Category: Review

February 24, 2024 – Fahrenheit 451, Chapter 3

February 24, 2023 /

This week, I am looking at the concepts of chapter 3, the last chapter in Fahrenheit 451. As the second time reading it, I can honestly say that I don’t remember a single thing about this book. I had a slight hope that maybe it would come back to me as I went along, but – nope. That is OK, because now I can come at it with a fresh and unbiased prospective.

If you read the book, then you know where the chapter starts. I’ll just say that there was a lot of burning of things. This translated into a failed manhunt and ending with nuclear war. And when once over, it was time to rebuild society. A little simplistic and abrupt if you ask me.

I have to be careful that I keep things in line as I write today. I am simultaneously thinking about this chapter and the overall wrap-up next week. While they are related, they are most definitely not the same. It has more to do with the origin story of the book rather than what is happening in this particular chapter.

Enough flowery non-sense and platitudes, let’s get into it. What I wanted to talk about today was a particular incident in the book. After Montag escaped from the scene of his troubles and his pursuers lost the trail something happened. What happened was that a fill-in for Montag was identified. The mechanical hound pursued, attacked and executed that person. All the while the event was filmed for TV and the action was conveniently abstract by camera angle, action and distance.

I definitely shouldn’t admit this but I will anyway. You see, I believe that people are stupid, until they are not. What I am saying is that people will believe almost anything reasonable until proven otherwise. Generally speaking this is related to issue that never effected me until they did and then they were real or wrong.

A political response to covid was believed and accepted by all sides because all sides were pretty much saying the same thing. Until your job was deemed ’essential’ or your job required a vaccine card or your dentist made you wear a mask in the lobby. It was then people said “wait a minute, this isn’t right. We are all in this together, or are we?”

You see, for propaganda to be effective, it has to be seen as accurate or true. When the mechanical hound killed the stand in for Montag, it was for show. It was to prove that a renegade’s actions has consequences and justice was served. As long as the greater population believed that there was no escape or no hope of resistance, there actually wasn’t.

An artificial society where friends and relatives are TV images, reality is built on whatever is seen. We all know that TV is staged and scripted. So the saying that perception is reality clearly germane to the topic. All my friends are on Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/TikTok. You catch what I am saying? I a saying that we are halfway there to living in an artificial society.

How many times have you heard about people that beat a disease are the ones that fight it at every turn? When my wife was going through cancer treatment, I read case studies provided for support members that spoke to the very situation. Of course, this is not everyone’s destiny but certainly when the stars align and the person has the right attitude, sometimes the seemingly impossible can happen.

End Your Programming Routine: I am certainly not advocating for doing something crazy or life threatening by fighting a tyrannical entity with deadly consequences. The definition of changing your programming is challenging the status quo. You must observe and question what you see versus what you know. A worthy fight is one that is worth the risks.

February 17, 2023 – Fahrenheit 451, Chapter 2

February 17, 2023 /

We are off to the races. It feels strange to say that with this chapter, we are over half way through the book. After months and months with Atlas Shrugged, we are going to finish this whole endeavor in one month. And that includes a summary of the entire book as well.

There is a lot going on in this chapter. It has to be the case because there is less than sixty pages remaining. So, the action has to go pretty quickly. I guess that this is the transition chapter or the beginning of the awakening within Montag.

The chapter began with Montag questioning his happiness. Using natural reckoning, he surmised that if he was unhappy in his position, then maybe doing the opposite would be the solution. The opposite would be instead of living in an artificial fantasyland like wall to wall TVs stroking your ego all day long, read, think and discuss with others to come to a higher understanding. This of course was highly illegal.

Along the progression of the story, Montag seeks self validation, a mentor and then finally proselytizing. I wouldn’t expect anything but trouble from this, but I won’t spoil the story completely. Instead, let’s turn focus on the concepts of the chapter. There are a lot of things I could say about different themes going on but, I think all roads lead to this quote from the character Faber.

“Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.” Depending on what side of the fence that you are on, this is Bradbury’s definition of the value of books (or the danger thereof).

I take it a step further for not just books but media content in general. I suppose at Bradbury’s time, the choices were quite a bit more limited and even dare I say definable. If Fahrenheit 451 were written today, it would have to include podcast, video streaming and movies and TV, etc. I am starting to develop some ideas of my own in my journey with philosophy. But, this is a topic for another day. Right now, I am focused with Bradbury on his stance that the ability to read/watch/listen to what you want is an important tenant of freedom. Since we are discussing Bradbury, I will use the word read to mean any form of media consumption for leisure in this post.

Media can be propaganda and propaganda can be media. So, while I am all for the freedom of choice to consume whatever materials people find interesting and satisfying. we have to be guarded that our choices aren’t ‘shining our own shackles’ if you will. The counter point to this is what people often label as ‘mental masturbation’. I will elaborate more on these two below.

As a recent phenomenon, some people binge watch a show like ‘The Bachelor’. This is an example of what I am referring to as ‘shining your shackles’. I say this because I have never found anything redeeming about the series and I question even the entertainment value of the concept. It remains extremely popular because of lack of depth and even re-enforces a fairy tale delusion. People watching it are proud that they have seen every episode and even pick sides like at WWE style event, meaning it has a scripted outcome and artificial action. There are even oddsmakers in Las Vegas on the whole process.

Like a three ring circus, keeping people dim and entertained is a strategy for manipulation working in concert with advancing more sinister ideals. Sure, the media companies goal is to make money. All the while, attention to any sort of controversial or important subjects are out in the background. People in this circle tend to base decisions on how they feel about something rather than the facts of the situation.

Contrast this to the opposite side, maybe someone more like myself. I am reading all these books like 1984 and Atlas Shrugged for fun. I do end up trying to advance what I see are the values of the books by writing but there is a cliff there. What I am saying is that too much of this self-validation becomes mental masturbation. If all I ever do is read and write on all of the points that I already believe then I am just as guilty of being in la-la land as ‘The Bachelor’ crowd.

I of course believe that reading what you want is important. The zen master is able navigate both sides of the spectrum and really get to meaningful purpose. Some degree of absolute entertainment is fine. Some degree of value based entertainment is fine. Really to make it work effectively, those two groups and concepts have to meet in the middle.

I will go back to the structure of the quote now. For the most part, the leisure portion of the equation is not a question in the United States and in the book. As such, I will ignore that one. Quality information is hit and miss. This is what I was getting to with the propaganda sentence that started this post out. I do think that this is worthy of its own discussion. Suffice to say, we have both quality and non-quality work prevalent in society. And in theory, we have the right to discuss.

Now I know that this is going long but it is worth staying here for a bit. Let us assume that we had quality information about a vaccine discussion. Technically, we have the legal right to discuss pros and cons of such. However, the places of such debate were labelled as ‘Dangerous misinformation’ on social media. I ask you, what is more dangerous having the debate or silencing one side?

I will leave with this, 1938 Germany. Official government policy was to promote and cultivate a master race, read not-Jews, not-central Europeans, you know the list. Dangerous misinformation was to stand otherwise to that policy even though plenty of people secretly didn’t believe it. They had no real safe way to fight back except in the underground at the risk of death.

My grandparents were alive (and adults) at such time. My father was born the year after the war ended. We think that we are so far removed and much more sophisticated to ever go back to such a horrible place. It’s not that society has changed, the level and mechanisms of propaganda has changed. Even our recent ancestors had a better sense of values that we do now. As such, they didn’t tolerate a man calling himself a woman to win every swimming event. That’s OK, there is a new season of ‘The Bachelor’ out. We can deal with this problem another day.

End Your Programming Routine: How do we end our programming when we are strung out on anti-depression pills and zombies in front of the TV? My belief is that we have to do what matters. What that actually looks like and how it is done I suppose is the real solution. I try to bring a mixture of problems like these types of books and then solution like building or fixing or making something. I am not ignoring the problem it is just like the scale is so massive that I can’t do it alone. So I do what I can.

February 10, 2023 – Fahrenheit 451, Chapter 1

February 10, 2023 /

If you look at all the lists of books like or books related to or if you liked insert 1984/A Brave New World/Atlas Shrugged, Fahrenheit 451 is on the list. You knew it didn’t you? The fact is, I have been watching the library since I finished 1984 (which was 2021 now) and it just hasn’t been available. Since Covid, the library automatically renews books that have exceeded the due date. I suspect that Fahrenheit 451 is lost.

This is a book that I read as a 16 year old. I remember checking it out from my high school library. It is like reading it all over again because I don’t remember a thing except what the cover looked like and that it was a paperback. While I have technically read it, you can safely assume that I won’t have preconceived notions at this point.

Some of these books, I don’t know if it makes sense to do a chapter by chapter review. Although, it is difficult to determine if you haven’t read or don’t remember the book how to actually approach it. At least this time, it will be what it will be. I am going to examine the concepts of Chapter one.

Let’s first introduce the main character, Guy Montag. Guy is a what is called a fireman. In this day and age, a fireman is someone who burns books. With it is also the house, it’s possessions and sometimes the occupants are burned. What is supposed to happen is that the building is fire resistant and the occupants are arrested which means only the books and flammable possessions are burned.

Guy is married to Mildred. She has clearly drank too much of the Kool-aid. Our first introduction to her is in an overdosed state, zoned out on life by pills and reality with earbuds in. She is the manifestation of the society: programmed by TV and propaganda and depressed as a result.

Guy has a short. platonic relationship with a 17 girl named Clarisse. She seems to be a wild-child in that she no longer attends school and acts as she pleases. While she seems ignorant of the political environment and social norms, it is that same characteristic the leads her to draw her own conclusions in life without the influence of propaganda.

Between Guy’s career, his wife’s mental state and Clarisse’s intuition, is the concept of the chapter. Idle time leads to reading, communicating and thinking, Those activities lead to questioning the status quo. As a result, reading is banned, communicating is limited and thinking is diminished. Those activities have been replaced by the TV. Boy isn’t that the truth.

My kids are in high school. Since I live on Main street and that is also the same street as the high school, I often see a lot of kids walking to and from school either passing by my house or me travelling back and forth to school. The number of kids that I see walking and staring at their phones is incredible. My kids do it too.

Electronics have been around a long time, ninety years since radio was a mainstay in the home. Never has such a device created zombies but before cell phones. The minute that they leave the school, they have to see what they missed on the phone. That takes priority over the environmental factors such as the weather, traffic and life all around them.

Ironically, we live in a time where it is easier than it has ever been to be both informed and to research information. Yet society is becoming dumber and more ignorant than it has ever been. You would likely say that the newspaper is irrelevant. That being said we have less outlets producing journalistic level news stories. In theory, that is non-biased, properly sourced articles written to inform the reader.

That has been replaced by twitter polls, Facebook rumors and TikTok dances. Nextdoor is a pile of garbage that is more concerned with proper parking and home owners association rules than meaningful neighbor interactions. My point with any of this is that we have replaced curated information produced with ethical standards to a free form of mind control. And with that, people are driven into ideological camps never to return, along with their degree of logic, rhetoric and grammar.

We no longer have to worry about idle time. People are blue pilled in the Matrix and they do it to themselves. As soon as they get a chance, they plug themselves back in to the programming. Even to the point that they can’t even walk home without staring at the screen.

End Your Programming Routine: It seems obvious that to end your programming you have stopped doing it to yourself. I think that it is important to realize what is going on around you so that you know you are being programmed. Only then can you make the decision to stop self-inflicted problems. I hope people are not so apathetic as to not care, but I am very suspicious. As with all problems, start with your circle of control, yourself.

February 3, 2023 – Atlas Shrugged, the Wrap-Up

February 3, 2023 /

It doesn’t look too worse for wear. On the right is what the book looks like now. The original wrinkles in the cover were from when I packed it with me to Spain, in my luggage. I try really hard not to mash up paperbacks. I know… this is kind of their intended purpose but I like nice looking books. I am sure that is not why you tuned in though. So, let’s get into it.

What did we learn from all of this? Ayn Rand, who fled communist Russia in 1925 was an illegal alien. Meaning she got a visa to visit the United States and never left. But, that wasn’t in the book. The part of it that was important was that she had already observed the societal destructiveness of collectivism in just seven years. I think that is why the book was keenly insightful on the ilk living for others.

The one thing that I took away was an interest in Philosophy. I am not exactly sure of what I am going to do with it yet, but to look into it some more. It is not going to supersede my current reading plans, but once I get to a place where I am thinking about what is next.

So, what did I think? That is a complicated question. I was marveled by the parallels of what happened in the book. I was strongly concerned that we are following many aspects of the story page for page. I was annoyed at how long the book was; there was a lot of extraneous details that really didn’t lead to the core of the story. I enjoyed my time reading the book, in general.

I have been asked if this is a must read. I would say that if you like reading, you are into dystopian fiction or classical literature and you either like to validate your own values or you are open to changing your opinions then yes. I don’t give this a must read because I just feel that it is way too long. Something like 1984 that is a couple hundred pages has a lot more impact much quicker. Think of it this way, you could read 1984 easily three times in the same time as Atlas Shrugged.

Since this series has gone on so long, I feel like I have little to say about the overall work remaining. I felt like the ending was a little anticlimactic. The readers are left with little justice as most of the bad guys drive away or are abandoned at the end of the story. Two minor characters blew themselves up in a Mexican standoff and the Galt gang just flies off to Colorado ostensibly to live their best life while the rest of the country is left.

Maybe it is because I am a man, not a woman that I have a hard time identifying with Dabny, the primary character. She is in a three way love square (not triangle). She loves the one she cant have, she has the one she doesn’t fully love but respects and admires and she can’t move beyond the first love. She is portrayed as this very logical person yet cannot make binary commitments required for a proper relationship. If I am being honest, that indecisive love theme of the story irritated me.

One aspect that didn’t play as well was the labor situation. It seems like in the story, every time someone quit a job there was a replacement available. I think that if we have learned anything post-pandemic that is just not true. If people were really dropping out of society at such rates as written, those jobs would not immediately be filled in the real world. And even as low skilled as building or running a railroad might be, people are not going to immediately pick-up where someone left off.

Outside of the agonizingly long story arc, I do believe that Atlas Shrugged was well written. The book itself could almost be timeless because there is very little reference to technology. There is a record player mentioned a couple of times, cars trains and airplanes. What there is not is science fiction gizmos that never came to fruition nor is there science fiction/fantasy tendencies to come up with out of this world names or races or any other thing that is difficult to understand. I suppose what I am really trying to say is that it was written in plain language.

I have read that Atlas Shrugged was supposedly set in the 1990s. Outside of the technology changes that weren’t that different than the 1950s, the timeline is actually pretty spot on. The book supposedly took place over something like a ten year period.

I think that if we look at our history compared to Atlas Shrugged, our collectivism journey really got into gear in the early 2000s. I know we had the war on poverty of the 1960s which largely started the welfare state but it was the combination of the police state with the Patriot Act that has the two interests accelerating the transition.

Really, the pace of Atlas Shrugged was much quicker that what we are seeing in real life. We are now twenty plus years from the Patriot Acts and fifty years of entitlements and we still have not seen the implosion as a result of bad policy. Although we are getting there. I wouldn’t be surprised if another Covid type event split the country.

There are now three books in my liberty series. I am going to rank them 1984 > Atlas Shrugged > A Brave New World. I have already started the next one and I bet that you can guess what it will be. So stay tuned to next week for a new review starting on Friday.

End Your Programming Routine: Despite my criticisms, I am glad that I read this book. It entertained and stimulated me for seven months. That being said, its not one that I will likely ever read again. If I play my cards right, I will have all of these posts to refer back to if the subject comes up again. The next two books are going to be re-reads for me. But, there is something kind of exciting about going on the journey into the unknown like Atlas Shrugged was. This will not be the last we hear from Ayn Rand either, just not in the near future. It’s time for something different.

January 27, 2023 – Atlas Shrugged 3:10

January 27, 2023 /

And here we are my friends, the end. It has been seven long months of mostly Fridays analyzing this very long book. I should say, I am going to have one more and that will be my total book summary next week. I will stop looking at each chapter and themes but consider the book as a whole.

I don’t want to completely ruin the ending so I am not going to talk about what exactly happened, even in summary. But, what I will say is that the ending didn’t fully fit into the flow of the rest of the book (to me). That is all I am going to say about that.

The thing that I am going to talk about today is the symbolism of the Taggert Transcontinental bridge across the Mississippi. This bridge has been mentioned in many chapters throughout the book. I want to talk about what it means and what it doesn’t.

As the story goes, the bridge was built in 1885. It was originally forbidden by the barge companies running up and down the Mississippi river. Nathaniel Taggert was even sued and lost in his ability to build it. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled on the matter that he eventually won the ability to build the bridge. And so he did “with his bare hands’ as the story goes.

Apparently, there are very few crossings of the Mississippi river and this bridge is one of them. Throughout the book as things progressively got worse, there was always hope because the bridge still stood and was functional. Most of the track problems seemed to happen in the mountain west or southwest. The fact that the bridge was still available allowed the possibility of transcontinental service by rerouting around the problem areas.

It is said that Rand developed a psychological discipline called Objectivism. In a nutshell, it is the use of reason and logic as a basis for belief. I suppose that this is different than the Freudian school which are the three personalities or the Frankl school of experiential development. From a logical basis, I can understand that bridge functioning = potential hope. But I really see the error in that line of thinking is really too simple of an analysis.

Just think using a simple example. I am still alive so therefore I have a chance at becoming an millionaire. What I didn’t say is that I haver terminal cancer and that I am on life support. Yes, there is a chance that someone could hand me a lottery ticket and I could become an instant millionaire in the next drawing. It is possible. What isn’t said is the probability is almost zero. Even if that did happen, so what. I wouldn’t live long enough to cash it in. I wouldn’t live long enough to spend it or possibly write it into my will to give it away.

I don’t have a problem with Objectivism per se. It seems like a perfectly fine way to run as railroad as they say. But, it does seem to be a fatal character flaw with Dabny and it is certainly no proof that this is a valid discipline; the very idea that Ojectivism is based. Now, I don’t want to get all philosophical, this is an area that I have little education or training. But, I believe that logic only exists on facts and facts only exist on what is, not what could be.

So as in life, decisions have to be made. Facts forecast probable outcomes and those are the basis of decision, not facts themselves. Each decision is a gamble based on probability, risk and potential reward. Logic by it’s nature cannot be involved with uncertainty. That would mean that A may not result in A and because A might eventually equal B or A might equal C.

Just like I could win the lottery on my deathbed, so could a catastrophic event happen in business or government. Near certainty is not certain, it is almost likely. This is where the saying ‘barring uncertain circumstances’ comes from. On one hand, I admire the never give up mindset. But, I will say this is the attitude of running an empire, not creating one. Because I believe that you have to quit things that don’t work or won’t work.

End Your Programming Routine: As we wrap up our time here with this book, I have to say it has been an amazing journey for me. My eyes were already open, but it is so strange to read events of fiction written over seventy years ago coming alive in real or near real time. I think if you asked people fifty years ago, this was a playbook of what not to do. Now, it seems like a playbook of what is happening. That is sad. What you do about it is be informed on the issues, but live your life for yourself and not others, just like John Galt.

January 20, 2023 – Atlas Shrugged 3:9

January 20, 2023 /

This is the second to last chapter and we are heading to the big bang. Last chapter we had Galt’s refusal to cooperate, so where does that leave us? Well in true government fashion, we need to double down on failed efforts. Because more of the same will eventually work, right?

I keep saying that things are not going well but truly they are failing at this point. I think that our own experiences have proven that failing is often hard to recognize when you are in the middle of the collapse. You need a point of reference in order to establish how much change has actually occurred.

I am going to skip the chapter synopsis but to say that Dr Stadler and Cuffy Meigs blow themselves up at Project X trying to take over a portion of the country. Numerous high level government officials quit because of hopelessness and others just go straight strongman.

I want to go back to the idea of collapse. I have heard it describe as slow collapse because it doesn’t happen overnight. I suppose that there are those immediate changes like in the case of a coup. But, I actually think that this is normal. If we think about near history collapses like the Soviet Union it was fairly quick as over the course of a couple months. It probably seems fast because we condense history but I am pretty sure that three months of hell doesn’t seem fast at the time, especially if you are in it.

The course of Atlas Shrugged seems to run over multiple years. If there were concrete date references, I missed them. But I do distinctly recall descriptions of different seasons and we went through multiple winters and falls in the book. My point with this is that this would be termed a slow collapse.

There are so many things that we are born into that we never knew any different. Recently, I have heard many comparisons to the speculation of 2023 and 2008. For those that don’t study or remember history, 2008 was when the US government had a policy of “Too Big to Fail”. Different pundits are predicting that 2023 is going to be worse than 2008. Let’s take a look.

Yesterday, I was reading a headline “223,000 non-farming jobs added in December 2022”. The subtext of the headline was that this number blew expectations out of the water. And the implications from that is that things are so much better than expected and you should feel good about this too. I say this in context that also released in the Twitter files the FBI paid Twitter $3.5million for the ability to influence who and what was allowed to be posted on twitter.

Now I ask you, even if the numbers are truly accurate can we even trust any source at this point? Even if we believe that to be true, how many jobs were lost. I saw a lot of sizable numbers between Meta, ABC, Twitter and Amazon. You see, when you add 200 but lose 500 there is a lot to be desired. The headlines I was reading to support this writing was saying the ‘hot economy is starting to cool’. I am thinking to myself ‘what hot economy’? It’s hard to say that seven interest rate increases and 50% inflation equals a hot economy,

Anyway, I am probably going to get out of my lane if I keep going because I am not going to provide proper source citing for this. My point here is that we are in collapse and we have people telling us how lucky we are going to get. At the risk of mixing politics and economics, I ask are we more free today than we were in 1980 or less? Since there is no evidence that anyone can provide that we are more free, we have failed liberty. And that is a collapse in my book.

End Your Programming Routine: This topic could warrant an entire series. I also think that there is very little that be done about all of this, especially as an individual. I suppose the good news is that it is not a violent collapse. Smart money recognizes the situation and takes advantage of it. Don’t be afraid to study the rules and find the loopholes, there is still profits to be made in my lifetime. And that is all we need to be successful and by proxy happy.

January 13, 2023 – Atlas Shrugged 3:8

January 13, 2023 /

We are getting close now, I can almost taste it. After this chapter, there are approximately 40 pages and two chapters remaining. I have to say, I didn’t anticipate completely what happens in this chapter and I am still noodling how this is going to end. So let’s get into it.

This is the chapter that follows the 60 page statement by John Galt. Immediately, the government representatives that were hijacked are stunned. The entire country is in a tailspin, of course and government continues to put up a false front. This is where the plan to coopt John Galt starts to happen.

Dabny looks up Galt’s address despite being warned not to. Her finding him draws the government to him as well. They capture John Galt and he is then held in an attempt to give the appearance that he has joined sides with the status quo.

The entire book has been this chess match of proxy conflicts between the group saying they represent ‘the people’ and the group of people that say that they represent ‘the individual’. In this chapter, we have direct interaction between the two groups. Surprisingly, Galt gets captured and is held prisoner in the attempt to win him over to the side of the people.

I suppose, this is where the rubber meets the road in this chapter. It is sometimes a good strategy to emulate what is successful for your own purposes. For instance, I have heard the advice that if something is working in a particular genre, then that means that there is a market and the possibility for it to work for you. In more plain language, I will use an example.

In today’s day and age, there is a kind of career as what is called ‘an influencer’. The nearest way I can figure is that people get money for being a celebrity of sorts. It is enough money to be a full time job and sometimes significant amount of money. So, because that is a career, that means that there is room for others to do the same thing even in the same space. The same can be said for contractors or widget makers too.

What isn’t said or known is the formula on how to make it actually work. Certainly, there are attributes like appearance, use of popular platforms, consistency of interaction but there are also intangibles; one of them that I would call luck. My point with all of that is that emulating success is a way to obtain it. I think we have quite the opposite in Atlas Shrugged.

One of the characteristics of obtaining success is authenticity. Politicians are in a way influencers as well. Recently, a former pope just died. During his time at the head of the Catholic church, he was seen as a traditionalist or conservative. This direction of the church was really seen as a shift from the populist direction of his predecessor.

I am not a Catholic, but a Christian so I am adjacent. There is no doubt that the Pope is an important figure to people in that religion. My sense is that even though there was strife over policy, there was no doubt that he was a man of faith and genuine in his beliefs. What I am trying to say is that whether we agree with the direction I don’t think that we can disagree on the intent.

That is the thing that any organization which tries to coopt a movement or attach itself to a rising star could possibly make it work. Of course Atlas Shrugged was not going to work because the government really didn’t believe in the same things as John Galt. They wanted to use his popularity and be seen as associated with him rather than embrace his beliefs. The reason that I say this is because they truly don’t need Galt to fix the problem, they need to change their beliefs and therefore the policies.

I sometimes think that a parliamentary style government would be better than our government. But, then I think that Parliaments are so much more subject to opinion with the ‘no confidence’ card that can be played that I am left with no good government options. You might think that makes a government more responsive to the people but my observation is that it is an entity that is more manic.

End Your Programming Routine: Just like Lord of the Rings and a score of other fiction works, you cannot control the power if you are not worthy. Simply attaching your name to a rising star doesn’t work without being genuine with your convictions. Even at the point of a gun, John Galt refused to cooperate. Because after all, are you going to murder someone on a national broadcast? Before completely chancing it, know your environment and risks. If you stand for your convictions, you can’t be swayed, even by force.

January 12, 2023 – The Red/Green Show

January 12, 2023 /

Back when I had first got out of college and began my career, of course all of my co-workers were older than me. I remember one of them that could have been my dad was so ecstatic about this Red Green Show. He went on and on about how funny it was and that I should watch it. For us, it aired on PBS on Friday nights so I tried to watch it once and I didn’t get it.

Red Green was the main character’s name. I feel like Red Green was also a dichotomy; kind of two states that cannot exist simultaneously. You can’t be a handyman and use duct tape to fix everything for instance like in the TV show. This leads to today’s topic of red and green lasers.

I have had a red laser for 5-7 years. The laser is put into the bore of the barrel and used to project a dot that you would then try to manipulate your scope so that the first shot is on paper. This is the process of bore sighting a scope. After numerous uses at the range I decided that red is not adequate for range work.

The picture on the left is in near darkness. The camera flash made it seem lighter than it really was. My point is that in the dark, the red laser is readily visible up to 25 yards or so. I have used it in the basement to get a preliminary bore sight. But, I really only have 10 yards of distance in my basement. At the rifle range the closest target stand is 50 yards. Sometimes even that initial bore sight is not adequate enough.

This is when I decided that I would try green. I haven’t actually used it at the range yet but the picture on the right is outside in the daylight. I had to get close enough so that the camera could actually pic up the dots (about five yards) but I could see it at 15 yards easily. By the time I could see the green dot in the camera, I could also see the red light with my eyes.

Light in the green spectrum is easier for the human eye to see than red in daylight. A couple things to be aware of. Green light requires more power to generate. So, you will see with pricing that they are also more expensive. I have heard that you get a couple of hours of laser usage with green but double or more with red. So, a long day at the range you may run through a battery or more.

In my day (before cheap lasers) if you had one it was red. That means that red lasers are ubiquitous in laser sights and bore sights. But, now there are often choices between red and green. Pick green if money is no option. But, don’t feel bad about red. My view is that lasers are low-light tools when it comes to aiming. I suppose that my vision and skill is fine enough that in daylight I am going to use the sights and not rely on the laser for aiming.

As I said above, I have yet to use this green laser on any sight in activity. So, what I am talking about comes from colloquial wisdom and not experience. What I can say is that I can’t see the red laser at 50 yards, so there was a lot of guessing when I was working on sighting in last year.

End Your Programming Routine: This is one of those topics that I had on my list for Tacticool Thursday last year. This is an example of some of the stuff I am occasionally going to talk about still. I am going to reduce the frequency of this kind of content and I am surly going to avoid outing anything specific that could be construed as illegal in today’s political content.

January 6, 2023 – Atlas Shrugged 3:7

January 6, 2023 /

Well, well, well… we meet again. I have to say that this is one of those chapters that goes completely off of the rails. It is completely and unnecessarily too long. It is an over sixty page soliloquy by John Galt and his reasons for doing what he has done. I actually think that this is probably Rand speaking. I think that the this probably could have been done very effectively in 10 pages. It took me probably six hours to read this and even then I don’t think I got most of it.

After the last chapter, he finally did it. Reardon finally through in the towel. As a result Mr. Thompson was going to give a national address. In case you don’t recognize the name, Mr. Thompson is the President at the time. Not so fast, John Galt hijacks the broadcast and here is the longest statement in written history.

There is a lot of good stuff here that just makes sense, but really there are two things that I want to talk about. The first one is the name of the section ‘A is A’. On the surface, you might think that this is kind of gibberish. But, it makes perfect sense because it is exactly as it sounds and it is exactly what is happening today.

What John Galt is saying is a functioning and proper society must be accept the reality that one thing cannot be another. Or said another way, A cannot be B otherwise it would actually be B and not A. As one example let us talk about gender. It is pervasive throughout the school system and soon throughout society that there are more than two genders. In fact, at our local high school we had a homecoming king, queen and a non-binary (something or other).

There are kids that are X, there are kids that allegedly identify as they/them or literally plural. This stuff doesn’t even make sense. This creates all kinds of issues related to sports competition and even locker room assignment. I have even been seeing stories about how people went through gender re-assignment and now are trying to transition back to their original gender. These are kids that don’t even know what they are going to do after high school thinking that they are born in some deficient manner with respect to their gender. I would argue that they don’t even know what being either a man or a woman is supposed to be.

Like any good Libertarian, I could care less if someone wants to identify are a cat, but A is A. It is dangerous to deny biology and reality because we are convincing ourselves that it doesn’t exist or we can wish reality is not really true if we tell ourselves that it isn’t. We should probably do away with all the homecoming nonsense anyway, I don’t see much value.

The second thing that I want to talk about is to quote John Galt directly. “The evil of the world is made possible by the sanction that you give it. Withdraw you sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to win on your enemies terms or win at a game that they are setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those that enslave you, do not beg for alms from those that robbed you be it subsidies, loans or jobs do not join their team to recoup what they have taken by helping them rob your neighbors.”

It goes on but it makes the point so elegantly. This is what I have been saying about politics all along. No matter the side, either side is taking from someone to further their own agenda and personal riches of the people that are connected within. We need to stop thinking that we can vote ourselves out of the problems we have. To be frank, our problems are the result of us voting in the first place. Picking a side endorses the system into existence.

I do this as a hobby and because I am trying to change people’s programming. The fact of the matter is that I am not surprised that a single contested race did not end the way that I wanted. I didn’t vote for third party candidates or just ‘throw in a protest vote’. I voted for what I thought was the lessor of the two evils. But I also did it to make a point that my local society is 180 degrees of my own personal beliefs.

I have talked about scientific laws and theories before. A theory is something that cannot be either completely proven or disproven but a law is something that cannot be disproven. The theory of relativity is a theory because we can’t actually test it. We cannot travel at the speed of light to find out that we have aged relative to the speed that we have travelled while others have aged relative to the distance that we travelled in that time. If we start to tell ourselves that Newton’s first law is Force = sunshine/rainbows instead of mass * acceleration then we haven’t accomplished anything other than making ourselves collectively dumber. For those that don’t know E = mc^2 is the exact equation as F = m*a, more on that some other day.

End Your Programming Routine: It doesn’t surprise me that my philosophy falls on deaf ears. In the book, John Galt is willing to wait for the collapse of society because it is the only tool he has remaining. It seems like the course of the book lasts five years or so and accelerates quickly. We are watching and even enabling our own collapse as we live and breathe, it is just happening so much slower that we are not even seeing it. Like John and his peers, there might come a day where I realize that my efforts to change programming are beyond my reach or ability. And like Dabny at this point, I am not willing to give up.

December 30, 2022 – Atlas Shrugged 3:6

December 30, 2022 /

I think that it is fitting that we end the calendar year on Atlas Shrugged. This has been a monumental review series for me. There has been so much good and relevant content that seems to be evergreen even though it was written in the 1950s. This chapter is no exception.

Hank Reardon’s family tries to backtrack on their relationship with him. They try to apologize to him because the state has seized all of Reardon’s assets and he has no more liquid cash to keep paying them. Reardon’s family wants him to start clearing assets so that he has cash flow to keep supporting them which Hank refuses to do.

The meeting with the government proceeded the meeting with his family. Essentially they were also backtracking because they were afraid that he was going to quit. They were offering what they called an equitable deal by combining all of the profits and dispensing them out by proportional furnace count. This plan was to be administered via the Steel Unification Board just like the railroad. The fact that Reardon had fifty percent more output with a third the amount of furnaces did not sit well and Hank refuses to take the deal.

As Reardon left the meeting he found a riot in front of the gate to the steel factory. The riot was labeled as union driven but was apparently incited by the government reps, specifically Tinky Holloway who was slated to be the head of the Steel Unification Board. I will spare all the intimate details so that you can read the book and all of the twists and turns. Suffice to say, I want to talk about the riots.

There is a term that is called ‘Astroturfing‘. It means that there is something that appears to be organic or natural but really isn’t. In context, it is generally used to describe events such as protests that are often heavily funded or staffed by outsiders. This is what we have with the steel mill riots. where the rioters are not even workers or union members but paid rabble rousers.

Practices like this are used for the optics of the situation. When some event is dubbed the ‘Million Mom March‘ then there darn well be at least one million moms attending or the cause will be deemed illegitimate. You can read the link if you like, I am going to talk about it next.

Wikipedia states that the million mom march organization said that there was 500-750,000 people in attendance. National Park Service estimates 150,000 but the organization’s numbers included 70 satellite gatherings in their numbers as well. If you remember the media coverage, special camera angles were used to make the gathering appear as full as possible and therefore how could it not be one million moms.

This event was a re-branding of Handgun Control Incorporated (which incidentally has been named two other things and is now Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence). So I ask you, what sounds more benign, Handgun Control Inc or the Million Mom March? And what were they really marching for? Were they loving, caring moms or were they trying to impose their political and moral beliefs on others?

Brady has been around since the 1980s and will likely be around forever more. But, their new name sounds a lot like some other organizations like Moms Demand Action; really, not really. If I look at the summary statement when I search the group, I read ‘a grass roots organization’ but on the very same page I see that the parent organization is Everytown for Gun Safety and their actual name is Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

Let us just look a little further. When I search Everytown for Gun Safety, I find that the founder of the organization in Michael Bloomberg. I am not going to say that a billionaire cannot be the founder of some sort of organization, but I am going to have a hard time swallowing the ‘grass roots’ definition.

Grass roots means that it starts with you and me. I seemed to have misplaced my 75 billion extra dollars, so I think I am one of the people. What I am getting at here is that every time we see some sort of national political/equity movement, look a little deeper into the origin story like this one sponsoring Black Lives Matter (Tides Foundation).

Just wait until the next chapter, we are going to learn all about ‘shared prosperity’. I am equally enamored by the self titled definition of ‘charity’.

End Your Programming Routine: I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this but I am all for equality. My definition of equality is just that, equal. If you remember my analysis of Rights in the American Dream Series then you will remember that Rights are actually subjective. This my friends is getting to where it is at. The fact that Rand laid all of this at our feet seventy years ago and we are too stupid to recognize same game different players is our own fault. More on that as we progress. See you in 2023 for the finale.