The Age of Make Believe

 

Inertia

The Age of Make Believe

Collective incompetence

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

  

            Corn Pop was a bad dude, and he ran a bunch of bad boys!

                                                                 ~Joe Biden

 

            Based on the bold story from the fellow that spends several hours a week at the White House, Corn Pop was chastened to the point he and his pompadour hairdo were thrown out of the black swimming pool by the only white guy represented to be brave enough to confront he and his posse of bad boys.

            Completing his watch from the lifeguard stand, that future office occupier began to worry about the consequences of the expulsion and the threat from the departing Corn Pop of working on him with his straight razor. At that point, yet another emerging white guy (the white guy count increased as the yarn was spun) suggested cutting a piece of the chain from the divider between the shallow and deep end of the pool and using it as a weapon in the event of need.

            So, it was that the budding young diplomatic tough guy met Corn Pop, the rock star tough guy, at his car and charmed his way into the gang leader’s good graces. He claimed he provided cover for the bad boys the rest of their summer and the whole crew lived in peace and solidarity. It all kinda’ makes the hairs stand up on your legs just like this same white guy of record described his bleached blond hairs standing up on his legs that summer as the black kids felt of them.

Maybe that same make-believe strategy is in play to bring his Russian counterpart into the fold along with his modern band of armed bad boys … after the gang gathers the Ukrainian spoils.

Inertia

Inertia was a word that was brought into common American vocabulary along with the first space flights. It was and is more often misused than used properly.

Inertia is the passive property of a body that opposes forces applied to it. If a body is at rest, there is resistance to put it in motion. If a body is moving, there is a similar resistance to slowing it down. In other words, the condition of existence has a natural inclination to remain in the state it finds itself.

I’ll submit the condition of inertia applies not only to motion, but to the condition of enterprise.

Driving up Highway 28 recently and observing the farming brilliance of folks like Willie Joe and his father reinforced the fear of the departure of agriculturists of their stature. The level of intensity to year after year assume the risk, submit to the immensity of the effort, and to continue to charge relentlessly into the claws of regulatory burden that come from every direction takes courage that few know. Array the factors and consider the assault they face. All forms of government have become an outright foe to any secure labor availability in their broad array and mosaic of social sweepstakes ventures. Diesel has reached the tip over point of $4.00/gallon. Historically, fertilizer costs have run about 17% of budgets, but the 2022 price runup of as much as 210% is a trainwreck in process. Herbicide availability is being buffeted by similar pricing due to ingredient availability and regulatory assault.

In fact, highlight every cost category and the result is the same. It's a war with expanding constraints from every direction, but the grandest foe of all is water or, more accurately, the absence thereof. In short, the absence of substantive supply enhancements since the early ‘60s is dangerous beyond any measure of the make-believe world of the environmental malcontents and their scribes in Washington, Ottawa, Berlin, Paris, New Amsterdam, San Francisco, Austin, and Santa Fe.

The parallel worry, though, has become the talk. It isn’t just occasional anymore. Everybody is asking why they are continuing to do these things, assuming these risks, and subjecting to the crushing assault on mental and physical health without even a hint of a tentative path forward.

There is a bottom line.

The stepwise halting of this American miracle of agriculture, this force of disrupting the state of inertia of production, has consequences that cannot be fixed by the collective incompetence that holds sway over our existence.

The Age of Make Believe

Corn Pop’s white buddy is the most dangerous figure head of that collection of incompetence, and every sane body knows that (including our enemies). His seconds are equally if not more dangerous to the American model. Witness numbers two and three in the current line of presidential succession.

Underlying that are the symptoms of our national sickness.

Fully, 40% of our national expenditures are now in the form of debt. Only 35% of the budget is discretionary and controllable to some extent which means we could eliminate all the expenditures that can be controlled and still not eliminate the requirement of debt reliance to fulfill the ongoing and cataclysmic spending orgy. Secured debt now surpasses $30,000,000,000,000 or double all American consumer debt. We are witness to and complicit in the most dangerous border in the entire world. We are 60 years behind in updating our water resource production, storage, and distribution systems. We are no longer energy independent. We are prisoners to the secular green eejits that could not distinguish the difference between a combine and a cultivator sweep. Nuclear energy has the same modern connotation as did leprosy in biblical times. We incubate flu virus in our nasal cavities with masks worrying about dying at a rate of less than half of one percent of those who contract the virus while we were never taught that upwards of 65% of the first settlers in Virginia perished trying to create the world today which much prefers an iPhone to any contrived or equally make-believe wilderness area. We were never taught that the real reason of the need to separate church from state was to get out from under the Church of England that demanded tax money and land from the colonies so they, too, could live off the backs and control the lives of the ordinary citizenry, and, through it all, we turn a blind eye to the leading cause of death annually … the killing of babies.

We are in a bad place, and, the truth is, it is predicated on nonstop make believe at every level of leadership.

 

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “If there is to be a miracle in Ukraine … it will be the citizenry and the proxy for their 2^nd Amendment.”