The Last of Us, Episode Underage Sex

The Last of Us is a zombie apocalypse show without that many zombies. Sure, on occasion the Z's run on screen, commit their slaughters and then run off. They're like the flood tide -- in and out on a regular schedule. It seems the show's creators want a soap opera with zombies, but the Z's don't talk, let alone gossip, hence their absence.

I take it all back. I saw a movie once where a zombie talked, only it was more of an internal monologue. He didn't much like being a zombie -- shuffling around, wondering if his arm would fall off and if his next meal is on the ground around the corner. This walking, talking, and complaining intellectual had real melodramatic potential. I won't say the movie was entertaining, but it made me feel better about my own circumstances. I started watching it because of the attractive girl in the promo (yes, I'm that shallow). However, even the beauty couldn't keep me interested. So: why would I watch a Zombie soap opera with so few zombies and not one stunningly attractive female? I hoped it might be worth a blog post.

The first episode of LOU was pretty good, so I watched the second. After the second, Joel "the morose" and the feisty, uncooperative girl he protects, are on their own. The third diverged into a lesson in morality: that it is possible for two people to work together if they both have facial hair. The fourth is like a road movie that asks the question why would Joel and the kid go to Kansas City? but doesn't answer it. Then the fifth asks: how the hell do they get out of Kansas City after they're dumb enough to go there? Well, it's a struggle, a real f-ing struggle -- worst than St. Louis!

In episode six we flash forward three months, and it's now a road movie without the road. They've been wandering around in the wilderness for weeks and they've passed this one "cabin in the woods" a couple times. Each time the girl insists they stop to ask directions but Joel refuses. He says he knows where they are, they're in North America. But when the cabin has a sign hanging outside that says "Soups On," they stop for some direction -- which the actors badly need. Even though the folks in the cabin have plenty of food, they eat and leave. When Joel is outside he grabs his chest and almost faints. I feared he'd die of heart failure and become just another old, dead white guy.

It's an anxiety attack. Before, when those monsters tried to kill him -- and that's just the regular people -- it didn't cause anxiety. In fact, Joel was so serene he could sleep through an ambush. For him, the root cause of anxiety is fresh air, trees, and a lot of peace and quiet. So: when you live on the knife edge, stay there.

The cabin couple told them to cross the River of Death, which, once Joel catches his breath, they do. Surprise! The far side does not hold the Heart of Darkness, as we're led to expect, but the Soul of Enlightenment! Enlightenment is confined in a stockade built around a picturesque small town whose former inhabitants turned into walking mushrooms. This ideal community runs on the principles of communism. Fortunately, no one has read "The Tragedy of the Commons," which would give away the ending.

I find it's a bad idea to get into political arguments with fictional characters, so I will point the gentle reader to And then there were none by Eric Frank Russell, who provides a fictional libertarian alternative (MYOB).

Joel and the girl stay in a beautiful house where the plush decor is the only sign of the composted previous inhabitants. The Matriarch of the Commie Commune gives the girl a diaphragm for use when she's having sex. Which raises the question: who is she having sex with? She's been on the road with Joel for months. They will leave early the next morning for another arduous journey to meet up with her parents (at least that's the story they gave the matriarch). She's having intercourse, of course -- with Joel. It has to be Joel. Oh, Joel, say it ain't so! Tell us the scriptwriters, who know you better than anyone, got it wrong.

But Joel is in no condition to have sex. If fresh air and trees made him anxious, being around enlightened and helpful people who mean him no harm makes him suicidal. No wonder he wants to run from that communal ideal and the witty girl, who put the "chirp" in chirpy. And sure enough, the girl tries to buck him up.

The gift of the diaphragm says the girl can have sex but she shouldn't have children. You see, Gaia finally got the human population down to a manageable level and the matriarch wants to keep it that way.

In any case, there's a rumor in the common dining area that the girl is a lesbian, so maybe the diaphragm is meant as a barter item for when she's on the road. In their communist system, you don't pay for your food and drink. How do they keep people from consuming too much? They hang fat people. Remember how the pleasantly uber-plump inhabitants of the cabin-in-the-woods spoke of this Shangri-la in the Rockies with a dead-pan dread? That couple wouldn't be hanging around the dining area, they'd be hanging around until they got cut down.

The next morning Joel and the girl are back on the road and Joel is looking for the end of the road. At the end of the episode, he finds it. 

In my review of episode one, I said that once Joel left Boston and its girl bosses he would have "room to grow (or shrink) -- if he can escape the ever-present, domineering forces of the matriarchy." Apparently, he carried the matriarchy around with him like a crushing burden, and rather than shrink he shriveled.

Hitler, the Socialist

From Tik History:

Hitler's Socialism: The Evidence is Overwhelming

Go get overwhelmed.

In my youth, I thought I was a Socialist. I was reading Upton Sinclair, the popular socialist novelist, and the socialists in his books about post-WWI Europe were good people and that was enough for me. Then he introduced the father of Fascism, the thug Mussolini -- only "the Moose" was a Socialist when he made his appearance. The National Socialist street-fighting "brown shirts," were socialist true believers brawling with international socialist "black shirt" true believers (Anti-fa, as it happens). An idealistic young German Piano prodigy becomes an idealistic SS commander.

The Bolshevik creators of the United Socialist Soviet Republics attract a menagerie of Western leftists to Moscow and St. Petersburg (aka Petrograd/Leningrad), including anarchists and syndicalists and every-other ist -- who then bail when things go south but carry the flame of revolution home with them.

True, Sinclair did argue that Hitler/Lenin/Stalin weren't true socialists but I had to ask, how do you tell the difference between the murderous and the benign kind of socialism? In later years I wondered: is fake socialism the only true socialism? Is the grass-roots socialist mantra, "fool me again" and "all power to the Sociopaths!"

As a tenth grader in 1964, I had to admit that Upton Sinclair sure could write. He not only talked me into his beliefs, he talked me right back out of them.

Don't change your mind, change your sex

Andrew Sullivan, who I've read off-and-on since he was at the New Republic magazine, asks: Is this "The Greatest Scandal In Gay Rights History? How journalists - yes, journalists - want to shut down reporting on child transition."

Discussing one program, he notes:

More than a third of the kids pushed onto the trans track had autism, sometimes severe. Others were victims of domestic abuse...No questions about other aspects of a child’s mental health were considered if the kid was identifying as the opposite sex.

It's the fall of 1968. I'm in a ramshackle college bar in a midwestern mill town nursing a Stroh's 3.2 beer -- a legal drink for 18-year-olds. A new girl (I'm unaware how new)  occupies the neighboring stool. I say, "hi." She says, "hi."

We start talking. She's from New York City. I ask if she's visiting relatives, one of two reasons an NYC native would turn up locally -- turnpike pile-up being the other. No, she's having medical procedures performed. "Oh?" says I, with a thoughtful pause, "what procedures are those?" I'm perplexed. My town is not known for medical tourism. She tells me she is having her sex changed from male to female and prepares for a confrontation she doesn't get.

As a Time Magazine reader back then, I knew everything that happened in the world a week after it happened. They'd informed me that sex reassignment surgery was available for those who were born one sex but were "hard-wired" for the other (with only two genders to choose from at the time). This is a rare condition, they explained, which affected maybe one in 100,000 -- whereas we now know it's half of the second grade at the local elementary school. How an otherwise credible publication could get its numbers so far off is beyond me.

Another possible explanation for the numerical disparity between then and now is "water fluoridation." The cumulative effect of all that fluoride could be fewer cavities and more gender-swapping. Naturally, the last part went unmentioned by the public health authorities to prevent undo discomfort in the rubes who simply refuse to cut down on their consumption of sugary sodas and would rather lose their teeth than rearrange their genitals.

There could be another possible, if unlikely, explanation. I once heard of a certain medical procedure where the number of operations performed in a locale was determined by the number of surgeons who perform it. Unfortunately, more people died who got the operation than among the people who remained ignorant of the cause of their suffering and took antacids instead -- death being the sometimes side-effect of the procedure. Apparently, this was not considered a sufficient reason to stop performing it.

Also, I had a friend who was a resident at the local trauma center.  He told me to avoid a certain surgeon whose blade should never be allowed to touch flesh. Everyone at the hospital knew about him but the guy still performed operations so...it's good to have a powerful union on your side. Sure, it's a delicate question, but one that needs to be asked: could the increased availability of medical specialists dedicated to the treatment of the condition account for the swelling caseload? Personally, I doubt it. Fluoridation, that's the cause.

It was the presence of a highly talented plastic surgeon, a man of my slight acquaintance, that made my town the "sex-change capital of the world." He had quasi-nude statues on the lawn in front of his office depicting the human form as GQ and the Swimsuit Edition intended (pre-body positive days). As a scruffy thirteen-year-old, I hitchhiked around town (considered safe means of travel by my peers -- which is not the same as being safe, though we had no problems). I got a ride from the doctor once. His "Truman Capote" like manner made him memorable. I knew him for a total of maybe eight-and-a-half minutes and rather liked him.

A few years later he was on a local television show to talk about prophecy, not puberty blockers. He combined the rhymes of Nostradamus (also a doctor) with the Book of Revelations to place the Second Coming at the close of the second millennium. He mentioned his own modest role in it (he was in one of the crowds, I think). With hindsight, his foresight was a bit off -- unless it was the second coming of crazy he anticipated.

He was the reason the "journeyman-lady" came to town for her transformation. Today, she'd go into the military. She was born a boy, she explained, but always had the mind of a girl. She was required to go through counseling and live as a girl for a time as she underwent hormone treatments. She seemed very much a female when I met her but the below-the-tummy "tuck" was still in her future. I thought, sure, changing your mind can be hard, but is changing everything but your mind easier? I did not try to dissuade her, though, because of what happened a couple weeks before.

I was in a different bar, one with "lounge" in the name, a classier place where the upholstery ain't held together with tape and they charge an extra nickel a drink to keep out the riff-raff. I'd spent several weeks on a summer job in a hot and loud foundry that produced missing fingers among the employees. Having worked overtime and escaped with digits intact, I felt both fortunate and flush with cash. I also found myself in the surprising position of talking to a beautiful, well-accoutered girl. She told me she was going to have a nose job because she didn't like her nose and she was finally doing something about it. This made no sense because, in her case, nature had achieved the pinnacle of nasal perfection, or so I thought.

Admittedly, I come from a family where the proboscis is a prominent facial feature. My father said we had "Noble Roman Noses," even though we weren't Italian. Perhaps it was my distorted view of nasal normality that caused me to counsel her hotness against the action. She had a quite lovely nose, I said, and a simple cost/benefit analysis -- given the possible downside risks -- shows she should not undergo the procedure. She reacted with great hostility, the way wrong-headed people often do when a right-headed person tries to correct their behavior for the overall benefit of the entire society -- a society whose medical resources need to be focused on real medical problems rather than catering to the vanity of stunningly attractive, cash-flush females. In her defense, she did leave town to have the procedure performed, maybe because she wanted to wake up still a girl.

Back at the shabbier bar, a large man came over to the "journeyman lady" and gave me a stern look as he addressed her. "Time to leave." He seemed more like a bodyguard than a friend or relative. As they left I thought, given how open she was about her transition, a bodyguard might be a prudent precaution. 

A few weeks later she was in that bar again and at the center of a celebration. She was now as much of a woman as she was ever going to be. I thought of that old saying, "no matter where you go, there you are!" I wondered if that applied to bodies as well as places.  If so, her problems were by no means at an end.

Disney's Anti-man but pro WASP

Doesn't Disney know that WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant?  This is a sub-genre of the White Supremacy conspiracy theory: the White Specificity conspiracy theory.

Disparu has a review of  Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the latest Marvel Movie.  I haven't seen it. I'll wait for it to show up on Tubi. Disparu's annoyed that the socialism of the movie "ants" is commented on quite favorably -- then finds much else to be annoyed by. The womanly WASP up-stages Ant-man in the big fight scene and I say "but of course!" Are the poor production values worse than the poor plot? Hard to say.

Apparently, the folks at Disney don't know that socialism comes in various flavors, which displays both an ignorance of history and a lack of imagination. For instance, if Putin took over Disney, top executives and whole creative teams would start "jumping" from the windows of very high buildings. Of course, this is not an example of true socialism -- just socialism as it actually exists. In true socialism, an ant happily works herself to death because she knows the Queen is her true mother and she and the other workers form a true and mighty sisterhood!  In false socialism, the ant sadly works herself to death after the Queen has falsely imprisoned her with the other bitchez and they all fight over scraps. False socialism is what we truly get.

Some will argue that Socialist Justice only requires the summary execution of the fat 'n happy few at the top, while the "creative teams" will churn out poorly produced, but highly expensive, sneakers at a repurposed "amusement park turned reeducation camp."

Forgetting that serious socialists are not easily amused, camp inmates will claim they've already been highly re-educated at Yale and Harvard and demand their student loans be "socialized" while they keep their cars and condos. The jokes on them. Their appeals will go unanswered but not unpunished. In the tragic aftermath, the world will be afflicted with tattered track shoes.

Early Stage Demen -- What's that called again?

Lately, Youtube's been shoving videos under my nose about how to tell if you're in the early stages of Dementia. I recently stopped worrying about early-onset Alzheimers (at my age, it won't be early), and now this. Let me say plainly: if I'm suffering from dementia, I want to be the last to know.

Now that I'm fully retired, I started posting here (after a long break) to keep my mind engaged with -- if not married to -- the thought process. Now I've noticed a feature on the Blogger dashboard called Stats. I wondered, what is this "Stats" thing and do they charge for it? Out of curiosity, I clicked on the "Stats" link and, to my surprise, got a page with -- stats.

There were some page views, which is unsurprising (I do visit my own blog from time to time). Then I noticed a recent interest in posts from the 2008 election. Now, not even I am interested in my thoughts on the 2008 election -- I was barely interested in my "thoughts" in 2008. So I suspect it's either 1) a graduate student analyzing "3Chan" rants (the predecessor to 4Chan) or 2) an FBI informant building a case. How to tell the difference? I'm thinking I'll sell a yearly subscription. The person who makes the purchase is the informant.

I should mention that in the post, "Doom for Democrats?" I speculate on the identity of the Phlegmatic Endtimer, Spengler, subsequently revealed as David Goldman. I sometimes think he is wrong-headed in his pronouncements but always with strong arguments to support his wrong-headedness. Some of his musings can be found here.

I wish I had hit the "stats" button earlier. At the start, I put some fiction on the blog as backup storage and later returned the pages to draft when I reread them and felt embarrassed. Now I see some of those stories got hundreds of page views during the time they were up.

Then there's the interesting case of Ask not for whom dat Canary croaks, it croaks for you!  The first seven years it got the expected couple of views. Then, all of a sudden, it got well over six hundred. Could it have been Russian bots?

Does Credit Expansion lead to Waist Expansion or Waste Expansion?

Jeff Snider at EuroDollar Univesity discusses the Chinese Stimulant that ain't fentanyl -- increased availability of Bank Credit.

Back in the 1980's I read that the Soviet Union had the highest rate of capital investment in the world and on the whole (or rather, "hole"), that investment produced a negative return -- requiring more investment. I read that and thought, "Gee, that can't be good." I had the picture of being on a treadmill and running to stay in place but the treadmill speeds up so, in the end, you're running so you'll fall behind slower. In such a scenario, collapsing from exhaustion seems the logical outcome.

In "The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities," Mancur Olson didn't discuss the credit markets so much as the "credit to" markets. In his view, the growth of self-dealing special interest groups in an otherwise growing economy produces economic sclerosis that leads to failure. The CCP is a collection of self-dealing special interest groups. Its near collapse during Mao's Cultural Revolution allowed a multi-decade spurt in economic development. Its reemergence as society's "guiding force" will likely herald its decline.

We face a similar danger in the good ol' USA. It's not the dealings of the Fed that will determine our economic future so much as the self-dealing of a web of special interests and influence peddlers I call "The Crony Class." Are they anti-climate change or pro their control of the nation's resources -- and do they see a difference? Crony class interests require a lot of lying-and-believing at the same time. ESG, anyone?

A Telluride Tell-all

If you ask yourself, "where does this lead?" and the answer is "nowhere good," then don't ask the question.

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of anti-racist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo—to retweet out loud.

Way back in the misty-misty, I saw Pulp Fiction with a progressive black friend and afterward said that Quintan Tarantino must have a special license for the prolific use of the N-word. My friend seemed both baffled and distressed by that comment. To me, it was a simple display of movement power. Think of an individual who can say, "You, right here, can use this word but you, over there, can't," and be obeyed -- and obeyed because they can enforce their will. That's a display of power.

I'd noticed that the left often defends the guilty (the murderers Sacco and Vanzetti) and persecutes the innocent (Bret Kavanagh), which puzzled me. I mean, there are plenty of innocent people who need defending. I figured it was a recruitment tool as well as a display of power. Anyone can defend the innocent but it takes a potential activist -- a person willing to commit to the cause and the "new morality" the cause promotes -- to defend the guilty. Once you accept that the murderer is the true victim and the innocent defender of the "loathsome" status quo is the real criminal, you are on your way. How about a donation?