Those “New Atheists”—they were prime examples of very smart dolts doing the same sort of navel-gazing that philosophers, those tiresome people, have been doing since we learned to make scratchy thingies with which to preserve our deathless words for the ages. On this plane of existence—and who knows how many others there might be?—there are no answers to the ultimate questions.

Where did the building blocks of the universe come from? How can you get something out of nothing? Where does space end? How can anything go on for infinity? Who made God? How can any entity come from nowhere? How is it possible to always have existed? Who invented natural law? Why do “people of faith” keep making God in their own images? Why do they shrink God to fit?

And everyone gets so cute about secularism. There’s no such thing. Politics is religion. Atheism is a dogma. We poor things, yet another species designed to live in packs and hardwired to sort ourselves into hierarchies and always searching for the alpha to lead us to salvation of one sort or another and getting led over cliffs more often than not—why are we hardwired that way?

Me, I don’t need to know. I always had my own certainty that the Big Something exists—or maybe, as my FFFFG said scornfully, I was just brainwashed too early to remember the process.

Anyway have fun. You ain’t gonna get nowhere with it, but at least we can’t get lost going on circular journeys. We end up where we started.

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It was such an undreamed-of gift to the podcast bros when Charlie Kirk was murdered. He was a guy able to demonstrate the force of positive action. Go out and fight until you win.

Turns out everyone hated him. Success like his makes losers look bad.

Biggest losers in American political discourse are the libertarians and they got conservatives pulling up hard just behind them. They get tangled in each others’ feet trying to be the most ineffective in getting young men to feel fighting might be worth the effort. Isn’t it astonishing how much profit there is in helping to destroy your own country? And who is raking in so much of the cash?

I was so pleased the other day to hear Sean Duffy is aggressively recruiting gamers to apply for training to become air traffic controllers. Guy better watch his back. Such creative thinking is hazardous in DC.

When you look at the percentages, there’s almost no one who actually wants this Trump administration to reorder how things are done in government.

It sounds so charming described in ant-terms, those vast subterranean farms they build where they can milk their pet aphids for their honeydew.

But politics is run by a different species that ravages everything in its path. The SPLC ain’t even hardly a surprise. The shock is we got for maybe the first time ever a DOJ not afraid to go after all them snapping jaws in the grass.

And you think “the dissident right” doesn’t know that?

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But only recently I read excerpts of Ernst Jünger’s recounting of his WWI experiences, and a few of young Hitler’s too.

War is a terrible smelter. It’s a wonder anyone at all comes through it retaining even shreds of decency and goodness. More than we acknowledge live the rest of their lives permanently incapable of simple normal obligations. That Greatest Generation were the fathers and mothers of the people later turning academia into a great cesspool of rage and retribution against the middle class. And it’s the middle class that civilization is built on.

Jünger talks about experiences that make your heart seize up. He describes them in ways incomprehensible to any untested person. I don’t think it’s useful to paraphrase anything he said. You need to experience the full power for yourself, without a summarizing introduction.

Hitler’s own words are also a terrible education. Metal beaten into a permanently distorted form then taken up as an implement for many competing interests to employ should never have been allowed. But, you know, that metal didn’t distort itself. It didn’t have the inherent strength to survive the forge.

Dishonesty always angers me. People on all sides of any issue indulge in it ruthlessly. It’s not that there’s a middle way forward. There’s a factual and truthful side, and otherwise.

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Everything is fracturing now. Huge as his audience is, Tucker is furiously discovering the limits of his power with Trump—that power has concluded at zero.

I’m glad to see all this. MAGA was a carnival show that served its useful purpose. I don’t see a durable role for TPUSA. Charlie Kirk was a unique force and talent perfectly matched to Trump’s. Erika was a good helpmeet to her husband. I don’t think she can be his successor.

I’ve said before Trump is a human smelter. He might be an incubator too and birth is a rough process, with its own rendering.

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The terrible people in Congress come from all our own communities. We elect ourselves.

We are all equally guilty. We voted for Carter or for Reagan who both brought us here. We voted for Biden who was George W. Bush’s fifth term.

Or we didn’t vote at all and figured someone else would fix things we were too dainty to touch.

We’ve always had crazy social movements in America sweeping up the young and the purportedly wiser.

Nothing is secular. Young people haven’t lost faith. There’s always something to believe in with your whole entire heart and enough people who will tell you it’s true.

Universities from their foundings in Europe were full of lunatic thinking. The cleverest and the best their societies could produce argued over the course of their entire adult lives about minutiae of doctrine and did their utmost to kill dissenters off. Nothing has improved in academia over the course of a thousand years.

We tell our kids, don’t we, to take responsibility for their actions? So who do we think we are?

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Trump’s a guy who’s met his moment twice. It’s nothing to do with any of us though it is about the nation and the place he wrenched in it for himself by winning.

Everyone who voted for him did so for their own reasons. We ain’t a coalition. We have no common intent.

Trump doesn’t represent the party under which he ran three times and won twice. The real GOP continues desperate to make his era fail. Younger conservatives can’t decide who or what they are and they get swoony twenty times a day over every new podcaster take on how Trump has purportedly betrayed them. These guys, they’re all colluding with the Democrats one way or another, purposefully or just because they’re the usual sorts of morons playing in the mudpits of politics.

I was working myself up over the current state of things and the looming midterm apocalypse as though we were right back in the spring of 2024 but since yesterday and my dazzling realization, my dainties are feeling all sparkly again just as they did that magic Election night when I knew Trump had won again.

How things go in life depends on every fifteen minutes of time, more or less, what you do and what you don’t, and everyone else’s fifteen minutes too, intersecting on the crazyboard Existence got nailed up for us to try and make sense of.

You think any experts anywhere can map the results of this Iran war out to the furthest extremities of its reach in time and space? You think probabilities mean anything after the decade we’ve just lived through?

Trump is the freest politician we’ve ever had, right now. Thank God he knows it.

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Imagine if someone had shown this to Jasmine Crockett and saved her from destroying her Senate bid with them faux inflections of hers when she might rather have emulated a classy black heroine with the ruthlessness and cunning to win.

Anyway back to today’s movie recommendation. I wouldn’t call it a blaxploitation film myself. I want my zombies to reanimate for a logical reason and Sugar Hill summons its undead for a controlled, time-limited and sympathetic tour of duty. If you’re going to have equalizers I think they ought to be like these.

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But always remember our instincts exist for a purpose. They’re not obsolete coding remnants best overwritten to make us inclusive, empathetic and broadminded.

They’re meant to keep you alive, and nature isn’t tolerant of anyone who lets other people deaden their essential equipment.

I wonder if it’s really society’s tragedy that so many moms and dads are agreeing or actively seeking to render their own offspring infertile via Frankenstein treatment protocols.

It’s only a horror when agents of the state make it impossible for other parents to refuse if they want to be permitted to keep their families together.

The human hunger to transform the self into a new being is central to all religion and religious frenzies ye shall always have with you. Children throughout history have suffered and frequently died whenever their parents got over-eager to serve whatever sacrifice-demanding god was in fashion.

You know what I always say. We ain’t modern—we’re just now. Shamans as always are alive and well and enabled to do their bad work whenever we’re stupid enough to let ourselves be mesmerized by their drums.

In every era there’ve been those with the capacity to resist madness. Some got destroyed for being sane; life on this plane of existence is often short of justice.

Successful lawsuits against the medical mutilations du jour might seem a way to achieve a little restitution but the rest of us will effectively pay the bill, won’t we?

It is our fault we let this particular nonsense reach a degree of critical mass. But we let Dolts of Educational Instruction remove phonics from the reading curriculum and we let them institute “equitable” math instruction, didn’t we? Heck—we let them destroy the concept of neighborhood schools and isn’t that the original sin?

Too many parents let themselves be shamed into thinking the safety of our children was a wrong thing to be upset about.

And here, as one says, we are.

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This is about two books released in English translation when I was just a kid. The Finnish one came out first. I’ve thought back on it all my life though I’d long forgotten the title and author’s name and I bet nobody here ever heard of either of them.

The Russian one everybody everywhere knows and I was two years older when I read it and none of it stayed with me beyond the misery and the cold. Can’t even tell you what the protagonist had been like. Now, sixty-three years later, I think maybe I’ve never had much taste for famous intellectuals.

The Finnish story had been written as a sort of “…post-war advisory literature by paying special attention to its informal educational content.”¹ but I only learned that had been its purpose when the magic of AI finally tracked the book down for me a couple of months ago.

The author wanted to help dislocated children adjust to life back home. But mostly I remember the portrayal of the mom and her anguish when her little girl returns not remembering her native language or real family and wanting only to go back to the nice middle-class Swedish foster parents who’d given her everything in safety and comfort while her older siblings back on the farm had to make it through the war as best as could be managed by all of them.

I ached for that mother so terribly. But it wouldn’t be until twenty-nine years later I’d know for myself what a mother’s heart can feel like, and here I am another thirty-six years beyond that.

Recently the Substack Screaming Into the Void included a video clip, sent to him by commenter baker charlie, about this: The incredible story of American POWs smuggling rations to Russian prisoners | Pass It On - Colorado Springs Gazette.

Dr. Aseyev is proof that Russians of innate nobility are a little different from them famous Masters of Self-Obsessed Thousand-Page Gasbaggery Who Whine in Cyrillic.

I’ve always thought needy guests of generous hosts ought to hold back from, at least, trashing them in public, but so many Americans just can’t stop pulling down their pants or flipping up their skirts so guys like Solzhenitsyn and [the actual] Yuri Bezmenov can keep inflicting on us ungratefully purposeful canings, even from the Great Beyond.

Me, I just ain’t that kinky.

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¹Full article: Rebuilding emotional ties for child evacuees returning from abroad: children’s literature and informal education in post-Second World War Finland

Nicholas Ray directed the film adaptation of a Berton Roueché article published in The New Yorker in 1955 and complained his first two writers had made it too much of a documentary so he brought in Clifford Odets to fix the script and ended up with a psycho-social drama indicting what the left saw as a pox upon humanity—the suburban family trying to have a nice decent life.

And I’m sitting here watching James Mason giving his wife clear notice of his intent and instead of grabbing the kid and running out any of the doors of their house she weeps upon his arm and sobs that maybe it’s not such a great idea.

Mason produced the film and blamed its initial poor reception on Ray’s having filmed it in CinemaScope but perhaps American audiences of the time had little patience for the script’s nonsense. It had to wait for the French to help it reach its place of liberal regard.

I’ve no complaint against Mason’s performance though, nor that of the little boy who played his son. The child realizing his loved father has become a malevolent antagonist is perfectly done.

Mom’s as useless as Odets could make her and fulfilled Ray’s and Mason’s vision. There’d’ve been no actual horror without it.

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These days it’s where you go if your taste runs to adolescent Hispanic hookers. The full rainbow range of Latin American trafficked children, hot fresh cheap.

Is it almost a year already since Debbie Dingell rolled her eyes at Trump’s address to Congress where Alexis Nungaray and Allyson Phillips were special guests to honor the memories of their daughters murdered by illegal aliens? Talk about iconic moments.

But noting this sort of hypocrisy running all day and all night on the magic loop of 24/7 cable don’t get you nowhere and we’re gonna find the left succeeding in its dreams of dumping us in mass graves with all our clever pointed right-wing memes tossed in on top if we don’t get smarter and tougher faster than the speed of light.

Remember those lines from Kipling?

Say what you want, the man was pretty clear-eyed about human capacities. It’s just that these days our loving sisters aren’t doing rear-guard mop-ups but the full-front assault any way they can and they daily prove their willingness to neglect and endanger even their own kids on this Harridans’ Crusade to make America a safe and welcoming place for monsters of all nations.

Please do something practical and effective to stop it, won’t you?

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But the law isn’t likely to help you either even if you do begin to recognize how terrible your situation is. Can you secure a lifelong conservatorship for a minor kid who walks and talks and can express himself quite clearly? Who’s just, perhaps other advocates might say, rebellious and headstrong and maybe a little bit lacking in an understanding of consequences?

I was thinking, as the awful news unfolded and kept getting more awful, about the cinematic irony too. That the man they seemed to have hated most in all the world, and had devoted time and money to attempt to defeat and destroy, who’s always been such a rotten husband, nevertheless did better at raising his own kids. Yeah, I laughed too at the Children of the Corn photos and wonder why people spend all that money on plastic surgery to achieve nothing so much as the android look.

But Trump, for all his failures, made it clear early. Don’t fuck up your life like your uncle did his. The fear of being such a loser as that is the black secret haunting everything Trump does. Whatever else anyone might think of him, he sure scared his kids straight.

And my God, when you look at Rob Reiner’s body of work, he could’ve chosen to translate to the screen the books of anyone but he took Stephen King as his most important muse.

His failure and his tragedy? Perhaps to not have been able to see people for who they really are. Bad enough using your money and influence to interfere in politics, to promote causes that will cause harm you’re unable to envision, to give prominence to the works of a wretched author whose particular specialty is torture porn and all the fun ways to kill women.

But when it’s your own child? When what you need him to be isn’t what he can ever become? When you’ve let him reach the age of majority without having put necessary and essential plans in place to protect him and everyone else from what he’s always been?

And now I insert a message from my alter ego, The Vitamin Fairy. Even rich people with access to the best nutrition and the best—or purportedly the best—medical care, even those people need to be intentional about their childbearing. You think there’s any possibility you might get pregnant or impregnate anyone else? Take that multivitamin every day. How much, I always wonder, reading about people like Nick Reiner, is the trajectory of his life inextricably bound to something as simple as that? All those parties and the good wine and how even moderate alcohol consumption depletes a woman’s folate stores, and somehow, though you think you’re the best and most loving parents in the world you find yourself with a changeling in the crib.

Well, who knows. No one deserves to end so horribly as the Reiners have. I am sorry to see it.

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During Our Plague Era they were letting their little children be forced to eat lunch outside on concrete no matter the weather, and now they’re shocked when:

• their daughters keep coming in second or bringing home a concussion because the guys are stronger at sports

• their daughters keep getting urinary tract infections because they’re holding their pee all day so as not to be harassed in the school bathroom by a boy in or out of a dress

Etc.

Those pussy hats they all made for the Million Women Marches—me, I can see a good reason to dig ’em out of their closets and reconstitute some of the outrage.

The Suits-With-Eye-Poking-Power-Lapels gals who think they belong in the C-suite don’t do more than sob-tweet when a true crisis hits?

And look at this interesting aspect of their dilemma. What public interest law firms can women of a liberal persuasion who might want to contest these matters turn to?

I guess Chase Strangio wouldn’t be taking their calls.

Me—you only need to hurt my kid once and only then because I didn’t see it coming. One time. You don’t get a second swing at my child’s safety or natural rights.

Something sure suppressed these gals’ proper maternal hormones, didn’t it? Maybe too much neon pink in the yarn.

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No. You can figure it out yourself. Prove me wrong.

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I couldn’t let it go. Ain’t we required to rebuke evil? The old sleep less at night than they used to and I need every second of rest I can get. It bit and scratched at me, my silence.

And I need to keep my dignity too, and my discretion and balance while I speak out for justice. You’d think someone could bundle them all into one handy package. I’d have to do it myself despite my unmatched talent for fumble-fingeredness.

Finally I itched it out of my brain, the right way to go. What helped was revisiting the guy’s Substack; he made his wretched self even worse with his follow-up post to his first.

So this is the comment I left:

He can delete it, he can block this Bad Fairy. She ain’t anyone meaningful in the least little way to him. He can mock and dismiss her as a troll. Others do; I ain’t in the least suffering from any bit of their disregard.

It’ll be fine, because these things, words from an insignificant anonymous stranger he’ll likely never encounter in the actuals but saying something maybe nobody ever said to him before, saying it starkly and clearly, letting him make of it as he will—these four words ain’t all that easy to delete from an endlessly-ruminating type of brain and I’m pretty sure he’s got one. They’ll be with him forever now, they’ll catch him unexpectedly in an insomniac moment, they’ll enrage him maybe one time when he’s stuck in traffic. He’ll never be able to winkle them out of his head.

I myself don’t feel fully and entirely better but at least I can look at myself quite calmly in the mirror now and I got one less thing I might need to be rebuked for failing at by a Higher Authority later.

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The Democratic Party is overrun with guys and gals like that but examples are everywhere regardless of affiliation though the type mostly migrates leftwards.

I realized what it was when I searched the writings of someone I know of after Charlie Kirk was murdered. There’s an unmistakable voice. It infests academia where the worst of them achieve a sort of black charisma that mesmerizes our children. We’re watching what it caused.

We all have an obligation to confront if we can the people crippled by this sort of hatred when they enter into even the most minor positions of power.

This is hard because everyone has people they love who are friends with or otherwise connected to such wretched creatures.

So do what you can if you can. Don’t let people get away with attempting to disguise the worst of themselves as pure purpose and noble stances. Explain to your kids that such people dress themselves in a false glamour rooted in an excused and pampered sickness.

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During my maternity leave I’d obtained that list of certified providers my state had so thoughtfully compiled and I started calling the ones within a reasonable radius from my home and by the time I’d made it through the fifth or so name I knew we were just fucked.

And I had that terrible revelation anyone with brains must have. If your kid is too young to be able to tell you everything that happens to him while he’s out of your sight, you’re gonna have a real big problem.

But them ancestors, like I said, fixed mine. My then-husband switched to the night shift and my mother came over every afternoon so he could get some sleep and I was home by six-ish every evening and left for work when he got home in the morning.

Even for nursery school when my kid turned four, we were in safe hands. The owner was in the Jewish Center’s Sisterhood with my mom and her son was my brother’s lifelong friend.

What—you think none of this was proof of divine intervention? Before my kid was born my mother had been a disabled heart patient who spent all day in her comfy chair watching soap operas and Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune with her nitroglycerin bottle right next to her on the side table and the thought of walking around the block was as likely as a little stroll to Mordor. Taking care of her grandson added two active useful decades to her life. She became a nurturer we’d never seen before and could never have imagined based on previous history. Maybe it was a case of benevolent possession.

But up in the Bronx a family is crying today and all over the country every day, it seems, other families are crying because their children were killed at daycare.

And sure—kinship carers kill kids too. Keeping your kids alive and safe and making it through to adulthood—it’s more accidents of luck than any of us want to think about.

And it’s also grimly true that more people than we want to honestly acknowledge must have two incomes just to have a modest life.

But you absolutely want women to stay home and raise their own children? You better find a way to ensure their retirement years ain’t leaden. No matter what family values people profess you still get abandonments and divorces and all sorts of other catastrophes that real life smacks you with.

Maybe people should take out marriage bonds with reasonable tiered premiums to help insure against such future possibilities, but if they’re not even buying life insurance these days maybe the market isn’t ready for the concept.

It might be, with civilization as old as it is already, there never can be durable solutions to problems like these. Worth trying a little harder though.

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“Me and Scaly will be Up Here waiting for you to figure it all out. We’ll probably play a few hands of pinochle. That’s why he’s got them little arms.

“Have a nice trip!”

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You actually really do support the Constitution or you don’t.

You understand American values or you don’t.

You know what makes a real American or you don’t.

You hate injustice or you don’t.

You hate all liars or you don’t.

You use uncensored evidence to support your claims or you don’t.

You stand against all mobs and pile-ons or you don’t.

You hold your friends and colleagues to the same standards you revile your adversaries for trashing or you don’t.

It’s hard, I agree. It hardly ever wins you friends and you risk losing the ones you got. All of us is tribal and no philosophy of life can trump that. The point of a system like ours is to demand we try our bestest and to recognize every time we fail and then drag ourselves by our bloody fingertips back to what civilized us into an original people rather than leaving us to be just a bunch of profiteers and ruffians and loony cultists all determined to establish their own teeny fiefdoms throughout a huge new territory.

Me, I do try my best. Gets lonelier every day.

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