Bringing the Hammer Down

I have been posting links to this blog on my LinkedIn account (and not much else there) for some time. However I did recently post an article there about a Tech VC’s views on wealth and happiness, thinking it would be a worthwhile change. I was wrong. Those approaches to wealth generation will only remain possible as long as this society remains resilient against the current efforts to turn it communist. Yes, a local network of capable friends and allies will be very valuable after such a turn, but nearly all the things we do on LinkedIn will not. Networking for private jobs, idea and information-exchanges, referrals, sources of talent and capital, etc. – The state will tell you what will be with all of that. Thinking of starting a new business ? – Well if you build it, it may be taken from you. Not only will GNP and personal worth decline, but also America’s richness in creativity and innovation, in culture, arts, and other forms of thinking and expression.

The Biden administration’s polls are in the tank, “Lets’ Go Brandon” tunes are #1 on iTunes and other lists, yet it keeps coming out with more assaults on us like the move to give $450K to illegal border-jumpers while cutting back the retirement benefits for native citizens, and possibly shutting off another gas pipeline to Michigan where people need it to stay warm in the winter. So it is clear that we are in the late stages of this Marxist takeover where the government is callously and openly indifferent to the difficulties its policies are causing to ordinary people, and it is no longer even pretending to seek your approval, support, nor endorsement. Instead, it is rushing to make its final plays to lock us down against our will.

Since May, Biden has been secretly flying illegal aliens around the country in the dead of night with the intention to grant them all citizenship and bonuses, provided they vote Democrat. There has been no notice to the states, and those pulling the strings in his administration have been targeting the Republican states. The dems will give no answer to the stupid Republicans’ crowing that there will be a huge “Red Wave” in the 2020 elections, because their answer is subversion: Watch them rush to push through the “US Citizenship Act of 2021” which will grant voting rights to as many as 11-18 million illegals to tip the election. The useless Republicans did nothing more than to tisk-tisk Biden’s flouting of federal immigration law that was obviously-purposeful from day 1, instead of taking him to task on it in court. The only groups of illegal immigrants that his administration IS returning to their home countries, even though most are legitimate refugees from them, are those coming from Venezuela and Cuba. Because those people are fleeing Marxism and they would never vote for it here.

The administration is moving to appoint radicals like Omarova, Sohn, and Bedoya into the bureaucracy now, looking at stacking the supreme court, and at replacing all cryptos and cash with a federal CBDC that would put all of our money and transactions under the eyes and control of government. Omarova’s confirmation review is under way and her economics mirror the USSR where she grew up. She wants to shut down private banking and re-park our savings with the Fed, and to require businesses to serve some governmental purpose. How status-quo is that ?

David Horowitz is an interesting voice on the push for all of this, because he is a conservative who used to be a communist agitator. He bluntly calls out the Republicans’ for continuing to spectate while the people on the left fight to eliminate them. He scorns that they continue to call them ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ while they in-turn are baselessly labeled as ‘white supremacists’ and ‘domestic terrorists‘. Around a dozen of Republicans in the senate just bailed-out the democrats’ $1.75 Trillion spending bill, which they were completely deadlocked on. McConnell and those other RINOs just wont fight to preserve America. But when the democrats have the upper hand legislatively, they always go straight for the kill. I think Horowitz is likely correct that we are one election away from losing our country.

There is also a big push of aggressive muslim immigrants trying to break into the less-socialist eastern European countries like Hungary and Poland now, but those countries are actively protecting their borders. There is hopeful pushback appearing though. In Austria, the police and the military have sided with the people by refusing to obey the government’s order to them to enforce its covid passport dictats. But the poor people in Australia have been bullied to the point where they are afraid to gather in peaceful demonstrations anymore. The people pushing this great reset across the western world are trying to manufacture a great depression, assuming that people will then surrender their rights, which was basically how FDR got his New Deal enacted. Push is coming to shove and 2022 is likely to see disturbances arise. The moves from the Biden administration also has setup these coming months as a prime window of opportunity for aggressor states to make any desired military invasions into other countries (e.g., Russia into Ukraine, and China into Taiwan).

The word ‘fascism’ has been recklessly flung around in slanderous fashion over these past couple of years. It refers to a highly totalitarian society wherein the state hasn’t seized ownership of all the assets (communism), but still is in total control. Two of its defining characteristics are: (1) A complete and fierce nationalism throughout the population (“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles !”), dissent from which is not tolerated. (2) Though much of business and industry may still remain private, it all serves and answers to government’s whims unswervingly. In the political vanguard of the USA today, instead of fierce nationalism we see its opposite: a chorus of voices labeling the country negatively as an inherently racist, usurping, and subjugating one. At the same time, we are increasingly seeing corporate America moving beyond embracing woke norms (‘educating’ its people on pronoun usage, etc.) toward becoming more overt apparatuses of the governments’ ideals and agenda. Hiring managers at State Street Advisors can still make offers as-usual to the job candidates they most want to bring onboard – unless the candidate is a white male, in which case they have to appeal further up the chain of command for permission. Tech’s censorship and manufacturing of opinion are ever-ongoing. And apparently no new bank is likely to receive its charter unless it agrees to ‘bend its knee’ to the green/woke/collectivist lefty-zeitgeist imperatives.

One of my favorite Jazz guitarists, Pat Martino, just passed away. He once said when asked about artistic and creative talent that “Everyone’s greatest talent is their joy”. And it’s true that if you can manage to make a living doing that which absorbs you and which you love, you are going to be a more fulfilled person and you are more likely to create some unique and great things – but not if you live in a society that quashes that and tells you what to do and think instead. Frank Zappa’s story is one example from the musical realm that could only have happened in the America we have had so-far: As a (very) quirky teenager living on the edge of the desert in Palmdale California, he already knew that he wanted to be a modern classical composer in the footsteps of Stockhausen, Varese and Stravinsky, but he also knew that his chances of achieving that were basically nil. But determined, he checked some books out of the library and learned composition and music theory from them. He then learned to play the guitar so he could start an avant-garde rock band, incorporating other musical styles like doo-wop that he got a kick out of. This was in the later 60s when much of that genre of music was still experimental and explorative, so he could do what he wanted to and still put it out on records – and most of it was very ‘different‘.

He hired impeccable musicians into his band not to create with him but to precisely execute his own compositions. In his lyrics he mocked and made fun of anyone and everything from hippies to corporate execs, and of-course government. His irreverence eventually brought criticism from Tipper Gore’s “Parents Musical Resource Committee”, a group of politically-connected termagant busybodies who insisted that some of his silliest lyrics should be censored so that their children could not hear them. He appeared in congress and made them all look as stupid as they were by telling them that it is their role to determine what their kids should be exposed to, and that censorship is dangerous and unconstitutional. Later, when pop music became a more-defined “industry”, the execs at Warner Brothers told him that they wanted to impose borders around the sort of music and performances that he could do, (he loved bringing audience members up on stage to participate in various ways), and that he should wear clownish rock outfits. He told them to go stick it, built a recording studio in his backyard, hired his wife to run his own recording company, and carried-on.

By the time cancer killed him at age 52 he was creating music alone on a very expensive machine called a Synclavier, had managed to get several of his orchestral compositions performed including on one occasion with the London Symphony Orchestra, and had recorded over 60 albums. Since then the Zappa Family Trust has released over 55 additional albums posthumously from his archive. He was proud that he never took any government grants nor external funding to realize his goals. His records, which were illegal to possess in communist eastern-block countries during the cold war, were highly-prized by black-market collectors there as exemplars of artistic free expression. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the people of Vilnius Lithuania chipped-in to erect a statue of him in their town square.

No one with such a fiercely independent drive and a resolute refusal to bow, neither to authority nor to established norms, could ever make it in a Marxist society where all expression and thought has to accord with and support the state’s dogma. So remember that if we do become such a society, there will be a lot more lost than just our economic prosperity. What you can read, learn, hear, think, say, and do will all be prescribed for all of us (so listen to whatever you like now). Your greatest talent, your individual joy, will no longer be tolerated.

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” – FZ

When the norm is dictated and deviation from it is crushed, it’s over. We’re most of the way there. So what should we give our energy and attention to at this crucial juncture of history ?