Friday, June 30, 2023

Be Based, Young Man - Vox Popoli

 An interview with Noor bin Ladin:

By turns, Noor blends optimism and pessimism about the future. “I walk through the streets sometimes and think to myself, ‘My God, so many of these people don’t realise the war we’re in.’” But it’s clear enough to me that her attitude is ultimately one of hope for the future. When I suggest that the pandemic response has been a “great filter” event – an event that decides, quite literally, whether people are going to make it or not – and that most people have failed abjectly, she rebuffs me strongly. However many people have accepted events at face value and gone along with what the good doctor Anthony Fauci has told them, enough people are aware of the “war”, and of the stakes involved, that a globalist victory is anything but assured. Despite the reversals of the last year, what she calls the “Great Awakening”, which began five years ago with the election of Donald Trump, is still going strong. “People are fighting back” – look at the protests in France, the Netherlands and even Australia, which people have been far too quick to write off as totally lost, she says. The increasingly desperate measures taken by authorities, especially vaccine mandates, are a clear sign for Noor that things are not going as planned for the globalists.

And, for all the talk of irreligion, decadence and degeneracy over the past hour – however “far removed from God we are”, as she puts it – she trusts, nonetheless, that “we all have an innate sense of morality” and “people know that what is happening is wrong.”

“But whatever happens,” she adds, “God wins at the end of the day.” This seems like a good place for us to end our conversation.

There’s one last thing, though. Given the gravity of everything we’ve talked about – from Auschwitz to xenoestrogens – it feels almost frivolous to ask Noor the burning question, the question that prompted this interview in the first place. But since we’re wrapping up, I think “what the hell?” and ask it anyway.

So what is it based women really want?

“Oh that’s simple,” Noor replies, with a smile. “Based women want a man who’s even more based than they are.”

The sooner both men and women accept that the entire “Enlightenment” program was the nothing more than the continuation of the religious program of the most wicked of the ancient pagan evils, the sooner they will turn back to Jesus Christ, back to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and the sooner Man can return to building civilization rather than tearing it down.

If you can’t fight for the Cross, perhaps you can at least summon the faith to fight for flush toilets. If you don’t believe in Rome, perhaps you can at least summon the will to delenda Carthage. If you can’t accept the Truth, perhaps you can see enough of it to reject the Lie.

And it’s a healthy reminder not to hide your intellectual light under a bushel in a futile attempt to avoid female rejection. Instead, give them something to which they can be drawn.

DISCUSS ON SG

https://voxday.net/2023/06/29/be-based-young-man/

What Based Women Want - Interview with Noor Bin Ladin

 “When you look at the state of manhood in the West, it’s clear that we’re witnessing a time when the feminisation of men is reaching its climax after years of policies and social engineering.”

I’m less than a minute into my interview with the delectable Noor Bin Ladin, and it’s already abundantly clear that this won’t be a surface-level discussion of the more obvious stereotypes of 21st-century masculinity we’re all familiar with. It starts out gently enough – “What’s the first thing you think of when I say, ‘Men in 2021?’” Answer, “Soy boys!” – but then, hold your breath!, we’re already taking a deep-dive into the causes of the present-day crisis not just of masculinity, but of Western civilisation itself. I shouldn’t have expected anything less.

For those of you who don’t know, yes, Noor Bin Ladin is a member of that Bin Ladin family, and September is never the best of months to have that infamous surname. It’s a time that elicits solemnity and reflection from Noor. And this September is no exception, given that it’s the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. This September also marks the one-year anniversary of Noor coming out in support of Donald Trump with her “Letter to America”, and she plans to follow it up this year with another personal statement of support for the US. (By the time this interview “goes to press”, we’ll already know what it is, but at the time of writing all I had to go on was a few rather enigmatic clues.)

“With President Trump at her helm,” she wrote in her “Letter”, “America stands a chance at restoring her principles, pride, independence and true place in the world as beacon of liberty and hope for all. This to me, is what “Make America Great Again” means. Looking back at your country’s foundation, and preserving what makes it truly GREAT. But also knowing that the best is yet to come.”

It may come as a shock to you to learn that a member of the Bin Ladin family is an America First patriot, but in these strange times, when nothing is as it seems, it feels somehow rather apt. Noor Bin Ladin was born in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and Saudi father who just so happened to be Osama Bin Ladin’s older brother. When Noor’s mother realised she couldn’t raise her daughters according to Saudi traditions, there ensued an almighty legal battle in the Swiss Courts to allow her to raise them in the West. It was her mother’s victory in this battle, ‘this clash between my life and how different it would have been in Saudi Arabia had she lost’, and frequent visits to America from a young age that have made Noor so profoundly appreciative of what the West, and especially America, represents. This is why, rather than dispiriting her, the outrage of the fraudulent election has only made her fight harder for what she believes in. Soon after Biden was installed into office, she was exposed to the full glare of the global media spotlight for a boat-borne protest against him on Lake Geneva. She’s also made appearances on Tonight with Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic. She has an active, pugnacious presence on Twitter, with close to 60k followers. Noor Bin Ladin isn’t going anywhere; or, to put it conversely, wherever it is she is going, only she decides.

Social engineering, and especially the efforts of globalists and globalist organisations like Julian Huxley and the Rockefeller Foundation, is one of the main focuses of her work, she tells me; she likes to call her field “the real history of the twentieth century”. In particular, she’s interested in the way the 19th century science of eugenics was rebranded as “population control” after the events of the Second World War, which made social and medical intervention to curb or entirely remove “undesirable” populations a very hard sell. But while the name changed to a more pleasing euphemism, the attitudes and the methods remained broadly the same: a paternalist elite, self-appointed, would get to decide who reproduces and who doesn’t. (Noor calls that elite a “cult of Malthusian psycho-freaks”.)  The bad news? The vast majority of the world’s population doesn’t make the cut. “This whole population control movement,” she says, “is a direct cause of the state of manhood today.” The feminisation of men, up to and including the promotion of transgenderism, is a clear way “to limit reproduction.” It’s that simple.

Nor does the denigration and, finally, the destruction of the masculine ideal stand alone as an aim on the road to population control for these social engineers. Rather, this is just one prong of a many-pronged attack on the two genders and the root of their combined strength: the nuclear family. Abortion, the birth-control pill, irreligion, women in the workplace, sterile hedonism, transgenderism – all have, some more than others, been weaponised by the social engineers to force men and women apart and to make it less likely that they’ll have children. Noor and I both agree that this process has taken place in distinct phases, with a particular focus on changing women’s behaviour and attitudes in the immediate decades after the Second World War. One of the stranger ironies of the new transgender agenda (try saying that in a hurry!) has been the sustained attack on women, not only on the rights and “freedoms” they’ve won in the twentieth century, but also on the very biological notion of womanhood. Even stranger has been the enthusiastic acquiescence of many so-called feminists in this process. (One Twitter commentator whose name escapes me perceptively suggested that this is just the apogee of the AWFL desire for ethical self-effacement – to be, quite literally, defined out of existence for the greater good. How moral!) The upshot, though, is the same as before: confusion, disorientation and subversion of traditional gender roles.

Anybody who’s taken a cursory glance at the demographics of the Western world will, at the very least, have a hard time denying that we aren’t having children like we used to. Even so, to many the notion of a global depopulation plan will of course sound like the most lurid of “conspiracy theories” (DUN DUN DUN!). Well, I’m not here to pitch you the notion of such a plan, and neither, ultimately, is Noor Bin Ladin; although she could marshal, and does during our interview, an impressive array of evidence in favour of that idea. She speaks with certainty, and I can tell that she believes that at this point in proceedings, the globalist plan should be plain as day to anybody whose eyes aren’t screwed or glued shut; she says as much when we speak.

But I will say a few things, since Noor and I end up talking about them at length. First, the ideas and goals of eugenics are very old and also remarkably consistent across the ages. One thing that struck me when I was writing my cookbook, Raw Egg Nationalism, was how the ideas expressed about diet control in Plato’s Republic, for instance, mirror those that seem to lie behind the notion of a “Great Reset”, including the injunction that we must all give up eating animal products, especially red meat. In both cases, a grain-slop diet, free from meat, is an essential part of maintaining orderly control of the workers; on that Plato’s Socrates and Klaus Schwab, the ludicrous thrift-store Palpatine of the WEF, would seem to be in total agreement. The only substantial difference between then and now is that today’s eugenicists actually have the means to realise their perverted dreams.

Then there’s the question of whether the globalist depopulation plan actually qualifies as a ‘conspiracy’ at all, if by that term you mean that the plan is hidden. Because very little about the beliefs and desires of the most prominent globalists is hidden – far from it. Since the earliest days, groups like the Fabian Society, Rockefeller Foundation, Audubon Society and individuals like Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley have been quite open about their eugenic beliefs, and this openness has continued to the present day. I get the sense with Noor that there’s still a certain disbelief at just how brazen this “cult of Malthusian psycho-freaks” really is. They’re not even hiding in plain sight, as the saying goes. They’re just there, and all you have to do is look them up, and what they’ve said and done, on the internet. Bill Gates is obviously the most prominent example, but it seems that you only have to scratch the surface of a billionaire these days and you’re likely to reveal someone who believes that the higher man must transcend his fleshly body, merge with machines and jet off into space to fulfil some greater destiny. While the growing fascination with space may simply be to provide these billionaires with a pristine space to fuck kids away from prying eyes now that Little St James is off-limits, their obsession with life-extension technology and increasingly urgent preparations for some unspecified doomsday scenario – remember those bunkers in New Zealand? – at the very least suggest that they know something big that we don’t.

Like I said, it’s a whole can of worms, and one we could spend multiple interviews discussing. But we’re here primarily to talk about men – and maybe women too. Although she’s unequivocal about the fact that most men in the West these days aren’t exactly masculine (or attractive), Noor doesn’t blame them entirely for this state of affairs. In this regard, it pleases me greatly to learn that she’s hip to the xenoestrogen question. Xenoestrogens, if you don’t know – and you really should – are industrial chemicals that mimic the effects of the female hormone estrogen. By upsetting the natural hormonal balance, these substances wreak absolute havoc on our health and the health of a wide variety of animals too, including Alex Jones’s famous “gay frogs”. The worst thing about xenoestrogens is their ubiquity: they are quite literally everywhere – in the food, in the water and even, as we’re discovering with microplastics, in the air. As Noor points out, prominent “population control” experts like Paul Ehrlich, for instance, were saying as early as the 1960s that sterility drugs might have to be put in the water to limit the population (there’s a New York Times article about it if you don’t believe me), but even if the spread of all of these gender-bending chemicals isn’t totally deliberate, their feminising effects serve the depopulation agenda nonetheless.

“What we need is more egg men, not soy boys!” Noor chimes in at one point. I’m pleased that she intuitively understands what I’m trying to say about the importance of taking control of your diet in the modern world if you want to live a full and independent life. But the problem, as we’ve already established, is a societal one. How do we fix an entire generation of weak men? Noor finds it especially funny that China is now doing its best to curb effeminacy – “China bans ‘sissy men’ from TV, demands masculine role models and orders broadcasters to stop promoting ‘vulgar internet stars’”, runs one headline – at precisely the time that the US, including the military, is embracing degeneracy like never before. Noor tells me, by contrast, that Moscow has banned pride marches for the next 100 years. She’s in no doubt that the West must find the will to reverse its growing degeneracy.

Noor’s view of the current state of Western politics is, as you might expect, far from positive. ‘Politics is totally performative – how do you say? – astroturfed!’ (She laughs with abandon whenever a word comes to her, her mother tongue being French.) The endless squabbling of mainstream politicians is just a distraction from the real problems, which most politicians have no interest in solving. In fact, they have every interest in perpetuating them. Noor has a very keen nose for who is and isn’t a fake conservative, a uniquely besetting problem on this side of the chamber. The words ‘Ben Shapiro’ and ‘Dan Crenshaw’ elicit visible disgust from her, much to my amusement. Still, there are a few America First candidates, like Joe Kent, who are trying to take back the Republican Party, but it’s a tall order for sure.

For many, the answer to a broken political system, one whose institutions have been totally colonised by the enemy, is to withdraw from the wider pozzed world into based enclaves and intentional communities of like-minded individuals. It’s easy to see the appeal of this approach. Even so, neither of us believes it’s the right one. A few weeks before the interview, Noor and I talked at length about secessionism, and we both agree that this is the worst possible solution. The globalist game is divide and rule, and secessionism will only divide the United States and make it easier to rule. Look at the history of the smaller nations of Europe, say the former Habsburg nations after 1918, and tell me why an independent Florida or new Confederacy wouldn’t suffer the same fate. A real American civil war would almost certainly see the involvement, directly or indirectly, of other major powers like Russia and China, not to mention the UN. The answer, then? To fight for what is rightfully ours – all of it.

How? “We have to get involved locally”, something General Flynn, another of Noor’s heroes apart from Trump, has been a strong advocate of. Many of you will have seen the Twitter videos of parents bringing down righteous fury on school boards for their mask mandates or promotion of paedophilia, and this is precisely the kind of thing Noor means. Fight for your local communities and institutions, take them back from our enemies. One of the lesser-known facts of Biden’s “victory” is the way figures like George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg poured money into local institutions, including election officials, in order to capture them in advance of the 2020 election. Take care of the little things and the big things will look after themselves, or so the Bible has it.

So what’s to come? Noor is in no doubt that America is the lynchpin. “The future rests on the shoulders of America right now,” she says. “If America succeeds, the rest of the world has a chance.” It’s not just the fact that America remains, for now, the most powerful nation on earth that makes its fate the true test of whether or not global government will succeed. It’s what America represents and its unique arsenal of ideas and traditions, in particular the written Constitution, that make its people uniquely placed to resist. And the globalists know this as well as anybody else, which explains why so much of their effort, for decades but with increasing ferocity over the last five years, has been focused there.

By turns, Noor blends optimism and pessimism about the future. “I walk through the streets sometimes and think to myself, ‘My God, so many of these people don’t realise the war we’re in.’” But it’s clear enough to me that her attitude is ultimately one of hope for the future. When I suggest that the pandemic response has been a “great filter” event – an event that decides, quite literally, whether people are going to make it or not – and that most people have failed abjectly, she rebuffs me strongly. However many people have accepted events at face value and gone along with what the good doctor Anthony Fauci has told them, enough people are aware of the “war”, and of the stakes involved, that a globalist victory is anything but assured. Despite the reversals of the last year, what she calls the “Great Awakening”, which began five years ago with the election of Donald Trump, is still going strong. “People are fighting back” – look at the protests in France, the Netherlands and even Australia, which people have been far too quick to write off as totally lost, she says. The increasingly desperate measures taken by authorities, especially vaccine mandates, are a clear sign for Noor that things are not going as planned for the globalists.

And, for all the talk of irreligion, decadence and degeneracy over the past hour – however “far removed from God we are”, as she puts it – she trusts, nonetheless, that “we all have an innate sense of morality” and “people know that what is happening is wrong.”

“But whatever happens,” she adds, “God wins at the end of the day.” This seems like a good place for us to end our conversation.

There’s one last thing, though. Given the gravity of everything we’ve talked about – from Auschwitz to xenoestrogens – it feels almost frivolous to ask Noor the burning question, the question that prompted this interview in the first place. But since we’re wrapping up, I think “what the hell?” and ask it anyway.

So what is it based women really want?

“Oh that’s simple,” Noor replies, with a smile. “Based women want a man who’s even more based than they are.”

“And who might that be?”

“Mel Gibson wouldn’t be bad… Is he single?”


https://mansworldmag.online/what-based-women-want/

What Happens in Russia After the Longest Day? By Pepe Escobar

 Following Wagner’s ‘rebellion’ – which was nothing more than a blatant coup attempt, and a PR stunt demonstrated by Prighozin’s top-notch theatrics – NATO and the Collective West’s excitement over the possibility of Russia descending into chaos and civil war were quickly turned into utter disappointment.

The first draft of the extraordinary events that took place in Russia on The Longest Day – Saturday, June 24 – leads us to a whole new can of worms.    

The Global Majority badly wants to know what happens next. Let’s examine the key pieces in the chessboard.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is cutting to the chase: he has reminded everyone that the Hegemon’s modus operandi is to back coup attempts whenever it can benefit. This dovetails with the fact that the FSB is actively investigating whether and how Western intel was involved in The Longest Day.

President Putin could not have been more unequivocal: 

“They [the West and Ukraine] wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other, so that soldiers and civilians would die, so that in the end Russia would lose, and our society would break apart and choke on bloody civil strife (…) They rubbed their hands, dreaming of getting revenge for their failures at the front and during the so-called counter-offensive, but they miscalculated.” 

Cue to the collective West – from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on down – frantically trying to distance itself even as the CIA leaked, via its trademark mouthpiece, the Washington Post, that they knew about “the rebellion.” 

The agenda was painfully obvious: Kiev losing on all fronts would be ritually buried by wall-to-wall coverage of the fake Russian “civil war.”

There’s no smoking gun – yet. But the FSB is following several leads to demonstrate how the “the rebellion” was set up by CIA/NATO. The spectacular failure makes the upcoming NATO July 11 summit in Vilnius even more incandescent. 

The Chinese, much like Lavrov, also cut to the chase: the Global Times asserted that the idea of “Wagner’s revolt weakening Putin’s authority is wishful thinking of the West,” with the Kremlin’s “strong capacity of deterrence” further increasing its authority. That’s exactly the reading of the Russian street.  

The Chinese reached their conclusion after a crucial visit by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Rudenko, who promptly flew to Beijing on Sunday, June 25. This is how the iron-clad strategic partnership works in practice.  

“The rebellion” as a P.R. stunt

Arguably the best explanation so far of the nuts and bolts of The Longest Day has been offered by Rostislav Ischenko.

The Global Majority will rejoice that Prighozin’s theatrics, in the end, left the collective West dazed, confused, and shattered: wasn’t the whole thing supposed to unleash total chaos inside Russian society and the army? 

Even as the fake, lightning-quick “mutiny” was in progress, Russia continued to pound Kiev’s forces – which, by the way, were spinning that the main phase of the “counter-offensive” was being launched exactly on June 24 at night. That was, predictably, yet another bluff.    

Back to the Russian street. “The rebellion” – inbuilt in a very convoluted plot – in the end was widely interpreted as just another military demonstration (by master of ceremonies Prighozin, not by the overwhelming majority of Wagner soldiers). “The rebellion” turned out to be a Western P.R. stunt, a series of (ultimately faded) pictures for global consumption.  

But now things are bound to get way more serious. 

Lavrov, once again, pointed to the role being played by the ever-self-aggrandized Le Petit Roi, Emmanuel Macron, right up there with the United States: “Macron clearly saw in the developments an opportunity to realize the threat of Ukraine dealing Russia a strategic blow, a mantra NATO leaders have been holding onto.”

So just like Kiev and the collective Western media, Lavrov added, Macron remains part of a single “machine” working against Moscow. That ties up with Putin, who stated of Macron’s Sunday intervention that “the entire Western military, economic and information machine has been set in motion against us.” 

And that’s a fact. 

Betting on a “long-term economic blockade”

Another fact adds to the more ominous clouds on the horizon.  

While no one was paying attention, a mini-Congress of national security officials took place in Copenhagen exactly on the fateful 24 and 25 of June.

They were arguably discussing “peace in Ukraine.” The chairman was none other than US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.  

Present at the meeting were Brazil, Germany, the U.K., France, Italy, Denmark, India, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, South Africa, Japan, Ukraine – and the proverbial Eurocrat of the non-sovereign EU. 

Note the G7 majority, side by side with three BRICS and two aspiring BRICS+ members.

“Peace in Ukraine” means, in this context, the so-called 10-point “Zelensky peace plan,” which implies a total Russian strategic defeat – complete with the restoration of Ukraine within the borders of 1991 and payment of colossal “reparations” by Moscow.

No wonder China was not part of it. Yet three BRICS – call them the weakest nodes – were there. BRICS and BRICS+ prospective members compose the six “swing states” which will be relentlessly courted and/or submitted to hardcore Hybrid Wars by the Hegemon to “behave” when it comes to Ukraine: Brazil, India, South Africa, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.  

Then there’s the 11th EU sanctions package, which is taking the economic war against Russia to a whole new level, as attested by Acting Permanent Representative to the EU, Kirill Logvinov.

Logvinov explained how “Brussels intends to drag as many countries as possible into this war (…) There is a clear shift from a failed blitzkrieg, which was said to be aimed at causing irreparable damage to Russia, to a multi-move game with the goal of establishing a kind of long-term economic blockade against our country.”

That’s undiluted Hybrid War territory – and the key targets are the six “swing states.” 

Logvinov remarked how “the EU always prefers to use blackmail and coercion. Since the EU remains the biggest economic partner for many countries, as well as a source of investment and a financial donor, Brussels clearly has enough leverage to exert pressure. So, the EU’s fight against the bypassing of sanctions is expected to be lengthy and uncompromising.”

So welcome to extraterritorial sanctions, EU-style, blacklisting companies from third countries “suspected” of re-exporting banned goods to Russia or engaged in oil trade without taking the so-called Russian oil price cap into account.

Fun in the Belarussian sun 

Among so many cheap thrills, what will be the next role of the main actor in The Longest Day (and even before)? And does it matter? 

Chinese scholars are fond of reminding us that during China’s periods of turmoil – for instance, at the end of the Han and Tang dynasties – the reason was always warlords not following orders from the Emperor.  

The Ottoman Empire’s Janissaries – their Wagner at the time – were meant to protect the Sultan and fight his wars. They ended up deciding who could be Sultan – as much as Roman Empire legionaries ended up deciding who would be Emperor. 

Chinese advice is always prescient: Beware of how you use your soldiers. Make sure they believe in what they’re fighting for. Otherwise, they’ll turn around to bite you.

And that leads us to Prighozin once again changing his story (he’s a specialist on the matter).  

He’s now saying that June 23-24 was just a mere “demonstration” to express his discontent. The main objective was to prove the superiority of Wagner over the Russian Army. 

Well, everybody knew about that: Wagner soldiers have been in combat day in, day out for over 10 years now in Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic, and Ukraine.

And that’s why he could boast that “Wagner advanced for 700 km without meeting any resistance. If Russia had asked them to be in charge of the war from the beginning, that would have been over by the night of February 24, 2022.”

Prighozin is also alluding to a deal with Belarus – laying extra fog of war around a possible transfer of Wagner under Belarus jurisdiction. NATO is already terrified in advance. Expect more ballooning military budgets – to be imposed at the Vilnius summit next month. 

Camps to accommodate at least 8,000 Wagner fighters are already being built in Belarus, in the Mogilev region – according to “Vyorstka” (“Layout”). 

The real story behind it is that Belarus, for quite a while, has been expecting a possible attack from rabid Poland. In parallel, as much as sending NATO into extra freakout mode, Moscow could be contemplating the opening of a new front between Lviv and Kiev.  

Wagner in Belarus makes total sense. The Belarussian Army is not exactly strong. Wagner secures Russia’s western front. That will raise major hell on NATO – even figuratively, and force them to spend even more astronomical sums. And Wagner can merrily use airports in Belarus to pursue its – rebranded – activities in West Asia and Africa.  

Everything that happened since The Longest Day is part of a new dramatic plot twist in a running series – way more gripping than whatever Netflix could offer. 

Yet what the majority of Russian public opinion really seems to expect is not another farcical Ride of the Valkyrie. They expect a serious draining of the Soviet-style bureaucratic swamp, and a real commitment to get this “almost war” to its logical conclusion as quickly as possible.     

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

Modern Meanderings in the Fire’s Light – The Burning Platform - By Doug “Uncola” Lynn

 For the most part, I’ve lost interest in the news.  Ukraine war?  Don’t care. Lost submarine? Yawn. Pride Month? Good luck with that. Canadian wildfires? So what.  Russian civil war?  Whatever. Elections? Been there, done that.

I believe it was French Philosopher Voltaire who defined “cynicism” as armor against despair, but, honestly, it’s not that. On the contrary, I am enjoying life more than ever and my days are meaningful and well-spent.

One year ago, I wrote about helping a former business associate by driving a dumptruck a few days a week.  In that moderately metaphorical article, entitled “Building Roads While the World Wilts”, I described my perception of America’s remaining attributes, particularly, out here in the “fringe” and mentioned how people “here on the edge seem to be ignoring The Borg”, then wondered…. “For how long?”

Now an entire year has gone by… and in spite of all the new headlines… very little has changed in my world. So far.

But if a Russian nuke goes “boom”, things will surely get drastic and dire pretty quick, right? Or if the stock and bond markets catastrophically sink or the internet goes dark, these events won’t be ignored anywhere – even in rural America and flyover country.

Moreover, what happens when cash disappears and all transactions become exclusively digital?

It’s probably just a matter of time.

Regardless, I’ve had some good days and nights with family, friends, business partners, coworkers, and new acquaintances this summer … around fires… out on the water… in a volunteering capacity, and on the job.  Yes, I’m helping out with the dumptruck again this summer, but in an even more limited capacity; and, once again, to acquire something I want.

After all, working hard is the American way; for some of us, that is.

Raised in a small and isolated rural town, I grew up surrounded by industrious, hard-working families. My closest neighbors included the county veterinarian, the hardware store owner, lumber yard owner, and the publisher of our local paper.  Additionally, some of my friends and relatives lived on farms, ranches, and acreages, all of them with livestock, and I helped them when asked.

In a similar fashion, the dumptruck town reminds me of where I grew up, albeit slightly smaller, not nearly as picturesque, and minus the Camelot charm.  The dumptruck town is, in fact, a plain little community of nearly 2,000+ people situated on the intersection of two highways 15 miles south of a 30,000+ population city.

The Plain Little Town is quite industrious, however.  It is a busy place, indeed, and a very tight-knit community. The folks there do business locally with each other and they work to serve their town’s interests first and foremost. Like in my hometown, many of the family businesses in the Plain Little Community go back generations and the modern descendants of the early founders and entrepreneurs still do business with each other … in lieu of collaborating with other companies located elsewhere.

Like the beloved village of my youth, and consistent with a typical Ayn Rand novel, most of the businesses in the Plain Little Town include a family surname in the company name. Although the names are primarily of Anglo, Irish, German, and Italian descent, the family names have stayed relevant through several successive generations; mainly because the respective families are proud of their vocations and their growth and accomplishments through the decades.

Since I first became aware of the Plain Little Town after I moved into the area many years ago, I watched the businesses there expand and modernize as they have grown to serve customers in larger and larger concentric circles throughout the region.

The excavation company for whom I help by driving the dumptruck began in the 1940s as a small plumbing business. The company has since installed thousands of septic tanks throughout the entire state while serving the plumbing needs of as many households in the region.

When working at any respective locations in, or near, the Plain Little Town, most of the local employees will patronize the downtown grocery store-turned-caterer for lunch.  The locals consistently order their food from there because it is delicious and healthy; much of it provided by nearby farms, orchards, and local dairies.

The grocery store/caterer has had the same surname in its signage for decades because the founder’s descendants continue to take pride in their profession. When the family decided to build a new cold storage unit on a portion of their parking lot, it was yours truly who helped to haul away the old concrete and dirt before back-hauling in new rock for the new foundation.

The local car dealer has the family surname in its company’s name, too, and the business has grown to sell more cars than its competitors located in the surrounding larger cities. When this car dealer needed to add a new “quick-lube” center last summer, the main dumptruck I drive was used again there.  Subsequently, when I rode by that car dealership last winter, I saw several plumbing trucks parked outside. The drivers of those trucks were, obviously, installing the fixtures in the new facility and it was no surprise to see the same name on those plumbing trucks as was on the dumptruck I used for the new building’s excavation.

These family-owned companies have earned their reputations.  Their last names are on their businesses because their promises are as good as those who make them. They have earned the ability to serve their community… and each other.

Through the years, the car dealer, grocery store owner, and my former business associate (who owns the dumptrucks), have purchased surrounding lands and developed entire neighborhoods which now contain scores of modern homes; new constructions predominately built by local contractors from the Plain Little Town.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to haul a freshly-excavated load of old concrete to a new location where I had not been before. The proposed dump spot was within the Plain Little Town’s city limits and the guy in the excavator gave me directions.  He said:   “Cross the bridge on the old highway and look for the abandoned legion hall. Back down the drive and around to the clearing and then wait for Cameron. I’ll have him meet you over there and he can show you where to dump”.

So I found the place and backed in from the old highway, down a slight hill, through a couple of narrow tree-lined curves, past a few narrow open metal gates, and onto an old dirt path that led into what appeared to be a scene from a Mad Max movie.

There were old dilapidated buildings, semi-trailers… including a silver fuel tanker that was burnt completely black, broken-down abandoned vehicles, piles of old tires, and pretty much everything else including a few kitchen sinks.

Cameron was one of the grunts I worked with last summer who has since been promoted.  He’s a handsome and polite young guy in his early twenties and when he appeared in one of the company’s four-wheel-drive trucks, he told me they’ve been developing the location since early spring.  It had been used as a junkyard for many years, but now it was being developed by the car dealer, grocery store owner, and my business associate who owned the excavation company that we both were working for that day.

As we stood under the early-morning sun, I marveled at the apocalyptical scene and said to him:  “We’re kind of lucky, ya know?”  He asked “why” and I replied:  “Because no young kid ever looked up to his Dad and said: ‘Hey Dad, when I grow up, I want to work in a CUBICLE!’“  He laughed and then we backed the dumptruck up for another three-quarters-mile to where the concrete was to be dumped.  Cameron said after the area was loaded with the old concrete from the various road projects, they were going to have it all ground up on location and used in the development of the property.

A short time later, after a few more runs, I figured out a way to drive in forward and turn around at the dump location.  Overall, I’ll just say it was a blast driving that dumptruck down the old dirt path and dumping concrete all day long.  Although it was a grindfest, and slightly dangerous, it was pretty darn fun.

While I drove in and out through the gates, I thought about my friend who owned the company.  He was the perfect guy to restore and develop that area.  If he needed to lay some rock into the low-lying and muddy segments along the dirt path, no problem, he had dumptrucks for that.  When they were ready to tear down the old buildings and dispose of all of the junk, before moving the land to accommodate future homes, it would be quite doable – because his trucks, trailers, excavators, dozers, and end-loaders were ready to go.

My friend’s family business earns money while serving the needs of the community. The family has worked very hard through the years and they have acquired the means and reputation to make positive change.

Of course, this is the American Way as I observe it most everywhere I go.  Recently, I spent some time in a resort area where family-owned marinas have sold and maintained boats for generations; where developers and contractors have built amazing communities; and where local grocery stores, restaurants, and businesses still thrive.

The generations before us are gone. But we, the living, remain.  And some of America still works… in sublime and astonishing ways.

Soon, we, too, will be gone.  And for what did we live?

There are people all over America whose promises can still be trusted, and whose actions benefit others.  These folks work hard every day – even as magicians like Klaus Schwab, and other wizards in the World Economic Forum, seek to conjure deception in order to dominate and control mankind.

Admittedly, and although I hate to be a pessimist, I don’t believe the financially-elite parasites can be stopped. They have the financial means, the power, and, most importantly, the time each day to secretly knit together their new world order.

Most diligent Americans have no genuine understanding of the political machinations behind the headlines. They are too busy at work to speculate anyway; even as the fire shines on us all.

Like fire, technology can warm and burn depending upon who harnesses its power.  Yet the sun still shines and the spirit of liberty will never be extinguished… especially in the darkest of times.

Happy Birthday, America.  Another year has gone by and you still have your moments.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2023/06/29/modern-meanderings-in-the-fires-light/#more-307067