Say True Things. It's Good for the Soul.

That smell is your sacred cow roasting.

Climate change isn’t real:

Just about everyone secretly knows that the climate crisis is about as real as Santa Clause riding a Bigfoot to El Dorado for a chat with the Loch Ness Monster. No prediction about the climate has ever come to pass. Carbon levels, the ozone layer, more hurricanes, stronger hurricanes, noticeable changes in sea levels… It is all nonsense.

Now the EU is actively attempting to destroy their own ability to generate power and grow food. Why? Because European elites like Klaus Schwab claim that humanity is on the brink of destruction from the climate. Be honest enough to ask yourself this question:

What about the climate is causing a problem?

I am not saying that I want you to point me to a Yale climate study. I don’t mean for you to tell me what is “definitely about to happen” or that the “science is settled”. I want you to explain to me, like I am a 6 year old, what is happening right now, at this moment, that I can see, that has a measurable negative effect on anything that can be attributed to climate change. (BTW, the Hurricane in Florida is the first one of the year… so it’s not that. Hurricanes happen.)

Is it the Maldives Islands? Because according to Google Earth, they are still there. Is it that Venice is flooding? Because the water levels aren’t rising, some of the old buildings are sinking. Is it crop yield? Because according to my research, the crops are fine, assuming some government hasn’t come along and seized your fertilizer. Have we run out of fossil fuels? I don’t think so… Natural gas is clean and abundant… people just refuse to use it. Wild fires in California? Well why aren’t they happening in other western states? (Answer, proper forest maintenance)

I’m sorry. I am not a stupid person. I have listened. I have an open mind. But I have asked and asked for something more powerful than an old picture of an iceberg and a new picture of a melted iceberg before I agree to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people by creating scarcity in food and energy production, and I have gotten nothing. Nobody has shown me a damn thing… and I watched Al Gore’s movie the same as the rest of you.

Perhaps… it’s time to consider that this is more about control than the climate.

Rachel Levine isn’t a woman… or an admiral

Yeah, that’s just a fact and we should probably stop being afraid to say it. That is a man and that man is not an admiral. He is just pretending to be a woman because he is mentally ill and he’s wearing an admiral costume because our government is ridiculous.

Look at it this way… If I started walking around telling everyone that I am Queen Elizabeth II, some psychiatrist out there might think that the kindest thing to do for me is to tell the people who love me just to play along. It’s a harmless delusion and there’s no real cure, so just roll with it.

However, if my friends and family start believing me and then tell their friends that I am not mentally ill and that I am, in fact, Her Majesty, Elizabeth II of Windsor… Or better yet, if people start contacting Buckingham Palace and claiming that the old bag buried in St. George’s Chapel is an imposter, then they have taken part in my delusion, and are trying to infect others with our collective illness.

Here’s the bottom line… I don’t want to pretend that Rachel Levine is a woman. Maybe that makes me a jerk, maybe even bigoted. Categorize it however you want, but this is America and I don’t have to pretend to believe things I don’t believe.

I don’t believe that hideous, weird man up there is a woman, and I am not going to say he is. Also he’s not an admiral either… in the same way that the Postmaster General isn’t a damn General… and I don’t really care if you believe it or not. I’m right and you’re wrong.

Donald Trump was a bad President

This is going to be tough for some of my readers. The general consensus among conservatives these days is that Donald Trump was a fine President. The left wing just went crazy on him and his own personal failings didn’t help the matter. Unfortunately, that is revisionist history, cope, and generally just untrue.

The truth is that while Donald Trump had some good policies and did some good things he was never a good President.

The role of President is really three-fold. First, he is the chief executive and should make policy for the executive branch that furthers American interest. Second, he is the top bureaucrat and should be an excellent organizational manager and understand how to appoint subordinates who will enforce his policies. Third, he is the head of government for the United States and the leader of the free world. This means that he has to represent all Americans and lead the United States in a way that the rest of the world respects and follows.

While he was passable in the first role, he was an abject failure in the other two. The fact is that his cabinet was a rotating door of people, both good and bad, who had no idea how to effectively do their jobs with him at the helm. He was constantly under attack from people in the executive branch who were working against him, in some cases trying to outright sabotage him. It would be easy to say that this isn’t his fault, but the fact is that simply isn’t true. He wasn’t a strong enough executive to have control over his own subordinates. That is possibly the very definition of bad leadership.

As for the third role as the head of government and leader of the free world, he simply didn’t have the ability to let the job of President elevate him above the fray. He insulted people and called them names. He antagonized his political opponents and attempted to humiliate them. Internationally, he was strong, but he wanted allies to capitulate all the time and only knew how to threaten adversaries. President Trump was all stick and no carrot. Hell, even Pablo Escobar offered “plata o plomo” (silver or lead). Trump only ever offered plomo.

In the end, when Covid showed up on the scene, he didn’t have enough friends left or political capital to effectively lead a scared nation, and world. Instead he just yelled a lot and allowed every bureaucrat with a bad idea to get exactly what they wanted. Our economy crashed, small business was crushed, schools were closed, people sheltered inside, and many people died (both from Covid and from Covid policy) because when the emergency came, we didn’t have someone who could lead. We just had someone who could yell… and that wasn’t good enough.

Just imagine where the whole world might be right now if a guy like Ron DeSantis was President in January of 2020. I honestly believe we would have avoided long term lockdowns, school closures, the entire PPP program (which was basically a giant fraud), the BLM riots, other civil unrest, January 6th, most of our current cultural and economic problems, and the Presidency of Joe Biden. Was all of that Donald Trump’s fault? No… but he wasn’t a good enough President to avoid them, and I blame him for it.

Joe Biden has dementia and is very corrupt

He’s an old man. He’s not up to the task. He should be bouncing his illegitimate stripper baby on his knee back in Delaware, and telling tall tales of Corn Pop and the gang. We all get it. He’s too old and suffering from some pretty severe mental decline. We’ve known that for a while and that’s relatively unnerving.

Unfortunately, that’s not the biggest problem with Biden. It’s not his screwed up family or their obvious corruption, either. Most political families have a Roger Clinton or a Billy Carter out there somewhere. In truth, if my brother would get off his butt and become President or something, I’d make James Biden look clean, Roger Clinton look sober, and Billy Carter look downright sophisticated.

The issue with President Biden (beyond the creepiness and the fact that he doesn’t know where he is) is his 50 years of obvious corruption. The man is on the take… and much like Hillary Clinton, he’s been on the take so long that the bills are coming due… and he’s in the Oval Office and has to pay up.

The whole “10% for the big guy” is only the tip of the iceberg, and considering the lack of interest in digging into it, I doubt we will really know the depth of his corruption during his presidency.

I’m sure we will eventually know most of it. It’s hard to lie to history that way. My guess is that stories will come out and books will be written after he’s dead and there’s no political risk for anyone still in power. But so many people are complicit in one way or another, it’s likely to be quite a while before it all comes out.

Joe Biden represents the kind of politician you don’t see much anymore… a true grease the wheels, old school, scumbag. Because of his current mental incapacity, it’s easy to forget that, and just feel a little sorry for the old war horse. He’s obviously past his prime. But he’s still the President… and in charge or not, he’s a very corrupt, mean spirited, immoral bastard. We will be a better country when he’s out of government all together.

I’d say he should resign, but I don’t think anyone wants a President Kamaladaladingdong.

Non Sequitur (Just an interesting thought)

I think one of the major reasons that Americans seem to be talking past each other these days boils down to a very basic difference in our understanding of reality. Through most of modernity, people understood reality as a mix between the physical and the metaphysical.

When I say physical, I am referring to the world of science… things that can be measured and recreated. When I say metaphysical, I am not really referring to religion. I more referring to the idea that there are such things as happiness, sadness, fear, and love that are not just manifestations of evolution, or chemicals secreted by a complex system of nerves and glands.

Sam Harris’ philosophy is a good example of the former. He is a physical reductionist, meaning that he doesn’t believe in anything beyond the physical world. Harris is comfortable taking this to its logical extreme and stating that consciousness and free will are both simply by-products of the atoms, cells, and chemicals that make up the human body. In his philosophy, you actually have no choice over any of your actions and reactions because the complex web of what makes up you and your environment guides what happens.

In Harris’ philosophy there is no difference between the dopamine rush that comes with an enthralling or enjoyable experience we call “joy” and joy itself. By his logic, dopamine hitting the receptor is joy. Obviously this creates all kinds of problems when it comes to the western understanding of responsibility, justice, and morality… but Harris does an adequate job justifying his stance in his many books and talks. I won’t attempt to straw-man his philosophy, so if you are interested, read him yourself.

Having said that, I disagree with Sam Harris. Like most people until very recently, I believe in a metaphysical realm. Joy is not a chemical reaction, it is something far more complex. You can take a drug and crudely replicate what joy feels like, but that does not, in fact, make you joyful. The same is true of fear, anger, and love.

My evidence for this is everywhere. A scientist can show the chemical formula for dopamine, but if you get too much for too long, its effect wears off. Happiness, on the other hand, doesn’t have a chemical formula. It can’t be described that way.

Phenomena like happiness, anger, love, and hate are best represented in art, not science. They are properly described in a poem, a song, a painting, or a dance. They are represented through allegory, because they are metaphysical truths, not physical reactions. They reside in a soul, not a brain, and you can only achieve them organically. They are not scientifically measurable.

In this modern age, I think when we find ourselves unable to agree on some of the most basic ideas of reality… it is possible that we can’t find common ground because we haven’t mutually agreed on reality.

Religion has fallen by the wayside for many. I’ll admit that I fall back and forth on the subject of organized Christianity. However, as we become a more irreligious society, it’s important that we don’t lose the metaphysical. We are not walking chemistry sets in meat puppets. We are living breathing human beings who built and live in a great society. We may be made up of “star stuff” as Neil Degrasse Tyson likes to say, but we all have a spark of the divine within us. Without that spark, we are not fully human. That spark is what differentiates us from the animals.

If that divine spark was a figment of our collective imagination, it wouldn’t be that hard to prove. We would be able to recreate things that we can’t. We have never gotten close to recreating consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t even really exist in science… it’s a philosophical concept. It only exists in the metaphysical realm. Science can only crudely imitate it. We can’t bring the dead back to life, no matter how perfectly we preserve and fix their body. We can’t drug ourselves into a simulation where we experience joy all the time, though many alcoholics and drug addicts have tried.

That’s why so many people on SSRIs and antidepressants are still miserable. Their problem isn’t in the chemicals in their brains, their problem is that they are unhappy… and too many psychiatrists don’t want to go there. It’s easier for them to crudely simulate health by dulling pain. Ironically in dulling the pain, sometimes the injury causing it is very difficult to find and repair.

When I talk to a cultural Marxist or a critical theorist about reality, it’s very unlikely that we can find common ground. For example, why can’t they define a woman? Answer: for the same reason they can’t define anything. For them happiness is the sensation of being happy. A woman is one who feels feminine. They are stuck in circular logic which reduces itself to nothing in a few rounds of questions that any undergrad should be able to flesh out. They are met with hostility and dish it back out ferociously. They are also wrong… and I believe that the honest ones will grow out of it.

Perhaps it’s time that we all rekindle a much older idea, that we live in a fallen and imperfect world… but that salvation is possible through faith, virtue, duty, and effort. (4 more things for which there is no chemical substitute). In them, we might just find satisfaction.

Happy hump day everyone!

—Virgil