Category: Deep Thoughts

In Pursuit Of A Dream

Deep Thoughts

I was watching some Eeewwchoob show about the evils of the lottery and how it’s just a disguised tax on stupid people and the poor and yadda yadda yadda.

One of the statements was that if you were to win a lottery with an advertised value of, say, $100 million, if you chose to take the lump sum payout instead of the annual payout, you’d end up with only $26 million, after taxes and so on.  ($100 minus the “lump sum penalty minus income tax.)

“Only” $26 million.  (Here’s where the “opportunity cost” canard, so beloved of finance people and con artists, comes into play.)  In other words, you’d be “losing” $74 million dollars because It’s All A Big Ripoff, Man.  Except of course that you wouldn’t be losing anything, but gaining many millions that you never had before.

And I don’t want to hear the old hackneyed saying about whether you buy a lottery ticket or not, you still have about the same chance of winning — which would be true if nobody had ever, ever won a lottery prize.  But as the newspapers are full of stories about how X won a lottery and then went broke after only a few years boo hoo, we have to assume that at least some people hit the jackpot.  So while the odds against are cripplingly high, they are not impossible.

So I play the lottery every week.  I only drop a few bucks at a time, because my feeling is that a $2 ticket is the cheapest dream you can get, and in any event I don’t live close to a casino where the odds are better but the payout is pathetic.  And if you know how the stock market can be and is being manipulated by huge institutions and giant index funds like Blackrock and Vanguard, you’d forget trying that form of legalized gambling too.

And I’m not saying the following is true in my case, not at all.  But something has occurred to me, as I’ve watched the economic news get worse and worse (thank you FJB) and the outlook becomes gloomier and gloomier, with prices skyrocketing and incomes remaining stagnant or even decreasing, with more and more hints that Social Security will end at some point, etc. etc.

I can’t help wondering that if all that shit really does hit the fan:  how many truly desperate people will not just turn to crime, but might take (in Tammy Keel’s immortal words) a sack lunch and a Mauser to the roof of a tall building, in the ultimate expression of nihilistic fatalism and despair.

And I wonder too how many people right now are being held back from doing so by having just the faint hope of that little lottery ticket in their pocket.

Marking Time

Deep Thoughts

Am I the only one who’s in a mood of suspension, here?

Of late, I feel myself facing the tide of daily events with a sense of either indifference or irritation — in the latter case, that whatever happens before the November elections will turn out to be irrelevant.

More than ever before, this election will be a watershed of some kind in this nation’s history.  If Trump wins the Presidency, perhaps he can do all the things — or at least most of the things — that could begin to turn the ship of state around, away from the looming catastrophe of Socialism that would most certainly be cemented in place should Harris and her Communist vice-president win.

I have to say that I felt the same way before Obama was elected, but not as keenly as I do now.

Is this what faces us, in the foreseeable future?  A perpetual cycle of eight years of socialism, followed by four years of slight correction, followed by another eight years of socialism?

I leave it to others — I have to leave it to others — to decide what happens from now on.  I am but one vote, one voice, and my age and failing health will prevent me from participating in what so many conservatives are calling a “revolution”, an upheaval so cataclysmic that for the first time in my life, I am afraid not just of that, but of the consequences thereof.

I have made all sorts of preparations, taken all sorts of precautions, but I fear that no matter what I have done, it will not be enough.

Conundrum

Deep Thoughts, Rights

The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”

And yet… you have a situation like this one:

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.

Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.

And how did he do this?

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.

I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13.  And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?

Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level.  And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:

Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele.  After all:

Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.

Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy.  Desperate measures were called for.

But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.

I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post.  Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.

But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.

And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons

The Name Thing

Deep Thoughts, Immigration

This one had me howling, in Comments:

I’m grateful for this opportunity to voice a question which has nagged me for many years: is Kim Du Toit really an American?

Look, I know you faced the choice: legally immigrate to America or be beaten to death in a cargo container. Anyone who has not faced that situation has no standing to say which is the moral choice. Nevertheless, your choice is questionable.

No reasonable person can doubt your commitment to constitutional, republican governance; to the public order so essential to the thriving of civilization; to entrepreneurship and the creative power of capital; to national defense; and ultimately to the rights and prerogatives of the individual.

However, you have certain… cosmopolitan tendencies, which cast doubt on your true allegiance. You have traveled to England and maybe even to Stockholm; places where child molesters are tolerated. We patriotic, heartland Americans might overlook such peccadilloes… except for one thing.

We can’t pronounce your name. Americans have made no secret of this: we cannot hear or pronounce French vowels or terminal consonants, and we understandably become violent when anybody points this out.

Previous generations of immigrants had the good sense to Americanize their names, is all I’m saying.

All good stuff, and it gave me much amusement. Let me take them in reverse order.  Firstly, here’s the story of the name.

When I became a U.S. citizen — I mean, on the very day I was sworn in — I was asked if I wanted to change my name.

It was the first I’d heard of this option;  nobody had ever told me I could do it when I became a citizen.  All I had to do was give a new name right there, and that would be the one on my passport and naturalization certificate (and SocSec database, automatically).

Had I changed it — one option was “Dalton” because it sorta sounds like “Doo-twah” and had two syllables, but I needed to think about it — it’s a big deal, changing one’s name —  and I had to make a decision right there and then.

So I didn’t.

And lo and behold, I found over time that people liked it — they said it sounded really cool and exotic — and it was quite a hit with the ladies, along with this kinda-fake Brit accent that I picked up at school.

Interestingly enough, when I asked both my American wives (Son&Heir’s mom, and Connie) if they wanted to keep their respective surnames instead of being saddled with this strange French thing, they not only refused, but refused loudly and emphatically.  (New Wife, when I asked her the same question, just gave me That Look so I changed the subject hastily.)

As to the other charges:

However, you have certain…cosmopolitan tendencies, which cast doubt on your true allegiance. You have traveled to England and maybe even to Stockholm; places where child molesters are tolerated. We patriotic, heartland Americans might overlook such peccadilloes…

(I chuckle helplessly again, even as I type this.)

I realize that the charge of “cosmopolitanism” is a serious one, especially to Middle America (the class to which I aspire, and the one with which I identify the most strongly).

But FFS, just because I speak several other languages that most Murkins can’t, and I like visiting foreign lands, and can tell the difference between Baroque- and Norman architecture, and likewise between Academy- and Romantic art, and Chopin and Schubert’s music, does this make me less American?

I even admit to preferring croissants over Wonder Bread, sausage rolls over hot dogs, and Victoria sponge cake instead of apple pie.  (I draw the line at BBQ, however:  no other food can compare.)

And I’m really sorry, but Wadworth 6X is just a better goddamn beer than fucking Budweiser or Coors.

Frankly, I think that Americans could do with a little more cosmopolitanism, if for no other reason than to break the bonds of bullshit American marketing of mediocre/awful products like the above (and let’s not forget “American” cheese, which is truly fucking horrible and no man should).

And I’m happy to do my bit to advance that cause, on these here pages and on this back porch of mine.

By the way:  I’ve never been to Stockholm, and I think child molesters should be burned at the stake, after extensive torture.