps into the new closet in the old basement portion; my sister-in-law's room; the new bathroom; and the view from the old basement back into the addition portion.











This shot is of the new electric panels, plus the network rack. On that latter point, I had the electrician run CAT6 to all of the new rooms, then Duncan and I set up the patch panel and rack ourselves, punching in the wires for each port, and installing RJ45 wall ports into each room.

Both of us now know how, and have our own tools, to both create custom RJ45 and RJ11 cables, and to punch wires to create network and phone panels. We are also "beaming" the internet connection across the property to the large garage with a special long-range "PoE", pole-mounted broadcast device.



This final batch, also respectively: the new family room; the view out the windows; the view out the other windows and deck door; and my in-laws's bedroom, from two different angles.











The only thing left is to get the new furnace installed. There are ducts running to the new rooms, not hooked to anything. I've been running an electric space heater in my room to keep from freezing.

The next house project is re-siding the "old" house exterior to match the addition portion. After that, it will be getting a large deck installed off the deck doors. We already have a gas line running the liquid propane from the house tank, for the grill, all ready to go for when the time comes.

In the ultimate "Are we the baddies?" moment, it turns out that the US and Ukraine have been jointly developing biological weapons in various parts of Ukraine, in biolabs. In other words, Ukraine actually has the same "weapons of mass destruction" which Saddam didn't have, which was used as the pretense for the US to invade Iraq. And Vladimir Putin is the bad guy in this current conflict?

If you overlay the map of Russia's air strikes with the locations of US-Ukrainian biolabs, there is an almost perfect match.

I watched a few minutes of the Manchester Derby over lunch, and what was more interesting than the game were the animated billboards.

The first one to go past said how "together matters". Unless you object to having the State or your employer forcefully inject an experimental substance from a multi-billion dollar legally immune pharmaceutical company into your veins. Unless you object to being beaten with batons if you resist having your business shut down for a virus with a ninety-nine percent survival rate. Or unless you're Russian with a Mastercard, even if you haven't been in the country for years.

The second one was about "no racism". What that means is that if you're a white European and you are proud of your culture and want to preserve it, you're a monster. If you think it's a bad idea to let an unlimited amount of totally undocumented people from violent third-world hellscapes come across in life rafts, then you're a Nazi.

The third one was about "sustainability", closely followed by one telling everyone they should travel to Abu Dubai on a gas guzzling jet-- you know, where they drive around in Bugattis they got from siphoning oil out of the ground and selling it.

Watching the little bit that I did made me feel like Neo once he realized he lived in the matrix. Everything is fine as long as you stay on the plantation, don't question anything, just do whatever you're told. If you even point out the existence of the plantation, let alone do anything to rock the boat or combat it, they destroy your whole life.

The crowd looked ninety-five percent white, yet they were paying huge percentages of their paltry paychecks to watch a bunch of black guys kick a sphere around, making hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, kneeling to "Black Lives Matter" and lecturing them about how racist they are, while being subjected to non-stop Globohomo propaganda in the stadium, condemning them and everything they-- at least used to-- believe in.

I was curious about how far away Moscow is from Kyiv, and what the two countries look like. As I do any time I'm curious about geography, I hopped in "Flight Simulator" on the Series X, grabbed my Beechcraft King Air 350i, and flew directly from the former city to the latter.

The first part of my journey saw me take off from Moscow's most busy airport, then fly Southwest across the countryside for about four hundred nautical miles. It was kind of a boring path: really flat, and nothing but forests and the occasional farm.













After about two hours I arrived at Kyiv, and flew around for a bit. The place is split by a river, with a large body of water to the North. I saw lots of boring Soviet-style gray buildings, lots of strange curved ones, and some oddly colorful ones too.













Because of the ongoing conflict, my destination airport was buzzing with human player activity, with people swooping all over the place, and almost crashing into buildings. Even as I was landing, I had to frantically swerve after touch down to avoid several planes which were landing going the wrong direction!

I recorded some video clips, but I have no way to edit the videos the Series X produces in anything other than the Windows video editor-- which obviously doesn't work under GNU/Linux. Otherwise I'd upload them, as they are very amusing. But here are some screenshots of the airport and my plane after landing, anyway.

Lots of interesting things happening right now. The list of clot shot side effects was released, and it's a nine page wall of text. Further, out of the not-insubstantial amount of adverse effects-- tens and tens of thousands of them, just in the tiny period shown in the data on offer-- three percent of those events were death!

Numerous insurance company reps and funeral parlor people have remarked that since the clot shots have gone out, they have seen unprecedented amounts of death among working age people. It's all anecdotal because the powers-that-be are suppressing the data to the maximum extent possible-- but the pieces fit together.

Changing gears, Sean Hannity and Lyndsay Graham are literally calling for Vladimir Putin to be assassinated! Now everyone will hopefully understand why Russia invaded Ukraine: the Russians have tried and tried and tried for decades to get the West to treat them as equals in diplomacy, and got nothing but middle fingers. Backed into a corner they finally took action, and rather than try to end the conflict-- "let's not throw rocks at a cornered animal"-- they got "cancel cultured". And I thought the Left cared about "xenophobia"? And now calls for the Russian leader to be sniped.

The actors in the West are cuckoo for cocoa puffs: they have the "liberal pathogen", as Mark Dice calls it. They don't care about their people, all they care about is ramming through their "you will own nothing and be happy" agenda, something I've humorously and accurately heard described as "Globohomo." Tucker Carlson summed it up well in a segment last night. He used Cameltoe as the example, but you could substitute her with Trudeau, Creepy Joe, Macron, Merkel, Boris, Draghi, or any of the other lizard people:



I should have seen all of this coming. I very closely followed the "Assad dropped chlorine bombs on his own people!" nonsense back in 2018. I wrote about it several times, including here, here, and here. Funnily, that episode involved-- who else-- the Russians! And between the Western governments and the Russian State, guess who was lying and who was telling the truth? Vladimir Putin's explanation at the time, paraphrased: "I don't give a shit about Assad specifically, but after what happened with America's invasion of Iraq, do you really think it's a good idea to destabilize that region further?"

That's a consistent pattern I see with Putin. He jails opposition politicians and journalists-- I wouldn't want to live under his rule. But at least he's a rational actor: I completely understand his logic and reasoning, even as I often disagree with his methods. By contrast and from a personal standpoint, the scary thing for me is that I live in a country led by unhinged lunatics, propped up by a lunatic general public. It's an ochlocracy: total mob rule.

One second the NPCs are supporting "Black Lives Matter" domestic terrorists burning down my city, to the point where my small business mechanic friend had to spend days in a van in front of his shop, with a shotgun and no sleep, to protect his livelihood. In matter of seconds the NPCs got the firmware update, and started denying me access to healthcare and groceries because I wouldn't dress like a Branch Covidian Death Cultist, for a virus with a 99.9% survival rate, from which I'd already had and recovered. Then in a matter of seconds again, the NPCs dropped the WuFlu instantaneously: new firmware update, now we need to assassinate Vladimir Putin and start World War III!

It's like living with a psychotic family member, who alternates between stealing your things and threatening to burn the house down with your kids in it. What's next?

And now let me conclude by looping this back to Tucker Carlson for a minute: remember "January 6th!", when a guy with a Daniel Boone hat and a spear came close to overthrowing the United States government, so we needed martial law in Washington DC, with fencing and Gatling guns? In the many weeks after, Carlson had to preface every segment of his show with pearl clutching: "What happened that day was terrible! Horrible! Reprehensible!" Then about six months later, he suddenly started being truthful about it, making fun of it for the farce it was, while pointing out how staged and fishy it was.

He's doing the same thing with the Russia-Ukraine situation now: "Not a single American would ever support Vladimir Putin or Russia! Every single American thinks Russia is evil, c'mon, that's not even what we're debating here!" It's like there is this grace period with Tucker Carlson, where you only get the truth once the dust settles. I don't know if it's him being afraid, his producers shackling him, or what.

There is an immense amount of truth saying in this Eric Peters blog post, and it extends far beyond cars.

I just read that Electronic Arts is patching out all of the Russian teams and players from their products, such as FIFA. Regardless of where you stand on that war, consumers paid X money and were promised Y number of teams and Z number of players-- which can be changed on a whim by the publisher, so they can virtue signal to other idiots on The Twatter, because the player doesn't own a copy of the software, but merely a temporary license to use the software, which can be revoked or have its terms modified at any time.

Gran Turismo 7 can not be played without an internet connection. They can't even change that behavior via a patch, because in fifteen years when the servers are gone, how would the patch be delivered? This is where we're headed.

The Davos crowd wants to do this with everything: your car, your house, your food, your clothes, and on and on. You'll subscribe on a EULA basis to get stuff. Then if you say something mean on The Twatter or donate money to peaceful trucker protesters or buy a firearm or practice your religion without a face diaper on-- or whatever-- you will find your subscriptions terminated. Some conflict comes up? You're not allowed to have an opinion: you will be punished either directly or indirectly, if you don't agree with Nasty Pelosi or whichever lizard creature is in charge at that moment.

The same goes with development technologies. I wrote this web site in January of 2007, and in the fifteen years that have followed, I have only had to touch the code once due to "obsolescence", where I had to replace like three lines of code which performed MySQL calls. Frameworks like .Net are driven by a commercial need to continually drive people towards new products and services-- planned obsolescence, baby. Whereas languages like PHP or Python aren't continually pulling the rug from beneath you, because the motivations and incentives are different.

In general, the more we can disconnect ourselves from multi-billion dollar corporations, governments, and weirdo hipsters, the better off and more independent we'll be.

The whole reason I bought a PlayStation 5 at launch was in anticipation of this-- which comes out in two days! The best thing about the game is that it retains its trademark Japanese quirkiness-- just look at those NPC names and character portraits! Once upon a time the "Pro Evolution Soccer" series was the football-equivalent, with goofy menu music and lots of Engrishey elements-- but morphed into a totally Westernized "FIFA" clone, which incidentally is why it died in popularity: what was its differentiating factor anymore? Good to see "Gran Turismo" is staying true to its character. I wish more Japanese developers would go back to their roots: almost everything they produce feels very Westernized these days.

Changing gears, Creepy Joe has been such an unbelievable-- and I mean that word, to the full extent-- disaster that he even makes a lot of the RINOs quoted here sound like voices of reason! That's how low the bar is. How about evacuating Afghanistan by removing the soldiers, but leaving behind all the civilians and military equipment? How about stopping domestic oil production, importing replacement oil from Russia, then having Russia invade Ukraine shortly after? How about wishing a winter of death on families who wouldn't get the clot shots, then telling everyone not to see the WuFlu as a divisive issue?

This is a superb video explaining why Russia is invading Ukraine. It lays out the kind of complexities I was warning about in this post from a few days ago. My intuition was that Russia was backed into a corner, with little choice left if they wanted to ensure their own survival-- and the video confirmed my suspicions.

I think the Russians are full-in, with their backs against the wall. They may even use nuclear weapons if they are pushed any harder. To them, this is an existential crisis. I heard a top Russian "journalist"-- State-backed, sort of like a Russian CNN anchor-- say something like "we may use nukes, because what's the point of a world without Russia in it?"

Clearly, the West needed and need to take Ukraine NATO membership off the table. It's not too late. Unfortunately, I don't think that will happen. My mother-in-law borrowed me a copy of "The Fourth Turning", a book I'd been meaning to read for many years. Newt Gingrich is correct here, and even tosses out "77 years", a number very close to the typical four seasons cycle duration.

We're about to see a "reset" in the world order, and no one is going to back down. Instead of having empathy and making conciliatory gestures towards Russia to get them away from the ledge, the West is going to double down on the sanctions, and the US may even begin military operations directly against the Russians. I hope it doesn't go that way, but history tells me it probably will.

Next, China will invade Taiwan. I'm essentially expecting that, maybe even in the next week or two; from their perspective, it's "strike while the iron is hot". Then we'll be back to World War II, with a European theater, and a Pacific theater-- except this time, all of the powers involved will be nuclear armed. China has been making thousands of hypersonic missiles for a reason-- and those missiles can carry nuclear payloads.

I should be getting emailed by Valve imminently, at which point I'll have seventy two hours to decide whether or not to follow through on my 650 USD "Steam Deck" purchase. If I do go forward with it, I can see the experience going one of two ways: either I will love it and not want to touch another piece of contemporary game hardware ever again, or the thing will sit in the carrying case and several months from now you'll see a blog post involving me lamenting the fact that I'd wasted my money.

To support the former timeline is the fact that I love playing games on Switch so much, even when the experience is dismal compared to other formats. I bought "Doom 2016" on Windows then again on PlayStation 4, and couldn't get into it either time. I bought the "lower than lowest quality, smeared in Vaseline" Switch port, and played all the way through it twice. And with the Steam Deck, it's not "lower than lowest quality": it's medium, high, or even ultra settings depending on the game and how long you want the battery to last, at the native resolution of the display, at a locked thirty frames per second!

Lending credence to the latter timeline is that there are better ways to experience these games. Why would I want to play "Elden Ring" in the future at medium quality at 720p, when I could just play it on my PlayStation 5 on my fifty inch 4K HDR TV with ultra quality settings? And the Switch is a smorgasbord for indie titles and collections of old games, even with frequent case and manual physical releases via companies like Limited Run Games. For my favorite kinds of modern games-- "Hi-Bit"-- the Steam Deck has no performance advantage, and lacks the Switch's wonderful OLED screen.

I think my whole experience with the Steam Deck would hinge on how well it would function for the hacker side of me. How easy is it to get a good RetroArch experience? How easy is it to get DOSBox working well? Can I run LibreOffice and VeraCrypt on it, and maybe even use it to replace my desktop PC altogether? Because if the Steam Deck became this magical 3DO, "EZWolf", "GZDoom", and "One Must Fall: 2097" handheld on which I can also do my taxes, I'd never desire anything else. Conversely, if it became one of those things where every time they roll an update everything breaks, I'd find it hugely disappointing. So far today, haven't yet found a single person who is looking at the Deck from this kind of angle.

Another use case could be as a development "workstation" of sorts. Regular readers know that I am a huge fan of "Fuze" on the Switch, and doing development straight on the handheld with a USB keyboard. I know that the "Godot Engine" guys have been working with Valve a lot over the past several months on having flawless support for the Deck. I've been wanting to make the leap from "Fuze" to the aforementioned "Godot Engine", and the Deck might get me motivated to follow through.

So we'll see. I probably won't know until I'm about to click the "Purchase" button on their web site, which way I'll go.

When drawing the lines of nation states, one possible approach is to grab the straight edge and run the pencil along ethnic or cultural lines. Another approach is to draw them to divide up spoils among conflict victors. In places where the latter principle is prioritized, ethnic lines are often split. Like water running downhill, inevitably forces seem to conspire to re-draw the lines to more closely conform with the wills of the people who were pseudo-arbitrarily pulled apart.

When ISIS started taking over the Middle East, I recall super-imposing various maps-- for example, one showing Sunni and Shia majorities-- and remarking at how ISIS's so-called "New Caliphate" was less culturally arbitrary than the lines the English and French had drawn up long ago. Another example would be the Balkans, which inevitably split between the Albanians, the Greeks, the Romanians, and so forth. Some modern-day countries are "fake": take Belgium for instance, which has major Flemish, French, German, and Italian populations in lieu of a unified "Belgian" identity.

Another "fake" country so-to-speak is Ukraine, which drove a wedge between ethnic Russians and the historical Ruthenians. I have a Moldovan friend whose father grew up in and then later returned to Crimea. This father was and is a Russian loyalist. When the Russians took the peninsula, he and his entire community did not perceive it as an invasion: they viewed it as a homecoming. In their eyes, they had been drawn on the wrong side of a pseudo-arbitrary line in the first place!

Russia's current military operations have the same flavor to me. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority-- or at least a critical mass minority-- of the people in the operational areas would prefer to be a part of Russia. I'm not a huge fan of armies marching around invading places, but I also recognize that sometimes that is simply how these splits eventually get resolved.

Either way, I don't want the United States to get involved. Two hundred trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities doesn't leave much choice. And beyond that, the wisdomless Nancy Pelosi and her ilk don't even know the difference between Hungary and Ukraine, much less the elaborate historical and cultural issues at play in the conflict. Any meddling they do will just make things worse.

More than even in the pickup truck market, video game customers are extremely tribal. They operate on a series of triggers, and once in awhile a game will come out which trips several of them at once. Here are some quotes I am seeing regarding "Elden Ring":

• With Elden Ring, we're in masterpiece territory.
• It's one of the best games ever made.
• While it feels like the impact of Breath of the Wild is waning as the open world genre starts to stagnate again...
• At the risk of hyperbole, it has dethroned Bloodborne as my favorite game of all time.
• The thing that surprised me most about Elden Ring is how good the exploration is. Better than BOTW in some ways.
• I'm here to witness history.
• On Friday I get to play the best game ever made.
• God bless Fromsoft.
• Never doubt Miyazaki.
• Game of the year locked up already and it's only Feb.
• As expected, it is the greatest game ever.
• Our lord and Savior Miyazaki doesn't fail.
• It's the first game since BOTW that's going to have a sense of wonder and discovery.
• What a time to be alive.
• Zelda fans crying.
• Thank god for individuals like Miyazaki.
• Combat in Elden Ring is unmatched by any other game.
• Game of the decade incoming.
• They are creating history now
• So happy to see these scores!!

Outside of the first few bullets, none of these other people have even played the game. The lowest "professional" critic review is a ninety. Most of them are literally one hundreds. I haven't seen this kind of mass psychosis hyperbole and groupthink since "Breath of the Wild." So, it's not surprising to see that game referenced with regards to this one.

"Breath of the Wild" was a solid game, but not spectacular. I'm sure "Elden Ring" is a solid title too. But the commentary around titles like these are rooted more in gaming culture psychology than the actual releases themselves.

I keep seeing headlines like this, where it's stated that prices are rising at the highest level in forty years. But that's just not true, because the apparatchiks keep changing how the CPI is calculated. In fact, prices are rising higher than they were in 1982; price inflation is over 15% right now! I bet it's the highest price inflation in the history of the United States.

I also like this labor force participation chart. It was down, down, down from 1965 on, and that was with women joining the labor force. Then Trump gets into office, and for the first time basically since then it was up, up up. That by the way coincided with him making the US no longer have the highest corporate tax rate in the entire OECD. But then Brandon gets selected? Down, down, down again.

Let's not forget what an awesome President Trump was. I didn't agree with his clot shot pushing, but even on that subject he was light years from ever wanting to require them, or face diapers: he just wanted the shots available if people did voluntarily want them. And I can guarantee he'd be the only Western leader condemning the major, third-world style human rights abuses going on in Canada right now via Fidel Jr.

Changing subjects, after the abomination that was V, Street Fighter is a dead series-- along with pretty much everything else from my childhood, such as Star Trek. To seal that conclusion, I couldn't even make it twenty seconds into the VI video: patently ridiculous looking Blender models, rap music, and a stock Adobe image for the logo. Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does.

Speaking of modern games, I've been asking some people who recognize as strongly as do I how evil this Cultural Marxist infiltration in gaming is-- KKK in reverse-- what their strategies are. The best advice I got in a nutshell: don't pre-order anything; watch extensive YouTube footage, look for red flags; is it a Western game? Does it have black trannies or purple-haired retards in it? Is a genre which tends to have a silent protagonist and lots of player freedom? Time box to two days, and make a decision.

I'm about five hours into "Horizon 2", and I'm not sure I can keep going. The first game already had the "woke dial" on maybe a six or seven-- but I could plug my nose and get through it. This sequel is at about a nine or a ten. Every single white male character I've encountered so far is either evil, ridiculously passive, or a doddering idiot. Meanwhile, all of the women are the crude, vulgar, frat-boy lesbian types. The noble male characters thus far have all been blacks.

Aside from the Victimhood Olympics nonsense, the writing, dialog, and characterizations are so paper thin, I can scarcely believe what I'm watching. My eleven year old daughter's writing is orders of magnitude more sophisticated.

Then you get to the protagonist, who is about the most unlikable character I've ever encountered in a video game. It's like they wrote her to have as repulsive of a personality as possible: she has no sense of humor, no warmth, no graciousness. In every interaction she's smarmy and sarcastic: hand on hip, doing the weird side-to-side neck crane deal black women do when they're trying to get free shit in a McDonald's, mocking the white guy she's invariably lecturing. There are literally no redeeming aspects to her character as a human being. She's the kind of person who would clear rooms at parties.

Beyond that, they took the character design and essentially made her twenty percent fatter, and her skin twenty percent more pock-marked. The Left hate female beauty with a passion.

I'm going to give "Gran Turismo 7" a shot in a few weeks. But if that one winds up being a dud or simply not that interesting, I'm just going to pawn the PlayStation 5 on eBay, and probably the Series X too. The most fun I've had by a wide margin with any video games over the past twelve months or more has been playing "Crash 'N Burn" and "The Horde" on 3DO. Nintendo's stuff isn't "woke" yet, so I'd still have the Switch-- albeit some of the character designs in "Arceus" raised my eyebrows...

This is an excellent retrospective regarding the WuFlu. I mentioned to someone recently that all the way back in March of 2020, it was already obvious that the whole thing was a con. "Nah, no way! We didn't know that back then." Well, thanks to this blog, I keep receipts.

Here I am on February 5, 2020, citing speculation that Tencent accidentally revealed mass casualty at the hands of the virus, in China. The data was unclear as of that date, and the truth could have been in either direction. But by March 27, 2020, I was so confident in the data having revealed that the whole thing was a fraud that I penned this, wherein I marveled at how disproportionately bent out of shape people were getting in their fear over what was no big deal.

Seven days before that-- on March 20, 2020-- I wrote here about how the trade-off in civil liberties was not even close to warranted given the threat of the virus. And the day before that I wrote about how the Fed showering trillions was bad, and very shortly therafter-- March 25-- I called out that this inflation of the money supply would raise prices. Boy did I get that one right. Boy did I get all of this right. Not because I'm smart-- but simply because I impartially pay attention to what's occurring.

Fast forward all the way to July 23, 2020 and Minnesota's low-IQ governor, Dim Tim Walz, mandated "face coverings", something which I eviscerated in this post, citing lots of statistics. It was totally nonsensical. Even if the WuFlu had been dangerous, and even if this "mandate" would have helped things (i.e. duct taping a bandanna to your face would stop airborne aerosol particles), late July would have been hilariously too late to accomplish anything.

Some people I've talked to recently have said that it's better to just be an ostrich with politics: "You can't control it anyway!" My riposte is that, "Yes, but then you walked around with a stupid looking diaper on your face for two years, didn't you? And then you got a heart tissue-destroying fluid injected into your veins, while simultaneously ceding your civil liberties, some of them forever. And then you caught the virus anyway!" That's what the ostrich approach gets you.

It doesn't make sense to worry about politics. But it does make sense to follow what's going on. In a "normal" world maybe one could vote in a politician, delegate some responsibility to them, and trust them to more or less do the right thing. But we are not in "normal" times. These people are authoritarian dictators: serial liars who will do whatever it takes, no matter how short-sighted or unscrupulous, to obtain and retain power. You absolutely need to day-to-day follow events in this crazy era.

I was just having a conversation about this topic of snow driving with my eleven year-old daughter, who can't wait to start driving. She's very tall for her age, and I taught her how to operate the clutch and change gears last summer. "But snow driving", I explained, "is a whole different skill set. I will explain many things to you before you even get in the car for the first time in winter."

One of those "skill set" things I am going to introduce her to is how to control the car when the back end comes lose. Because when it's really slick, any car on any tires is going to experience at least a little oversteer, if not a lot in the case of my 350z.

I am going to take her into a big open area, turn off all traction and stability control, and have her just do donuts for awhile. Then I will show her how you turn a donut back into a straight line. They do this in Finland: forty hours of skidpad work to get your driver's license. This way, when people take a corner and the car begins to rotate, the driver doesn't panic.

My first car way back when was a 1994 model year, and didn't have anti-lock brakes. Perfect way to learn. I wish I had some way to shut those off for her too. To this day, I "pump" and am very light on the brakes, staying out of ABS except in glare ice conditions where they come on no matter how gentle I am.

On a totally different note, I took a shot at listing the "best" proprietary video game platforms of all time. So, no VGA / Adlib DOS games, no Game Boy Advance, no Amiga-- just game consoles:

1. Sony PlayStation
2. Nintendo Famicom
3. Sega Mega Drive
4. Nintendo Super Famicom
5. Atari VCS
6. Sony PlayStation 2
7. NEC PC Engine
8. Sega Saturn
9. Nintendo Switch
10. Sega Master System

My favorite list looks different, I think it'd be: 3DO, Mega Drive, Saturn, PC Engine, and Atari 7800. I even like add-ons such as the 32x. The Dreamcast would be in the top ten somewhere. I'd probably enjoy a Jaguar, if I could ever justify spending that kind of money on one. Versus something like the PlayStation 2, a system in which I have zero interest, but can "objectively" recognize for its enormous library.

Let us begin this session by blessing ourselves in the name of the Diversity, the Inclusion, and the Holy Climate Change, Amen. Let us now reflect on the things which make this world Most Holy, the Blessed Sacraments and Sacred Commandments.


Our Commandments

Diversity Is Our Strength: The less people have in common, the more the group's members will be in harmony, and the more prosperous they will be. Therefore, it's important to remove as many white people, men, and Republicans as possible from every situation, to make the group ideologically homogeneous. Diversity!

Stereotyping Is Wrong: It's wrong to judge people based on superficial characteristics. And that's why we pigeonhole people not just into a couple of groups, but stereotype them into many! There are many ways to be a victim! Each specific to that person's life experiences... just kidding! Are you black? Are you a woman? Are you gay? Then you're a victim! Blessed are the victims among us, for they shall inherit the State Department, amen.

Inclusion, a Blessed Shibboleth: We need to include everyone, and make them feel welcome. Everyone! All are welcome here! Yes! Everyone who supports Black Lives Matter or who voted for Democrats are welcome! Those who like to fuck assholes are welcome! Those who want to increase the power of multi-billion dollar corporations are welcome! Let us now take a break to say a prayer: Oh, bless me Saint Patrisse, sanctify and save my soul, oh sanctimonious hero martyr Floyd, save our souls from the white devil Republicans and the fiery pits of the patriarchy, amen!

Mother Gaia Needs Help: Quick! Hurry my children, my flock! We need to immediately begin strip mining the Earth of all its cobalt and lithium with slave labor, so we can stop strip mining it of its oil! External combustion is the way forward, not internal combustion, you silly child! Or the atmosphere will be filled with too much plant food! The Earth already became Venus once when there was two hundred and sixty seven times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today-- last time that happened we ran out of margaritas and our fossil fuel powered air conditioner broke. We can't live without air conditioning obviously, all of the curl goes out of our hair!

Everything is Racist: My flock, my faithful pupils, we are Children of Progress! We know that it's not a matter of whether a given object is racist, but rather how it's racist. Therefore we need to spend trillions of dollars-- trillions!-- to Build Back Better. With equity! This will make the world a better place, because everything will be ten times more expensive, and the poorest among us will be plunged into poverty. Which is their own fault for not going to college! Or for choosing to work for a living by not moving to California or Washington DC and becoming diversity consultants like the rest of us. Progress, my lamb, progress!

The Sacred Precept of Accessibility: Everything should be accessible to everyone! Only a bigot thinks movies aren't for blind people! Or that music isn't for the deaf! What else would they possibly do with their time otherwise? We need to immediately drop what we're doing to make everything accessible to everyone at all times! Except for hospitals, workplaces, movie theaters, restaurants, or grocery stores for the unvaxxed, those most foul of heathen anti-science beasts, may Saint Floyd curse their souls!

Trust the Science: We need to trust the experts at all times! All experts! All experts who are on CNN need to be trusted immediately! And science! Men can have periods, too! Mosquitos can be stopped by a chain link fence, so wear that cotton mask immediately, you bigot! When The Most Holy Doctor Fausti said before that masks were paranoid and didn't work, he was mistaken: but he repented, and was absolved of his Misinformation! Locking people into their homes and excluding them from society will keep them safe and healthy, especially from the most lethal of WuFlu nasal congestion-- that is true, my child!

Evangelize: Everyone should be made to feel comfortable at all times. And everyone should be free to express their opinions, and to bring their whole selves with them. No one should be made to feel uncomfortable, and should live in a safe space. That's why, my flock, we need to enter every last situation by non-stop espousing our world view at every turn! Every meeting at work should begin with a meditation session, reflecting on the Original Sin of white people, and on the virtues of homogeneous Diversity! And because it's important for everyone to bring their whole selves, anyone to the right of Chairman Mao needs to be immediately censored and excluded from all aspects of society. This is how important Inclusion is!


When in Doubt

Some days you may be plunged into despair: you can't afford a fifty thousand dollar car which needs a new ten thousand dollar battery pack after eight years. Or you can't afford groceries because Build Back Better has created equity. Or because of Holy Lockdowns you aren't allowed to have a funeral for your boyfriend, who died from Myocarditis after getting his sixteenth Holy Jab of Annointing-- I mean, who died from the stress of Climate Change!

All of those evil white devil patriarchal monsters told you all of this would happen-- but they are broken clocks! Even a blind squirrel, my dear, even a blind squirrel. Therefore, cease all of these blasphemous thoughts! Banish this foul Cognitive Dissonance! It's the work of the Trump Devil! Wear your mask in pride! Buy another rainbow bumper sticker for your Prius! Say a prayer to Saint Cullors, Saint Floyd, or the Most Holy Priest Doctor Fausti! Thank The Biden, and never forget the power of the Virtue Signal: solidarity, comrade!

Let us end now in peace, except for Republicans. In the name of the Diversity, the Inclusion, and the Holy Climate Change, Amen!

I was listening to Victor Davis Hanson yesterday, and he started by rattling off many of the good things America still has going for it: high worker productivity among them. He pointed out that napkin math suggests an American worker is worth four Chinese workers, dividing GDPs by populations.

I filed that supposition away and moved on to this video. I'd always wondered why China isn't another Brazil in terms of national team quality. As it turns out, in North Korea-like fashion, The Party™ top-down dictates the athletic pools. As the guest put it, "there are more excellent wrestlers in Long Island than there are in all of China, because only a tiny part of the citizenry is told or allowed to be wrestlers." American wrestlers who wouldn't get within a mile of the US Olympic team may be tempted to join the Chinese one, if the Chinese so-offered-- and they have.

Putting things together then, Chinese GDP growth is poor given the size of the population. The Chinese aren't particularly good at competitive sports, because the lack of liberalism means the best athletes aren't necessarily surfacing. Got it.

The next piece in this puzzle was inspired within me by this Tucker Carlson segment regarding the Canadian freedom truckers. It's like a form of "Atlas Shrugged", playing out in real life. This was closely followed in my feeds by this.

All of it really got me thinking what America-- and indeed even Canada, and other Western countries-- would look like if they had serious, non-ideological leadership, who were willing to open-mindedly maximize the strengths of Western liberalism, while simultaneously having selective, adversarial "cut throat" protectionism against other countries.

If indeed an American worker is presently worth about four Chinese workers, it's not difficult to imagine them being worth double that or more if the American economy was truly liberalized. Simultaneously, serious leaders would be interested in and proud of "every day Americans", and would take measures to put those best interests first in all matters-- foremost of all, placing clamps on the globalization trends of the past fifty years, which have gutted what used to be the middle class.

America would return to being the world's dominant super power almost overnight. And it wouldn't even be close. It would be so strong, it'd even probably be able to slowly dig itself out of its thirty trillion dollar hole. The very same Victor Davis Hanson wrote a piece recently, detailing what I think would be a really good start towards the very same direction I just described.

This is all impossible though: half of the population in America is strongly authoritarian by nature, and would rather live under some variation of Communistic rule, than endure the responsibility that the fruits of freedom inevitably brings with it. One can thank "K-through-College" brainwashing at the hands of Marxist teachers, professors, and all of popular media for that.

An interesting follow-up to this post happened a few days ago while I was praying before bed. I asked God how it can simultaneously be that his son handed succession through Peter all the way down through the centuries, yet the Church has people in it like the current Pope and the aforementioned Bishop, who are not walking The Path?

Immediately he put this gentle laugh into my head, like a parent amusingly prodding his child: "Oh, so you know The Path now?"

Duh!

God wants us to pursue truth, so it's ok to "call out" our religious or political leaders where they go astray-- to not do so would be to ignore God's truth and reality. But on the flip side, everything has a purpose: we need to recognize that God has a road that he's leading not just us down, but everyone. People like Pope Francis or this Bishop are serving a role in all of this, which will eventually lead to greater good.

On a totally unrelated note, yesterday's "Gran Turismo 7" presentation looked amazing. That game is the reason I bought a PlayStation 5 at launch in the first place, and the title looks even better than my sky-high expectations. But what's with the "this game will not function without an internet connection" deal-- for a single player release?

There are people like John Linneman who call this stuff out, but their overall erroneous world view prevents them from seeing the big picture. CEOs of major corporations have veritably always dreamed of Klaus Schwab's "you will own nothing and be happy", "every plebe will pay us endlessly recurring subscription fees and make us gazillionaires".

They don't want us to own cars. They don't want us to own our own house. They don't want us to own copies of video games. All of it is the same line of thinking! Besides making them rich and us poor, it also gives them control over us: don't get "the jab", or say something mean on The Twatter? We're sorry, you violated our terms of server-- good luck starting that subscription car to drive to work tomorrow morning!

Back to "Gran Turismo 7" then: once I saw this whole landscape for what it was, I've become very sensitive to games where I can't preserve them. Not just for the sake of preservation itself-- although I do value that-- but to push back against this larger tide, which transcends just video games. I hope there is a lot of blowback against this specific example, and that Polyphony changes course here.

Had our first Mass with the bishop's WuFlu Burqa "mandate" in place. Maybe only ten percent of people were wearing them, a good sign. Our priest was not, but they had the servers-- children-- flooding their bloodstreams with CO2. It's in God's plan that they have deficient brain growth, I guess.

The choir was singing, but half of them had diapers duct taped to their faces, so you couldn't hear them. They didn't have us greet one another after the opening introduction. Verboten. Might breath on each other by accident.

Apparently people aren't "allowed" to bring the gifts forward anymore, something my daughter and I do fairly often. Because people are biohazards, right? So the gifts were already up at the front, causing total chaos with both the servers and ministers having no clue what to do. Our priest was doing a lot of stern-faced head-jerk directing. He did not proceed out of the building in the normal way, and did not greet people warmly as they left Mass.

They did not offer wine. You know, the blood of Christ. You know, The Sacrament. You know, the reason why the Mass exists as "a thing" in the first place. I know the Catholic Church considers it a mortal sin to miss Mass. But isn't that a two way street? If the Mass isn't providing The Sacrament, and you're not allowed to interact with anyone, then why not just watch it on TV?

I found out that the bishop was anticipating the nearest big city-- we're "stuck" in his diocese, an hour drive away-- would issue a Burqa "mandate". That didn't happen. But now he can't take his away without looking like a moron. Which he is. So now we're in a situation where the Church is more authoritarian than the secular government.

Because Jesus said you should "drink of this wine"-- unless you're afraid of getting the sniffles. Because the literal Word of God commands you to turn people away if they won't tape a piece of toilet paper to their face. Yeah, I think I remember those verses.

I'm by a mile not ditching Catholicism, even remotely. In fact, my kids will soon be full-on card carrying members, in May. But at the same time I can understand why some of the most ardent adherents of Christ are so-called "non-denominational": fewer barriers between you and Jesus.

I tried to just put all of this aside and really focus on me, and God. But the whole situation was distracting for everyone there, to put it mildly.

Looking forward to an awesome Saturday. Wrapping up a third-ever playthrough of "Escape from Monster Manor", this time on the brand new FZ-10. I've been taking lots of screenshots. I think I'll create a whole, dedicated static-page 3DO section on the SA Review Wharf, just to talk about the games, along with tons of screenshots.

I got copies of "Crash N Burn" and "The Horde" in the other day as well. Printed out some custom jewel case art for them. I'll be playing and reviewing those in the coming weeks. I had "The Horde" back in the day, but have-- surprisingly!-- never played "Crash N Burn", which for those who don't know was the Panasonic FZ-1's launch title in 1993.

I get different impressions of game hardware as I learn more and get older. Lately the 3DO has been feeling a lot like some kind of hybrid, parallel universe 486 multimedia PC: it's like an "Ultima Underworld, times two" sort of machine. That was my comparison point back in the day, and I really feel it today too. Versus the PlayStation, which is more like a Pentium PC-- much faster, but a little more generic feeling.

Daughter's copy of the new Pokemon game came in yesterday. I'll probably watch over her shoulder as she plays it a little today. She got the Pokemon special edition Switch Lite the day it came out back when, but has barely touched it-- just hasn't taken off as a platform for her. Her Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 (with keyboard) has been practically tethered to her hip for the past few years, by contrast. But this game will get her back to the Switch a bit, I wager.

Her and I are also-- very slowly, mind you-- working our way through "Tales of Arise", on the PlayStation 5. Solid game, but not particularly remarkable either. We'll play more today. I've also been chipping away at my "Pro Evo 2021" Master League team on the Series X, I'll probably play a few matches today.

I found out in the end-of-Mass announcements yesterday that the Catholic bishop for my part of Minnesota "instated" a WuFlu Burqa mandate for all church-related activities, including Mass itself. Thank God I'm where I am, because my priest suffixed that pronouncement with this, regarding face diapers: "However, I know that Christ would have never turned anyone away-- so you are free to not wear one."

Jesus surrounded himself with lepers, and said that all should come to him-- not just those whom he thought wouldn't give him nasal congestion for a few days. My priest has it one hundred percent correct.

I hadn't yet returned to Christ when the initial WuFlu nonsense was going on, so I wasn't aware of this-- but apparently the Catholic Church had suspended the Sunday obligation! If this obligation is based on scripture and is thus the literal Word of God, then it can not be suspended any more than the Ten Commandments can. If it is not based on scripture and can be abrogated on a whim, then why have it in the first place?

It's no wonder the Catholic Church is struggling to put butts in pews. People want strength, conviction, and direction in these times-- not mealy-mouthed whimpering and pandering, trying to "look good" to people who hate you.

This is an interesting demonstration of how Marxist the Left is in America today. In Left-wing ideologies like Communism and Fascism, the children belong to the State. The State is controlled by a tiny cabal of people who have everything, while no one else has anything. It's the ultimate con. It's a swindle by design. The State gets the children young, so that it can brainwash them into "liking" their captivity.

All I could think of in watching that woman was, "Stay away from my kids, you wench."

One related sentiment I've heard a lot from Western women over my lifetime is just how "overwhelming" it is to raise children, and how they need an army of people to help them do it. One daycare client explained to my mom in the 90's that she was so stressed out that morning, because she had the toaster and the microwave going at the same time.

This is all among career women, by the way. I never hear these complaints from non-career women.

I think feminism has made career women really susceptible to Marxism, because they've been taught that children are a burden. So the allure of shipping their kids off in a diesel bus to a prison is very compelling. "It takes a village!" For my part, I've been exclusively home schooling my daughter for the past two weeks, and I couldn't get enough of it. I would do math corrections and sentence dictations between meetings.

In general I can't understand why people don't want to be with their children. Children aren't a burden: they are your progeny, the greatest thing you'll ever have or experience. Teach them everything you know, every tidbit of wisdom. Nothing lasts forever, savor every moment of it. Thank God for it and for blessing you with kids.

Raising children is not difficult. You just be sensible and rational with them. They learn by example, so they will be sensible and rational too. You prepare expectations for situations ahead of time, and things will go smoothly. Kids are like sponges-- they love to learn, so teach them. They want to be helpful, so teach them productive things like cleaning, cooking, taking care of animals, or other chores.

Before long, they will be a huge help to you, and be wonderful daily companions. Buy some simple home school curriculum. Teach them math. Teach them the scientific method. Teach them logic. Explain history to them. Give them good books to read. It's not that difficult, and is the most rewarding thing ever.

This seven-odd minute long Peter Schiff clip is worth listening to. Long-time readers will know that I used to listen to his radio show daily, so I've been following him a long time. Holy smokes have his predictions come true. The Austrian perspective on economics has it nailed.

Interestingly, that's the primary reason I'm building the addition on to the house-- so I can convert my USD to something real. We needed more living space anyway, so why not translate the money into the property? Not only that, but it simultaneously helped me escape the WuFlu zombie apocalypse, and hedges me against future possible unrest.

An even more interesting video clip is this one from Vee. Sad to say, I run into this all the time in real life, and like him, it never occurred to me that maybe the people I'm speaking with literally don't understand what I'm saying!

Interesting situation here, where the referee catastrophically didn't play advantage. What made it interesting was that the referee was so beside himself at having made such a bad error, that the Milan players were not just consoling him on the field, but actually followed him back to the dressing room after the game to support him.

Sort of reminds me of when Klose was playing for us, and he admitted that he'd used his arm to score. I've mentioned this to my daughter before, and it rings true here: "They may look like they are all angry and upset at one another on the pitch-- but when you see them in the tunnel, they are all laughing, hugging, and shaking hands: these guys are more or less all friends behind the scenes."

I've been playing "Pro Evo 2021 Season Update" or whatever it's called. I haven't played one in a few years. That series has not changed or innovated in years, they are even still recycling the same menus from five or six editions ago! Graphically as well, it looks super dated. It does at least run at a locked sixty frames per second, at native 4K, with HDR. And "Master League" is still a winning formula-- it more feels like I'm replaying a fun game from yore, rather than a new one.

I should listen to the Peter McCullough interview mentioned here. He seems more optimistic than I am. Wife and son have been in the Murderapolis area for the past two weeks for the latter's strabismus surgery-- which went marvelously, incidentally-- and subsequent follow-up appointments. She tells me that the entire area has gone "full retard mode" again with the WuFlu Burqas. Many cities there have re-introduced face diaper mandates! I thank God every day in my prayers for giving me a way out of there: I couldn't go through that "literally not allowed to go indoors" deal again. That sucked.

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a brand new, complete-in-box Japanese Panasonic FZ-10. After tax and shipping, it ran me just under 540 USD. Adjusted for inflation, that's less than the system originally sold for. This is the first time I've had functioning 3DO hardware in quite a while: money well spent given it's my favorite game platform of all time.

For preservation purposes, I took a bunch of unboxing pictures. These first ones are of the box exterior. It had a number of dings and scuffs in it, having evidently been in storage for decades. As an aside, 3DOs are all "region free"-- but the Japanese units are more desirable because they contain a Kanji font which is missing from the US firmware, meaning they can run the entire software library











This next one is extra cool: the box still had the original price tag on it! 39,800 Yen comes out to about 350 USD, in today's conversion rates anyhow. That's about 620 USD in today's money.



What is that weird certificate thing in the green envelope on top of the box? I still need to get a Japanese friend to translate this for me. Purchase date was in 1996. So this is a very late 3DO.





But back to the unboxing.











I really like how all of the packaging uses this cute Japanese girl. Aiming for the teenage boy audience, for sure. Click on the interior brochure shots for huge versions.

Pay extra attention to the list of peripherals in the second brochure interior shot, on the bottom. Very, very interesting. What are those last three, on the top row? Or what about those final two on the bottom row? Did these products ever come out? It wound be fun to collect them.







I forget how big Karaoke is in Japan. I've never considered that the 3DO could be used as a Karaoke machine, yet here it is prominently demonstrated in the manual as one of the product use cases.



I wonder if I sent in for one of these cards, if they'd still send me one?



Without further ado, the system itself, with my daughter the hand model.









An interesting thing happened when I turned it on and accessed the integrated file manager (no more Sampler CD for me!) for the first time: there were a series of bizarrely-named files on the chip already, with nearly identical file sizes.



My first reaction was, "This is almost brand new, but not quite." But the unit itself had not so much as a piece of hair on it, much less any scuffs-- and as it ran, I could smell the new electronic burn-in smell, the kind I got from my PlayStation 5 and Series X last year.

But this time, from a twenty six year-old piece of electronics. How cool is that?

"No, it must be something else." Suddenly I was reminded of old footage from the 80s and 90s, watching computer devices run down the line, with women plugging chips in, pressing a few quality control test buttons, then unplugging them for seating into the motherboards. Then it hit me: maybe this was test data, and the person on the line got distracted, forgot the press the "wipe" key, and the chip got seated with the data still on it?

It's just a hypothesis, but it fits the available information.

Now that we're done with the unboxing, what do I plan to use this new 3DO for? Well, I bought a cheap S-Video USB capture device from Amazon, along with S-Video and Composite splitters. This allows me to use OBS Studio in Manjaro Linux to capture video, screenshots, and audio from the 3DO while I'm simultaneously playing on the actual CRT TV.

Here is an example of the kind of screenshot I can capture. You just right-click on the "Scene" in OBS Studio, in the bottom-left pane, and select the screenshot option. I love how the shots have noise in them: they remind me of old magazine or hint book scans. Lots of charm and character.



I did find out that the above capture device is mono only for audio-- so I wound up running that side of the composite split to a composite-to-3.5mm adapter, into the line-in on my PC motherboard, for stereo sound recording. Also, the picture through the splitter is observably darker on the television than without-- but I was able to correct that with TV calibration, with only very mild and totally acceptable (to me) washout.

Once my room is all complete, I will run a composite and S-Video switch to this setup, so I will be able to capture from all of my systems with the press of a button to flip between them. For video recording, I'll still probably use RetroArch, as the framerate is not absolutely perfect with this cheap capture device.

But my primary use case is screenshots. I want to do a series of blog posts about the 3DO library over the coming months and years, with tons of captures. So look forward to that, if that's your dig.

It's funny how politicians often say the exact opposite of what they actually mean. Here we have some tool in the Italian government, "Andrea Costa", saying "...the Government’s priority is to return to normalcy and not to close the activities..." while he's proposing banning people from working. Then we have this case, where the tech oligarchs say they want to "protect our democracy" while banning elected members of congress from their web sites.

Wrapping up yet another "Sword of Vermillion" playthrough, and decided to write a second post about the game in just a few weeks.

One of the things which Sega's Genesis RPGs do so well is minimalistic storytelling. You see the destroyed town of Excalabria-- only something like two lines of dialog involved-- then make your way to the moment the entire game has built you up for: entrance into Cartahena.

You are greeted by this song: welcome to Pyongyang, biznatch.



So far there is zero dialog, other than the guard saying your pass grants you entry to their "peaceful" town. You can see that the people are turned to stone-- but there is no exposition. You don't need any.

You enter the first house. There is a man inside! You talk to him, and have two sentences of dialog, which tells you everything you need to know.



In a modern RPG, this would have been a fifteen hour quest line, with this huge 3D modeled town, with side quests, crafting, and you name it. In an era-equivalent Square or Enix game, or even in Sega's own "Phantasy Star IV", there would have been five or ten minutes of dialog, endlessly repeating itself, and adding nothing in the process.

But in one of Sega's RPGs? They represent a town of millions of people, with a dissident hiding in a discrete location, with four houses and two sentences. The player knows exactly what's going on, and like a good novel the imagination fills in the gaps.

This game design concept continues when you enter the castle, wherein you find a single minister:



After two sentences, he attacks you:



And after that, we get a single sentence, whereupon the minister disappears:



We go back to the dissident, and there are two sentences more:



And that's it! A brilliant segment of story telling, boiled down to its bare essence, letting the player's imagination do its thing. Sega's period RPGs are practically the only entries in the entire JRPG genre to do exposition "right": through gameplay, art, and ludonarrative.

I have a good feeling about this year. Hopefully I'm not jinxing it. My son and daughter will be baptized into the Catholic faith; the house addition project will be completed; I feel re-invigorated at work; and I may also be getting a new sports car, which will be fun.

It should also be a fun year for video games. Here is a minimal list of reviews I'll be doing over the next twelve months, in roughly chronological order. It's pretty insane when I spell it all out:

• eFootball PES 2020 (Series X)
• Tales of Arise (PlayStation 5)
• NeoGeo Pocket Color Selection Vol.1 (Switch)
• Quake (Switch)
• Double Dragon & Kunio Kun Collection (Switch)
• Horizon Forbidden West (PlayStation 5)
• Gran Turismo 7 (PlayStation 5)
• Pathway (Switch)
• Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl (Series X)
• TMNT: Shredder's Revenge (Switch)
• God of War Ragnarok (PlayStation 5)
• Starfield (Series X)
• TMNT: Shredder's Revenge (Switch)
• Metal Slug Tactics (Switch)
• Siralim Ultimate (Switch)

I also may renovate the old Athlon 700 PC I built in 1999, and have kept for all of these years. I plan to dual-boot DOS 6.22 / Windows 3.1 and Windows 98. I also want to start teaching myself more music, so I'll get the MIDI keyboard / Atari ST setup going again, all once I have my new room.

As for today it's -25 deg. F outside-- the kind of weather where exposed skin is on a timer, and you have just a few minutes to get done whatever you need to do. Doors no longer fit into their frames quite right. Cars behave funnily. Needless to say, I will be staying indoors.

Finally, my son put up his longest video yet, go check it out!

I have two pieces of Friday humor to share.

I installed "eFootball Pro Evo 2021 Season Update"-- or whatever in the world it's called-- yesterday, only to find out today that it's being removed from "Game Pass" at midnight tonight, and that it's simultaneously no longer available to buy digitally!

"You will own nothing and be happy."

Fortunately, there are physical copies on eBay, although it's anybody's guess as to whether the game will continue to function properly once Konami pulls the plug on the server-side functionality. They are clearly trying to shove everyone into their "free-to-play" abomination. I also like how the front box art is filled with legalese text.

Recall that they told people they were taking a year off so that they could make a proper next-generation football game, re-writing the title in Unreal Engine. I was expecting potential "Rift Apart"-level graphics. Twenty four months later, they released a mobile game with six teams and no modes. What in the world were they even doing all of that time?

Now they are de-listing their old products to remove that choice, rather than making a new, improved product that people would rather buy than the old one. Make sense? Maybe I'll start shopping for PlayStation 2 units again...

Here is the second piece of Friday humor.