Gearing up the gratitude.

With Thanksgiving nearly upon us in the United States, it behooves us to remember things for which we should have gratitude. Gratitude is the best cure for many social and emotional illnesses, which is one reason it is so despised by people who hate America. 

So first, I'm grateful that socialism was pushed further away from the body politic by the results of our last election.  

Closer to home, I'm grateful that the early snowstorm we had last week is a melted memory now. As it turned out, on our block we missed having long-term issues by a matter of inches. 

The local utility company is pretty good about getting out there when the sun is warm, taking down branches that will fall on power lines when the weather turns cold. But when the problem is a tree more than a dozen feet into someone's property, I don't think they have the authority to go tree-cutting. When our early storm hit, some trees still had leaves, weighing down the limbs, which subsequently fell off. And in one case, an elderly tree was entirely weighed down. 

Timber!!!

As you can see, it landed a ways over the curb, into the street. The homeowner has yet to chop it up; he may be pricing the job out. Fortunately it did not go far out enough into the street to be a danger to traffic.

Even more fortunately, it literally missed the power lines by inches. 

It looks like the tiny upper branches probably brushed the lines as the whole thing came down. If it had been just a little taller, lights out. 

We came close to having a bunch of houses without energy as Thanksgiving approached, with a problem that couldn't be resolved until the downed tree was completely removed. 

So I'm grateful for electricity and the genius of those who learned how to harness it for the benefit of humanity and civilization. And I'm grateful that the weather did not result in a local cut of electricity. And I'm grateful too that Communism has not taken over our country, because in many ways that means all the lights go out.

The path ahead.

This is a nice path. 

It's used for walking, biking, jogging -- the usual low-tech path stuff. Well made, I think, dotted with benches, running through the wooded areas of several towns. It goes almost twenty miles along the former railway line. It's popular, and it's an example of the kind of things local governments can do well. 

I can't think of a thing that the federal government has done this well in many years. Its response to Hurricane Helene is making the Katrina response look like a model of logistics and efficiency. How could it have gotten worse since 2005?

voilà

Of course, it will probably turn out that some of the funding for our local trail project came from the National Institutes of Health's American Bicycle Path Fitness Initiative, a $20 billion slush fund that donated $10,000 to the county. Who knows anymore. I just made that initiative up, but you know it sounded legit. Who cares? It's just money.

Our money.  

We've been building a lot of bike paths in America, but the actual number of bicyclists is declining. Around here we have a handful of serious bike riders, a small group of oldster bikers-for-exercise (they like to use the path), and the rest are kids, or illegals without cars, or guys who got their licenses yanked for DUI. Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, said while running for office that he was going to bike to work at City Hall, and he did -- the second day he was in office, with the cameras rolling. Since then? Well, with the weather and traffic in New York and the idiocy of city drivers and other bikers, I think he'd be a fool if he did. But I doubt he has.  

Of course the campaign statement was just posing. It's all about appearances, and to hell with appearances. Appearances are ephemera, mist on a windy morning, nothing more than the emperor's new clothes, and the emperor is not someone who you want to see naked. 

This is how we get things like this:

What's her foreign policy plan? "Friendship is magic"?

I can't forecast what's going to happen in the election, but I will make one prediction that I think is ironclad: If Trump is elected, Antifa and all the other wannabolsheviks will go back to the only things they know how to do -- throw bricks, burn things, attack bystanders. The so-called insurrection of 2021 will be nothing by comparison, but of course it was nothing compared to the human injuries and billions of dollars in damage these commie cosplayers caused in 2020 anyhow, the one Governor Walz's wife and daughter enjoyed so much. The iron fist in the sparkly pink glove.

I can't lose hope for America, but I'm certainly not as optimistic about it as I once was. I know nothing lasts forever -- but it would be nice if the world's oldest constitutional republic could show itself to be more resilient than the ancient Roman Republic, which lasted almost 500 years. We'll be halfway to that mark in 2026 and it's looking grim.

The shifting battleground.

Yesterday being the celebration of Memorial Day, I was thinking about our nation and those who live in her embrace and yet despise her. For one thing, as I've said here in the past, it's become abundantly clear that Leftists only admire Americans who fight other Americans; there is no place in their admiration for Americans who fought foreign enemies. How can there be? If all foreigners are superior to us in this blighted country, there's no foreigners that we should defeat. 

That calculation seemed to start as defending the Native Americans, then moved on to others who were believed to have been unjustly at the sword point of the American military -- the Mexicans, the Spanish, and so on. Pretty much anyone who could be classified as Not White fell under that umbrella. Certainly we should not have been fighting the Vietnamese; it's not like they attacked us! That worked backward as well, that in retrospect we shouldn't have been fighting the Koreans. 

Admiration for the Confederates was swept away early, but then for the Union military too, as they most assuredly were not fighting to end slavery but for some selfish cause. The military in World War I were suckers and eventually dropped beneath notice. 

Holding out to the very end were the American warriors of World War II, and they mostly hung by a thread because of Pearl Harbor and the Final Solution. But Hiroshima eventually made us turn on America's fight against Japan, and now apparently the Left hates Jews, so the Nazis are not as bad as they used to be either. 

Now we're able and encouraged to despise all American fighters, unless they fought America herself. What a relief it must be to no longer wonder if one would have had the sustained courage to go to war for the nation, the sheer guts to stand firm in the heat of battle! Discarding respect for America's military means you never have to look up to them for anything anymore.   

It's easy to do this kind of thing when you don't teach genuine history. The younger generations literally know nothing about anything other than what Leftists choose to teach, and they certainly don't want to teach anything that shows America in a good light. 

But that's not even what I wanted to write about. I set out to write about the American Dream and how the idea has been mangled, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. 

Oh, Brave New Year, that has such people in it.

Okay, today we play Fun with Doomcasting. 

One of the things conservatives dread is the concept of social credit -- that delightful Chinese Marxist system of ruining the lives of people who do not toe the government line in every way. Disagree with Xi, show interest in Falun Gong, request more pay from your job, and you may find yourself unable to get a decent place to live, a vehicle, a loan, or anything else that ought to be decided by a proper financial credit system.

 

We know there are people who think it would be a good idea here in America. But there are two things we ought to keep in mind: 

1) It is already here unofficially, in the media; 

2) Your social credit score does not start at a baseline and go up or down -- it starts at nothing. You have to earn credit. You actually have to out-earn your fellows.

I've seen it in correspondence among editors and writers when some topic of Sensitivity comes up. Everyone panics a little, and each tries to provide a wokier-than-thou solution. In one story, there was a question about a trans woman whose boyfriend dumped "her" for unknown reasons. Would that make him a transphobe? Because the idea that a man might rather date a woman than a man dressed as a woman would mean he's some kind of evil hater. (Try reversing that -- "So the lesbian doesn't want to date a man dressed as a woman; is she a transphobe?" -- and watch the panic set in.) 

Even worse is medical writing, where we supposedly need to be grown-ups, but we are not. This is because we are no longer men and women, but AMABs and AFABs. 

You remember a few years back when the medical press was having kittens because it turned out that women's heart-attack symptoms were different from men's, and coronary studies always looked at men? It started the American Heart Association's Go Red for Women campaign twenty years ago. Well, now you may Go Red for AFABs, but you'd better drop the "women." 

If we must discuss distasteful subjects like ovarian or prostate cancer -- distasteful because no surgery on earth can give you ovaries or a prostate, yet we have to describe the patient population somehow -- we must refer to Assigned Male at Birth or Assigned Female at Birth. Like the doctor just decided which sex the baby should be. "We're fighting godless commies in Vietnam; better make some more boys today."

But we know that's only a stopgap, because there are campaigners who want to prevent the assignment of sex at birth. A baby should just be registered as "a baby" and it will tell us what it is later. That demand does not come from some lunatic fringe group; it is from the American Medical Association. 

So much for the idea that medical needs are different between boys and girls, and not knowing the difference is dangerous. Better the child should die than be misgendered, or gendered at all. 

What will we do when nothing is assigned at birth? Call them PWOs and PWPs (People With Ovaries/People With Prostates)? 

If you've ever been in a group blamestorm you know how this happens. Everyone is nervous; everyone is scared of being labeled something bad; everyone has to try to top the others, and as fast as they can. Temperance, consideration, sobriety of thought -- these are not considered virtues. We saw that in the wicked Tweetfest following the monstrous October 7 attack on Israel -- after the initial rush to lunacy was over, with its concurrent ratchet effect, the wiser ones silently deleted their Hamas-supporting Tweets. Others doubled down, more frantic than before. This is not adult behavior. 

I don't know where this mania ends, but I suspect it will require a lot of trial lawyers to start suing the ever-loving crap out of the perpetrators of insanity. We're starting to see a little of that, but not enough. Come on, you greedy bastards! There are billions to be made from this. Wise up and get suing! 

P.S.: I guess my social credit is deep in the negatives now. It was bound to happen sometime. It may have happened a long time ago. 

The public good?

One of the things I was once called on to do was review a report on companies and their charitable giving. A lot of what they consider charity is not what we would classically consider charity -- going to the Latin root of the word caritas, giving to the needy from Christian love. A lot of it is DEI-based (legal discrimination, in other words), encouraging grievances and tribalism; some goes for education, doing the same; and a lot goes for climate change and other green causes that will never make a difference in anything and never improve lives of anyone except for people in those industries. 

But that's only part of the problem, as I see it. 

When America made stuff: Too busy inventing to hector people 

The main practical problem is that while these companies are making themselves feel better and handing out awards to one another for their good deeds, they're making their products and/or services more expensive. You know the money isn't coming off what the officers get paid. So the company that's pledging 15% to fight climate change or 3% to promote equity or 12% to fund abortions for transwomen or 7% to fight normalcy is just making their stuff pricier. It would be like you insisting your boss pay you 20% more, which you promise you will send to Leap for the Cure! to save victims of Jumping Frenchmen of Maine disorder. Your boss might do that... or might sack you and hire someone who doesn't insist on the extra 20%. 

But isn't it a tax write-off? One may ask, and I thank you, One, for that thought. The answer is: Yes and no. U.S. companies may deduct up to 10% of pre-tax income in a given year, so yes. But the real value is in the publicity. The Harvard Business Review noted a couple of decades ago that "Tobacco giant Philip Morris, for example, spent $75 million on its charitable contributions in 1999 and then launched a $100 million advertising campaign to publicize them." 

Of course, these bighearted types will try to use their good intentions as cover when the chips are down -- like the walking tumor Harvey Weinstein trying to hide behind his support of gun control when the walls were closing in, or the so-called effective altruism touted by the now-disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried. 

One way or another, I believe that companies are using money that could be used as profits for investors (stimulating economic growth) or to lower prices (ditto), and giving that dough away to largely useless causes, then congratulating themselves and expecting parades in their honor. 

Even if they just paid the taxes and skipped the write-off, they would in theory make the tax burden on you and me less heavy. But instead, the cost of their beneficence is passed on to the consumer.

If everything is being made more expensive so companies can give money to a lot of charities or less worthy causes, then the rest of us have less spending power with our money. And as we know, a lot of "good" causes turn out to be only good for their officers' wallets. 

On the whole I suspect corporate giving does more harm than good. I'd like to see a genuine economist like Thomas Sowell do the math on this, and I'd bet a burger than I'm right. 

But it hardly matters. Companies don't really care if anyone is helped. The real importance is the puffery from Doing Public Good, even if it does the public bad. 

Can't work, must meme.

Too lazy to work on Labor Day, our annual day of rest from our labors. I'm sure lots of dads will be enjoying it. All they have to do is buy the beer, set up everything outside, clean the pool, grill all the food, and then relax for ten minutes before it's time to put everything away and go to sleep for work on Tuesday. 

All I'm doing is resorting to some more memes. 

Not mine, obviously, but a good reminder.

Sanitized.

Three years ago I was driving my wife's car in Pennsylvania. I stopped to pick up some goods at Walmart. The Chinese Death Flu was riding high at the time. I realized that she had no hand sanitizer in the car, so I grabbed a bottle to keep in the vehicle. I happened to notice it on Friday when I was using her car again. 

Didn't that take me back. Especially the scent, which is strong but pleasant enough for a hand sanitizer. Lavender? I suppose. 

I remembered that trip to the Walmart, how one of the store's exits had been closed off -- which funneled all customers through the same doors and ensured us being closer together at one point at least, but whatever. Also the masks. The arrows in the aisles. The dots on the floor by the register for social distancing. The plastic sheeting everywhere. The special shopping hours. The nitrile gloves, the weird shortages. All of it. All, apparently, for nothing. 

I don't know about you, but I'm not doing it again. 

The news is panicky about a new variant. Screw that. I'm not discounting it entirely -- three friends of mine over the age of 65 just had it. For one it was his third time with COVID, and he's vaxed out the bazooty. But guess what? All of them survived, even the one with severe physical degenerative issues in a long-term care facility. 

The whole mask thing was a bust. That's not just coming from the right-wing press. We know this, and they still want to start all over with it again. Closing the schools was a literal disaster for the kids. Watch what the teachers' unions do next. One thing for sure, it means we won't be allowed to ditch any of the rules for remote voting, the ones that made it so easy to, er, fortify the 2020 election.

I played along last time because we didn't know better, and the ones who did just lied. Also, I am not the kind of guy who believes in taking stands that inconvenience innocent bystanders. Why demand to shop barefaced and force some put-upon store manager to have to deal with me? He has enough on his plate. But I'm not going through that again, not unless the plague is the real deal, wiping out healthy people in the thousands like the Spanish Flu or the Black Death. So the Wuhan labs better cook up something really hot for our next election year. 

Speaking of which, that bottle of hand sanitizer expired in April 2022, long after my patience with the federal government had. And can you guess where it was manufactured?

Communist China: The cause of -- and treatment for? -- all the world's ills. 

Don't shop, adopt (fruit edition).

If you didn't feel guilty enough every time you throw away plastic instead of recycling, well, now you can start feeling guiltier, because by throwing out expired food you are DESTROYING THE PLANET.

But don't worry, because now that fruit, that poor, tenderly harvested, irreplaceable fruit is being rescued!

Danon's Two Good yogurt, named so because it has just two grams of sugar per serving, is here to SAVE THE PLANET by rescuing fruit! And if that sounds silly to you, then you are an Earth-destroying bastard and you don't care. But Danone, Danon's home company, DOES CARE:

Danone North America's Two Good® Yogurt is tackling food waste with the introduction of its Good Save™ product line, wrapping a year of commitment to positive impact for people and the planet for the brand. In partnership with Full Harvest®, Two Good 'Good Save' uses Verified Rescued Produce™ to create lower sugar yogurt products with the goal of reducing food waste at the farm level. The product line is setting the standard for the emerging rescued foods market and is the first dairy product to utilize 100% Verified Rescued Produce™. The initial offering features Meyer Lemons that are 100% verified rescued, with plans to launch additional flavors in 2021 and beyond.

You catch that? They loved the idea of rescuing fruit so much that they trademarked the term Verified Rescued Produce™. Note: The trademark does not mean a government entity looked it over and said, "Yes, by golly, that meets our exacting standards" and stamped it. It just means that they got the USPTO to issue a trademark.

So what is the deal with the great fruit rescue, this Dunkirk evac of fruit, and does this involve PETF (People for the Ethical Treatment of Fruit)?

Full Harvest is a do-gooder outfit that leads off saying that a full one-quarter of all produce in America is wasted. I always find these kinds of assertions questionable. You know the figures are always fudged to make the point stronger. Plus, considering how much we grow in this country, and how much agriculture traditionally goes to waste, I think consuming three-quarters is pretty good. 

If we weren't whacking people over the head to Eat! Fresh! Fruits! and Vegetables! all the time, I think we'd be canning and freezing more, and even less would be wasted. Because fresh stuff rots. Canned vegetables stay good for a very long time. 

I think it's safe to say also that children and teenagers probably count for most of the domestic waste. Someone who lives alone and buys apples will probably try to eat them, however much the siren call of the potato chips tries to lure them away. Parents trying and failing to get healthy food into children is the main cause of refrigerators turning into the hospice of produce, where the bounty of the earth goes to die. 

But Full Harvest is not able to round up the stuff that's perishing in the crisper drawer. So what IS Verified Rescued Produce™?

Verified Rescued Produce® is defined by Full Harvest as produce or its by-product that was grown for human consumption but is determined that it will go to waste at the time of evaluation.

While all Full Harvest produce either falls into surplus or imperfect and is being sold in service of reducing food waste, only some of it can be Verified Rescued™ - meaning that it can be verified that it would have gone to waste at the time of evaluation. Any category of Full Harvest produce above can qualify as Verified Rescued™ if it meets our strict verification requirements at the time of evaluation during our auditing process. When verified by a Full Harvest audit, the produce is officially considered “rescued”, meaning that it reduces food waste, and therefore qualifies for environmental benefits (Water savings and CO2 emissions avoidance).  

So... I'm eating garbage? What was so weird about the Meyer lemons that Two Good rescued that they were considered unmarketable? Now I'm a little scared.

Some people think we need to make supermarkets give away any food that's going to waste, but there are downsides to that that the commies never consider. For one thing, a big food giveaway every day would mean fewer customers and more freeloaders, so fewer people paying the freight. But say we took that step by force of law. Then the commies ask: "Why not give it all away from the get-go?" Because you can never do enough for those people, and they never think through the logical consequences of their demands. The Verified Experience of Communism™ proves again and again that giving stuff away leads to scarcity for everyone, but despite the vast human experience in this experiment, they cannot or will not understand why. 

In a way, rescuing fruit in a way nothing new. The huge Tropicana plant in Bradenton, Florida, not only uses four billion oranges annually to make juice, they also turn the peels into useful products like perfume ingredients and cattle feed. Capitalism is supposedly wasteful, but in fact it is way better at recycling than communism, because capitalists want to make a buck off everything they can. 

But back to the Two Good product. Is Two Good any good?

Yeah, it's a quality yogurt, as Danon stuff tends to be. But I have to say the lemon flavor is not very strong. Maybe they need to rescue MORE fruit. Maybe too many Meyer lemons are still losing their lives for nothing. DO BETTER, DANONE! 

Anyway, I hate being lectured with my food. I'm going back to the store brand. 

Urbi et orbi.

Suppose my church decided to enforce a twenty-percent tithe on all members. Ten percent is the usual request, based on the old temple requirements -- the word tithe means ten. But poor people would be exempt, and in fact would be given money from the church treasury. Indeed, it soon turned out that so much money was given to them that the church went into serious debt. 

Then the church decided that people could live in the building rent-free, even those who were not members, nor believers, nor even respectful. Food was provided. Some people who came in were in desperate need. Others, however, were not. It was obvious that most were addicts or insane or both. Despite the clear rules, they wouldn't go outside to smoke; they drank alcohol, did drugs, had sex; they ate and left garbage in the sanctuary. They stole the sacramental wine; they even peed in the baptismal font although there was a bathroom available. They got into fights. They ripped up carpet, broke chairs, shredded Bibles and missalettes, stole anything that was not bolted down. People were brought in to watch over them at the church's expense, but they continued these antics. Rules were never enforced; in fact, the watchers brought in were specially instructed not to interfere in any way. 

Meanwhile, the parish elementary school no longer bothered to teach the children math or science or even religion. The claim was made that learning leads to inequality, so there must be no learning. It became nothing more than a filthy, feral daycare center for children up to ten years old. But tuition doubled, then tripled.

Then the church demanded thirty, then forty percent of our income to cover all the new expenses. Still, there was never enough money for basic upkeep. The place looked terrible; parishioners feared it would burn down one night. When they went on Sunday it was a revolting experience. Maybe worst of all, the priest never even talked about God's Word anymore. All he said was what a great place the church was and what a privilege it was for us to be members. If we objected to the people ruining the building and interrupting the church's traditional duties, we were wicked and cruel. Meanwhile, there were rumors that the priest and his pals were raiding what they could from the treasury and having a wonderful time with it. 

My friends among the nonbelievers and non-adherents said I was insane to keep going to this church. And they were 100% right. And yet, when I looked around, I saw that every other parish had become exactly the same: mismanaged, broke, useless, filthy, and dangerous. 

Does this fictional example differ from the way American cities are treating their citizens?

The two things really have a lot in common. 

Let's assume cities and churches both have a duty to help the poor. Both have or ought to have a sense of purpose. But like the church in my illustration, the cities have completely given up on the idea of their proper duty toward the citizens -- safety and streets and sanitation. The citizens are just suckers, paying more and ever more to live in places that are dirtier and more dangerous by the day. 

I have written before that our beloved former pastor wanted to use the old chapel as a warming station in the winter, allowing the minuscule homeless population of the town to stay there in the winter. What happened was similar to the disaster described, as many of us expected, right up to the peeing in the baptismal font. Our pastor, probably somewhat chastened by the experience, had to close the doors to them. Groups that used the chapel for legitimate purposes were asked to check the sanctuary to make sure no bums slipped in while we were there, because for a couple of years after the failed experiment they kept thinking of it as their home -- and bathroom. Our pastor had learned a lesson. But at no time had he ever lost sight of the primary mission of the church -- to bring God's Word to the people. 

Cities aren't like that. Many adherents to the church of Leftism aren't like that, either. They get their stuff stolen, cars taken at gunpoint. Their streets are covered in garbage and feces. The schools are rattraps and kids come out dumber than they went in. Poor neighborhoods are shot up; old properties become a different type of shooting gallery. Expensive civic projects come and go, and the only thing that gets larger is the debt. And yet the Leftists continue to vote for the same kinds of imbeciles, grifters, and creeps who are making their lives miserable. Worse, if they move to some other town out of terror, they start voting for the same kinds of imbeciles, grifters, and creeps that ruined the place from which they came. They seem to cling to their faith more strongly than Catholics do to theirs, and much more than your average Methodist or Presbyterian. A Catholic who gets mugged may forgive his mugger, knowing that if the crook believed as he did, the poor soul would reform. The Leftist who gets mugged knows that the mugger believes the same things about life that he does, so there's nothing to do but accept it, or lash out at inappropriate targets. If it weren't for those rich people, no one would mug anyone! 

When a church fails in its duties, it is held up as an example. When a government does, it is considered par for the course. I do not understand why so very many people can cling so hard to something that fails them over and over again. 

Proclaim liberty throughout all the land.

As the old saying goes, there are two kinds of people: Those who divide people into two kinds of people, and those who do not. Well, I'm usually of the latter, but today I'm the former, I guess. 

Here we go: 

There are two kinds of Americans: Those who believe that human rights are God-given, and those who do not. This distinction is at the heart of all our political problems. The old counterargument, that rights are granted by government alone, had been the cry of tyrants, and was renewed by the new tyranny of Communism in the twentieth century. It exploded in our national consciousness right about the time we were able to recognize that the government's duty was to protect these God-given rights for all citizens. 

Until very recently, most Americans would have agreed wholeheartedly with this famous passage from the Declaration of Independence: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

I suppose there is no more crucial passage in our nation's founding than that. Some modern students think Olde Tyme people were longwinded, but look at these exceptionally important and in fact revolutionary ideas summed up in 54 words:

1) These truths are self-evident: they are postulates in no need of proof;

2) That God has endowed us with rights that are above and beyond politics;

3) That they are just three: we have a right to be alive; we have a right to be free from oppression; we have a right to seek happiness as free men;

4) That the only point of government is to secure (NOT PROVIDE) these God-given rights;

5) And that governments are formed by human beings and exist by the consent of those human beings who are under its jurisdiction. 

We've heard it all a million times, but how many of us realize how important it is? What a shocking statement it makes? The people on top through history had always acted as if the whole point of government was to protect the clan, whether the clan be a tiny tribe or Rome or France, and everyone's main job was to protect the brains of the outfit -- the ruler. The Declaration turned it all on its head. If the king infringes on the rights given to us by God, king had better watch his back. He has lost his legitimacy.

But if we don't believe in God, or don't believe that these simple rights are from the God that created us, what then? "Human rights" are disposable, mere lip service to keep the plebes in line, but there's no reason they cannot be infringed upon as much as desirable. It seems crazy that anyone would willfully dispense with the idea that his own rights come from a power higher than government. But in their effort to dethrone God, the Communists were perfectly happy to give the dispensing of rights back to government -- as long as they had their hands on the whip. 

And this is where we are now. 

We may be near or maybe even just past the tipping point, where fewer than half the people in the United States believe in that statement in the Declaration. Certainly there are those who scoff, saying the so-called "negative" rights are worthless, just the right to starve in the street; we need positive rights, the right to food, clothing, free education, housing, healthcare, and whatever else comes along. 

But those are not the rights we were founded on, because the Founders knew any real right was based in the right to freedom. They would have found it preposterous to go looking for a government-enforced right to someone else's labor. Which is what free food and free medicine and all the rest are. 

The heart of the matter is this: If Americans no longer believe that God (or nature or just human dignity, if you must) has given us the rights mentioned in the Declaration, rights that are few in number but rock-solid inviolable, then we're truly sunk. Those who control us will deny those rights; those who are controlled won't believe they are worth fighting for. 

The ironic thing is that those of us who believe that those rights are from God believe it is true whether we accept it or not, but will be forced to watch our government violate these rights as much as it desires. 

But those petty kings had better beware -- not from the peasants as much as their Creator. They were given a wonderful nation, and they'd better take care of it, or they will have to answer someday to Him. If human rights come from God, God is not going to be pleased with those who destroy these rights among others in their care -- especially in the United States of America, where we have known these things for 247 years. 

Putting the "sick" in "sickle."

It's May Day, kids, the day on which we celebrate that wonderful invention that's catching on with so many of you hipsters -- Communism! All the gang are getting into it. It's just the groovinest thing!

What? You haven't heard of it? Why, friend, let me tell you why Communism, especially New Improved Communism, is just the greatest thing since collectivized bread! 

1) It's not Capitalism.

Boo, Capitalism! Strictly speaking, Capitalism is not an -ism, which implies a constructed idea; it's just what happens when two people want something the other has and work out a nonviolent means to satisfy them both.

Guy 1: I would like some of that food.

Guy 2: I made it myself. I would like that nice rock you have.

Guy 1: I will give it to you for half that food.

Guy 2: Okay.

How stupid is that? Someone's obviously being exploited here; either the rock is worthless and Guy 2 is a sucker or the rock is valuable and Guy 1 is being taken. There is no middle ground! 

Under a Communist system, the needs of all are satisfied. Like so:

Guy 1: We need to give Bob some food here too. He is sickly. But we are out of rocks.

Guy 2: Sucks to be Bob.

Guy 1: Hoarder! (Stabs Guy 2 to death) Hey, Bob! Lunchtime!

Bob: This is great. Where did this guy get this?

Guy 1: Uh, I don't know. He said he made it.

Bob: How?

Guy 1: Uh...

See? Capitalism is a basic human interaction, and who wants to live in the stone age? Communism is completely made up, worthy for human intellect! Yet it teaches a simple lesson: When all else fails, just apply more violence. Which brings us to our second point:

2) It's anti-human.

Boy, don't humans suck? You bet they do! Well, under Communism, more of them are dispatched from the earth than by any other means. Look at these figures:

Reign of Bloody Mary (five years): 280 killed 

Spanish Inquisition (356 years): 1,500 killed 

Communism (~78 years): 154 people killed every hour

You don't get more efficient at bumping people off than that! But don't worry, I'm sure it was no one you know. You'd be fine. And that leads us to our last point: 

3) What, me worry?

You're worried about paying the rent, buying food, getting healthcare, aren't you? Well, under New Improved Communism, you'd never have to worry again! Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but animals in the zoo get everything they need, and so can you! Just do what you're told and don't do what you're told not to do and leave the decisions to the Scientifical Smarties using things like math to make the decisions, and everything will be fine. Sure, maybe sometimes we'll run low on things, maybe there won't be enough for everyone, but we covered that in point 2. 

So this May Day, leave all your troubles to the Communist leaders and celebrate this brave new workers' paradise. One way or another, all your worries will be over!

Vote Socialism, Freeze in the Dark.

Got a little message from our utility company the other day, the people whom we rely on for our gas heat and stove and water heater and electricity. 

All the years I've lived here, through times of pricey fuel and reasonable fuel, I've never seen a message like this. So let's ask: Can you explain the high prices in more detail? 

The rising cost of natural gas supplies has increased customers’ natural gas and electric winter bills for Orange & Rockland (O&R) and the rest of New York State’s electric and gas utility companies.

The cost of natural gas has been driven upward as:

Demand for the commodity has risen,

Exports have increased, and

Supply is limited. 

These and other factors have caused a decline in the amount of natural gas in storage in the United States.

So, I looked to the Web to ask, Why could exports have been increased? Why is supply so limited? And the first hundred hits were all of the Don't Blame Us CYA variety of government data spewers and their flunkies in the press, along with environmental groups that are dancing in the cold for the high price of natural gas and petroleum. So I checked some of the sites of people actually in the business of natural gas production and sales, like Shell. I was surprised but not shocked to see that China is the world's largest importer of liquefied natural gas, which means that once again China's activity is helping ruin things for the rest of us. The United States leads the world in LNG exports, but it seems like we could use some of that stuff closer to home right now. I'd rather we had more fuel of our own and less cheap crap available in Walmart.

Then there's the problem of Europe getting its gas cut off by Russia because of the sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine. "Europe demand for LNG sets off global competition for supplies," says the International Energy Agency, and that "Russia’s continued curtailment of natural gas flows to Europe has pushed international prices to painful new highs". Gee, didn't someone give Russia a kind of backhand green light to invade Ukraine? I seem to recall something like that.

Of course, European leaders who have been bragging about dropping nuclear energy and going to solar and wind while really running everything on Russian natural gas are in for a colder winter than we are. How much does woodfire contribute to global warming? 

So long, Black Forest; nice knowin' ya. 

Speaking of which, New York closed its Indian Point nuclear power plant last year -- seems like we could have used some of that nice, clean, cheap nuclear-generated electricity this winter. Thanks, Governor Cuomo! Another win for you!

 

We could have been drilling for more natural gas, I suppose, but we're not supposed to do that anymore. Some folks like to say, "We can't drill our way to lower gas prices." And yet we're told that our high prices now are due to low supply. Gosh, doesn't that mean... help me out here... that if we made more supply by drilling... gas would cost... could it be?... LESS? Man, math is hard.

So, since O&R can't get more fuel, its only answer for us is "managing usage." In other words, freeze in the dark. 

Some of the tips they give are fine, and worth doing even when fuel is inexpensive. Get your heating system inspected and cleaned? Sounds great. But it's not free. It's another expenditure when homeowners are being stretched by inflation, but maybe it would pay for itself in fuel savings. Maybe. Also: tighten up insulation, switch to LED lights, use smart thermostats, and so on. That stuff is free, right? 

You ever get the feeling that the world is being run by the stupidest, most vile people imaginable? Some are just stupid; some are just vile; most are a happy combination of both. Vote them out before we aren't allowed to do it anymore.

Fred's Book Club: Cheeky Devil!

Well, hello there! You must like to read, huh? You're doing it right now! And you're in the right place for our book feature, the Wednesday "Hump Day" feature we call the Humpback Writers, although nary a hump remains to be found. Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter!

Today's novel is an unusual bird, a surreal comedy from 1943 that is still hilarious. You know the author best (if at all) as writer and creator of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. But before he wrote the Dobie Gillis stories that became a movie and later a TV show, he wrote this, his first book:

Max Shulman took the title from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem that every schoolchild would have known back then, left off the "of tan," and pegged it to his novel about a dumbbell named Asa Hearthrug and his freshman year at Shulman's alma mater, the University of Minnesota. Calling this book a novel is kind of a stretch; it is a book-long comedy of the college scene, unsurprising since Shulman made his name as a humorist in college. 

You get the feel for how the book is going to go straight off the front matter, in the Author's Note: 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. The University of Minnesota is, of course, wholly imaginary. I think it would be of some interest to the reader to know how I happened to pick the name "Minnesota."
     It is a combination of two Indian words -- "Minne" meaning a place where four spavined men and a minor woman ate underdone pemmican, and "sota" meaning the day the bison got away because the hunter's wife blunted his arrows in a fit of pique.
     The combination of the two words means little, if anything, but the reader must consider that they are the only two Indian words I know. 

And we're off to the races.

Our book opens as Asa says farewell to his parents before his sojourn at the university. He also must bid a touching good-bye to his sweetheart, Lodestone La Toole:

Then I was beside her, and my funny little crooked smile gleamed across my bronzed face, and my brooding gray eyes crinkled at the corners. "Lodestone," I said simply.

     "Asa," she breathed, for that was my name.

     She was in my arms. Our lips met. Time crashed wildly about us as the entire universe was resolved into our wild embrace. I was laved in the fragrance of her. I knew a pulsing, mounting ecstasy, Then suddenly I was still, at peace in a pastel world. 

     "I'm hungry," said Lodestone at length. "Can't we get something to eat?"

     "Not now, my own. I haven't time. I must leave you in oh, too short a time to go to the University of Minnesota."

     "Maybe we could just get a hamburger. That don't take long."

     "I am going," I continued, "and yet I am not going. For you will always be with me. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I shall always think of you."

     "There's a White Castle down the road a piece. They have real nice hamburgers. It don't take them hardly no time to fix them neither."

Alas, soon our Asa is in college, and before you know it, swept into the Alpha Cholera fraternity, confused by professors, and prey to a femme fatale.    

I felt a prod in my ribs. Turning, I saw a dark-eyed, finely mustached girl in a close-knit burlap dress. "Hey," she whispered, "you know what sociology is?"

     "The study of how people live together," I answered.

     "Nah," she said. "It's the study of how the working class is oppressed under the capitalistic system."

     The professor fixed us with a baleful eye. "If you two don't mind," he said, "I'll go on with my lecture."

     "Tool," hissed the girl.

Yes, this is a member of the students communist party, Yetta Samovar. Or so she calls herself, having taken the name from a hero of the Soviet workers' paradise.

"She was the first Soviet woman to operate a power crane," said Yetta. "One day while working at the Dnepropetrovsk dam she leaned out of her crane to wave a greeting to a young man whose bed she shared and with whom she had become quite friendly. She leaned too far. Down she plunged into a block of newly laid, quick-drying concrete. Her last words as the concrete hardened around her were, 'Solidarity forever!'"

Asa's fraternity brothers struggle to save him from the grip of the communists by setting him up with another woman, named Noblesse Oblige. Asa falls in love with both. But what of sweet and hungry Lodestone La Toole? How will Asa decide? 

Asa is also put forward by his Cholera brothers to run for freshman representative to the student council -- can he win? What about the student newspaper? Why are they yelling all the time? ("Tear out the front page! I just got the results of the intramural chess matches.") 

It's a fast read and very funny, and while time has changed college culture to be even worse than it was in 1943, rest assured that it should all be recognizable to a student in any era.

I have to confess that the copy pictured above is not mine; mine is a 1948 three-in-one edition that I got from the Strand for $4 (price tag still inside). The collection includes Barefoot Boy, World War II home-front sendup The Feather Merchants, and the further adventures of Asa Hearthrug in The Zebra Derby.

I just want to mention one more gag, this from The Zebra Derby, in which Asa goes to war. In that book we find out that Asa's father is named Max Hearthrug. Max Shulman includes this footnote:

There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

And sure enough, in the course of The Zebra Derby we meet Max Pilfering, Max Onus, Max Clodde, Max Nipthung, Max Stagecraft, etc. etc.... and the return of Yetta Samovar! 

With jokes like these, you should read something else?

Insanity Day.

You know I like to keep an eye on special holidays and observances, the more insane the better. February 20th is here to oblige. 

According to the site Holidays Calendar, today is Hoodie Hoo Day. I suppose it's not on your Far Side Page-A-Day calendar, your iPhone calendar, the free wall calendar from the church (sponsored by the funeral home), or the Cute Kitties calendar your daughter put up. Here's the deets:

Hoodie Hoo Day is a day that is celebrated every year on February 20th. It is a day designed to help people overcome the winter-time blues and to prepare them for the coming of Spring. Although this holiday might seem like a joke holiday, it is an actual holiday that was created and copyrighted by Thomas Roy, a guy that has created over 80 different holidays, many of them quite unusual, such as Bathtub Party Day and Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day.

The main custom of this odd holiday is to go out on February 20th at noon, raise your hands over your head and yell, “Hoodie Hoo!!” for all the world to hear. Other ways that Thomas Roy suggests celebrating the holidays include wearing crazy or odd hats, ordering spring seeds for your garden and go out to a local flea market and buy a piece of used furniture.

So you have your instructions: Go outside, maybe with a weird hat, and yell "HOODIE HOO!" at the top of your lungs.

Of course, if you are reading this in the southern hemisphere, it is summertime and not appropriate behavior. You should wait until August 20th and do your own Down Under Hoodie Hoo. 

But this was not the insane holiday I wanted to post about. Today is also World Day of Social Justice: 

The United Nations' (UN) World Day of Social Justice is annually observed on February 20 to encourage people to look at how social justice affects poverty eradication. It also focuses on the goal of achieving full employment and support for social integration.

Uh-huh. And how do we observe this?

Many organizations, including the UN and the International Labour Office, make statements on the importance of social justice for people. Many organizations also present plans for greater social justice by tackling poverty, social and economic exclusion and unemployment. Trade unions and campaign groups are invited to call on their members and supporters to mark the day. The Russian General Confederation of Trade Unions declared that the common slogan would be "Social Justice and Decent Life for All!".

I wouldn't trust the Russian General Confederations of Trade Unions to give me correct change for a quarter. 

Schools, colleges and universities may prepare special activities for the day or plan a week of events around a theme related to poverty, social and economic exclusion or unemployment. Different media, including radio and television stations, newspapers and Internet sites, may give attention to the issues around the World Day of Social Justice.

So big statements will be made, bureaucrats will fly around acting Serious, and nothing will be done. Nothing can be done. And we know why, but no one wants to discuss it.

Social justice is a wicked term of art; "social" is about the most misused word in the world and "justice" always and invariably implies punishment. Basically it means punishing people with stuff and forcing them to give up stuff for those with no stuff. The rest is just enforced groupthink, where everyone has to smile on everyone else, unless they are national strongmen, terrorists, rich people, or crime bosses, in which case they are exempt. 

The thing is, we know what would really lead to an easing of poverty, which would ease so many other problems -- property rights, the rule of law, and removing fetters from capitalism. But the world is loaded with thug states, nepotism, corruption, tribalism, mob justice, and the rule of men rather than laws, and lately the United States looks like no great shining example of how to do things right. Getting something truly like "social justice" from this mess is like turning out a barrel of nails and expecting them to all land point-down. 

If the United Nations and the International Labour Office think they can straighten it out, they can be my guest -- but leave me and my money alone. 

So yeah, compared to the World Day of Social Justice, a silly holiday to lift one's winter blues seems like a model of sanity. Hoodie Hoo, y'all! 

Our tax dollars at work.

 

Fred's Book Club: The End, 2001 Edition.

Happy Wednesday, a.k.a. Hump Day, the day we run our Humpback Writers feature, in which writers with no known back issues have written books that have the singular advantage of me owning a copy of them. The books, that is, not the writers. I don't have a big photocopy of P.G. Wodehouse hanging on my office wall. Although that might improve the décor.

Today, January 20, for no particular reason, I am profiling a book from 2001 -- Barbara Olson's The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House. 

Okay, I should clarify that I'm not using this book to take shots at our departing president -- I mainly chose today to run this book because it's another day for the transference of presidential power, as when the Clintons left the White House twenty years ago. 

So what, according to author Olson, did the Clintons do that rates the "Last, Desperate Abuses of Power" subtitle? Well, to cite one abuse, the second chapter is called "Clemency for Cop Killers." For example, she writes, "Susan Rosenberg was a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most violent of the left-wing militias that disrupted the nation from the 1960s through the 1980s.... In October of 1981, Rosenberg's gang held up a Brink's truck in Nanuet, New York, killing guard Peter Paige and two police officers, Edward O'Grady and Waverly Brown, the first black officer on the local force. Rosenberg drove the getaway car and managed to escape." Rosenberg and her little friends also bombed the U.S. Capitol on November 7, 1983, causing no loss of life but a hell of a lot more damage than the "sedition" of two weeks ago did. Naturally Bill Clinton granted her clemency on his last day in office, and she now works for Black Lives Matter, along with other expressly Communist outfits. 

Anyone who still harbors some weird ideas that Bill and Hillary Clinton are good and decent people ought to read this book, although in the wake of #MeToo I wonder if anyone does, at least in Bill's case. But here's a description of the Clintons that could fit any well-known Washington lizard people with whom you may be familiar: 

The Clintons are members of the mandarin class -- public officials, accustomed to influence, respect, and privilege. People listen to them. People flatter them. And people do things for them, like feeding them, paying their bills, and giving them gifts. The Clintons may not even realize how much they have come to regard as an entitlement public financing and ubiquitous sycophancy. They can thus disparage the wealthy and rail against the "decade of greed" without any sense of shame at never, really having had to pay bills, meet a mortgage, or fix a roof. The perquisites and comforts of eight years in the White House further insulated them from the harsher economic realities of life. Bill and Hillary have every indication of believing that this form of life was their due; they were doing good things; therefore, they ought to be treated well -- very well. 

And people still wonder why so many in the nation backed Trump.

Although the book was published by Regnery, a conservative press, Barbara Olson was no far-right crusader. She had worked in the justice department as a prosecutor. Her husband Ted was solicitor general under George W. Bush and was a lawyer for him in Bush v. Gore, but has since represented clients on behalf of anchor babies and gay marriage. How Barbara Olson felt about these issues I don't know. She had previously written a book called Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, so she seemed to have taken a particular disgust with the Clintons and their tactics. 

I would love to have heard Barbara Olson's commentary during the 2016 election, but that was not to be.

Maybe the worst thing Bill Clinton did as president was nothing -- about a certain Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets only a brief mention in this book:

In the mind of Bill Clinton, political considerations outweigh even life-and-death matters of great concern to his own law-enforcement officials, not to mention the nation. As many in his own cabinet had repeatedly stated, terrorism, both foreign and domestic, was the nation's primary security anxiety. Since the end of the Cold War, Soviet aggression had been replaced by a number of particularly venomous threats, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama Bin Laden.

Barbara Olson perished on September 11, 2001, when the airplane to Los Angeles in which she was a passenger, American Airlines Flight 77, was forced to crash into the Pentagon by psychopathic terrorist flunkies working for Osama Bin Laden. 

Old snobs and new.

On the whole, I think I prefer the old-fashioned snobs, the kind one hardly sees anywhere anymore. I think they were a better class than our newfangled snobs. 

Stay back, hoi polloi.

They certainly share things in common, mainly the unbridled joy of being able to look down upon the mass of humanity. And that can be maddening to us in the rank-and-file. And yet the old snobs had it all over the current crop in multiple ways. For example:

1) They were cultured. They supported opera and other classical music, artists whose ardent devotion to their work showed in every stroke of paint, great books of historical importance, and they did it with their own money, not by making the government pay for it. They supported the Western culture that supports everything else. They did not think you could cut the legs under the table of civilization and it would float in air. They preserved Bach and Brahms; they didn't write articles celebrating the social importance of Cardi B.

2) They never tried to pretend to be "commoners." One might point out stories of little jaunts as "normal people" by Victoria and Albert, or rich women posing as shepherdesses, but that's just what those things were -- poses. They didn't try to be "street" when the "street" they came from was a "cul de sac." A snob in those days dressed in ragged clothing was not trying to be an oik any more than a guy dressed up as Green Lantern at ComicCon thinks he can fly. But slovenly hipsters with trust fund money on bikes in Brooklyn think they have cred.

3) They had noblesse oblige. Charity may have been and still be a haphazard thing, but it was considered a social obligation. When a war broke out, rich people were involved, and for real. When a rich person bought his way out, like Teddy Roosevelt's father in the Civil War, it was shameful, whether known publicly or not. They were expected to have skin in the game. Second and third sons were sent off to fight, not "raise awareness" for things. God, I am sick of rich people trying to raise my awareness.

4) They believed in tradition and heritage and God. See #1 above. Were they hypocrites? Sure, many of them, but like François de La Rochefoucauld they believed that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, so the social benefits were enforced even if the sinner was lost. Now we have believers in the Year Zero, who think that the world and its people can be remade if everything is co-opted into the great project, everything up to and including faith in God, which tells us that the so-called Liberation Theology is not dead -- worse, it now has precious little theology. As C.S. Lewis famously concluded, "Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies.  The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

5) They tried to help in ways that sometimes helped. See #3 above. Also see the work of William Gladstone, a British PM best remembered here for being skewered constantly by rival Disraeli, but a reformer who for whatever his other faults went out to help get poor women off the streets in genuine acts of charity. He also got rid of peacetime flogging in the navy, so that was nice. Modern snobs are more concerned with making themselves feel good about themselves, and if everything goes to hell, at least they tried. 

6) They were not everywhere you looked. The old snobs kept to themselves. One of the worst things about modern snobs is that you can't get away from them. There are more of them and they are all entitled to wonderful careers. Most have parents to support them in unpaid positions that pad the résumé, and the connections to get the good jobs before the talented climbers can even apply. They may have lots of money from the folks or they may not, but they're always turning up in workplaces, especially in media and government, where they want to make change. The only change these modern snobs should be making is four quarters for a dollar, and why? Because in the old days...

7) They thought they were better for better reasons. Personally, I don't mind being accused of ignorance; everyone is ignorant about some things. And I know I have little appreciation for the most high-minded offerings of culture. But I will not stand to be called evil because I don't subscribe to the modern shibboleths of Critical Social Justice, or that I know recycling is a money-wasting joke, or that I despise abortion and I love my church. Yet our modern snobs must not just look down on me, but call me all kinds of synonyms for evil. 

I'm not saying that it would be better to be poor in, say, Victorian London than in modern Detroit. The fact is that all kinds of advancements have made life better for people of every class in the last 150 years. I am saying that we now have what Glenn Reynolds calls the worst ruling class in the history of this great nation, all of which can be traced back to bad ideas from European Communists. 

Why are the bulk of our Communists people who grew up with money, rather than the unwashed poor? Answer that and it explains everything.

Who's celebrating?

Happy fourth Sunday of Advent! And down the stretch we go!

Anyway: I was walking along, minding my own business, when I passed a Protestant church with a Christmas tree out front. Nothing weird about that, not in December; it would be a little odd in August. Anyway, this church eschewed all the usual decorations to instead cover the tree with flags of the world.

So who's celebrating with us, according to the flags?

The United States, still a majority Christian country, as is Canada, and Chile above them, and Jamaica, and -- Israel? Well, okay, Judeo-Christian heritage and all that...

And here's the flag of Communist Cuba, about which the CIA World Factbook says it is more than 59% Christian. Yet as an official Communist state wherein the Communist party is the only legal political party, we know that they have an official position of atheism -- or at least, their only official religion is the religion of the state. 

And there's good ol' Communist China, hanging out with good ol' Socialist Venezuela. I'm sure they'll have a merry Christmas. 

Look, I get it -- Christ is supposed to have come to save all of us, not just Western people, not even people who go to church and make a big deal of faith. We have no idea who is saved and who is not, actually, and we may be surprised. And maybe we need to pray hardest for those nations that not only are anti-religious but actively persecute Christians. But displaying the flags of those nations on the Christmas tree seems less like wishful thinking and more like wanton foolishness, like turning a blind eye to the evils of the governments of this world. 

We can work and pray and strive and hope for world peace, but we should not be stupid. This is kind of stupid to me. It's not like they have every nation in the world up on the tree; there are 195 countries on planet Earth and there are nowhere near 195 flags on this tree. Perhaps the flags represent areas in which this denomination has opened offices or sent missionaries. That might make sense. But I still think it's just brotherhood-of-man stuff, or I guess we need to say personhood-of-persons. 

Having seen what I think is the pastor's house next door, I suspect that reverend personage believes Trump is the single largest cause of all the trouble in the world right now anyway, based on a myriad of signs and bumper stickers.

It's the kind of thinking that believes we are all naturally brothers unless some evil force turns us against one another, which is as naïve as anything can be. Naturally, those in America who subscribe to such notions immediately blame America as that evil force.  

All I can say is, if this minister has seen his congregation in action, he knows that people don't automatically get along all the time out of love, and should be able to understand why nations fight too. We all suffer from a condition called human nature. Our problems are bred in the bone, and don't go away from wishful thinking, or willful blindness. If all of us strove to live a Christian life, I think it would bring the fighting way down, but as long as humans are humans it's never going to be paradise on earth, and attempts to make it so usually go to hell fast.