Amerika

As winter storms tend to do, the Great Texas Freeze of 2021 blew through, stayed long enough to be an unwelcome guest, and then carried on. As usual, news reporting fragmented between what was real and what I can only call “hype.”

We heard about starving people, freezing people, people dying, and mass death from the New York newspapers. In reality, we had most of a week without water and several days without power, in most cases. It was not a crisis.

It mirrored the events in 1989 and 2011 when cold snaps knocked out power. Our winter is your summer; that is, we do all our maintenance over the winter, and this year it was delayed by COVID-19.

Consequently, all three inputs to our power — gas, nuclear, and wind — all failed to varying degrees. The story that the red state press is hyping is that almost all of our wind power failed; had we stayed on gas, this would have been far less of a big deal.

The Reds counter with all sorts of nasty things to say about natural gas. For them, it is a pose, I think, having been one of them. They know the world in terms of simple categories, like brightly colored objects being arranged by a child, in a two-dimensional plane.

That means that they put religious faith in electric energy being good, but gas being bad, so that electric energy has to come from solar or wind, even if it took energy from nuclear or gas to make those “green” plants.

Their cult-like mentality starts with shoveling the complexing of the world into a funnel, and what comes out the other side is equality. Equality explains the world in simple terms and gives people an activity they can do to feel good about themselves.

If equality fails, the answer is more equality. It is like heroin but without the needles. In the same way, if some unknown problem occurs, they just hold the idol and symbol of equality in front of it like a superstitious talisman to ward off evil.

No one wants to face it, but we never took the monkey out of humanity. I find myself increasingly drawn to the idea that far-off space travelers came down, got drunk on fermented fruit, and then a comely chimpanzee walked by… Bam! Humanity.

Some time later, as humans we find ourselves confronting the fact that popular lies win out over complex truths every time, unless the group is forced into line by someone smarter than even above-average.

As this illusion goes on, it attracts bourgeois denialists who insist that everything is great and fine because they want it to be and they want to use society as a vehicle for achieving their own goals, most of which turn out to be illusory.

Leftism consists of a social club where people share stories of their denial and affirm each other in denial. They have one question, “what is popular?”, and one method, namely prohibiting people from saying anything that threatens the denial.

That creates a two-dimensional world. Gas = bad, electric = good. Equality = good, anything else = bad. Diversity is good, homogeneity is inbreeding and bigotry. And so it goes, getting to the point where you cannot criticize wind power.

I admit to not being the biggest fan of oil and natural gas as an energy source. Pretty much all of us want to transition to something a big more Star Trek or Buck Rogers, but for now, the technology is not there.

If you want to do something good for the environment, in the meantime, I would suggest cutting immigration and welfare-style programs. We have too many people. Too few of them do anything good, productive, or useful.

The right approach is to cut off the freebies, slam shut the borders, and send everyone home who came here after 1965, as well as most whose ancestors came here after 1795.

With fewer people, and consequently more forest land, you can drive big V-8 cars and no one cares. No one cared in the 1940s because America was spread out, we had actual culture, taxes were low, and so there was enough land to eat up all that pollution.

Now, we have four times as many people and a quarter the land, roughly. That means that no matter what we do, we are going to crowd out natural ecosystems. No matter what we do, we will generate too much pollution.

It is one of the great pretenses of this time that we cannot do anything about this problem. Just stopping immigration and ending welfare would drive away many; others, especially illegals and fraudulent applications, can be sent away without changing our laws.

In the long term, however, we are going to need to realize that civilization and nature themselves are both valuable, and must be protected against the constant onslaught of individuals who want to use them up.

We have to recognize that this is our problem at the root of all other problems. Consider someone who set up his living room on his front lawn and invited anyone to participate in sitting on sofas, watching TVs, and cracking beers.

He would be considered insane. We all know that someone would steal the sofas, vandalize the easy chairs, drink all the beer, sell the TV, slip and fall and sue him for millions, and probably stab him in the chest.

And that’s just the first night! The problem with humanity is that most of us are still mostly chimpanzee in our hearts, and so if anything nice exists, will consume it like locusts and leave behind a wasteland.

All of our nice modern theories like equality dance around this issue. There are lots of nice, decent humans, but there are also lots of idiots, perverts, thieves, con men, sociopaths, neurotics, and other short-term thinkers.

A sane society would have a vigorous culture of eugenics, where defective people got sent on to somewhere else. Either that or drowned them in swamps; it really does not matter in the big view.

Texas is ground zero for the future of the West. Everyone wants to come here because one of our few remaining industries, energy produced from fossil fuels, has set itself up here. The money tree drops fruit on all who come near it.

At the same time, we are seeing how when you let everyone in, you kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. Those wide-open spaces are nearly gone, replaced by a network of small cities. Culture has been adulterated, as have genetics.

Human societies seem to make this mistake again and again. In pursuit of power, they bring in a huge group and force that group to obey a centralized symbolic message; this is the “Mandarin Method” perfected by Genghis Khan.

Then, that large group proves that human control methods are no match for biology. It degenerates into formless grey people. Those cannot do what once made it great, so the society downgrades into an anarchic mass of subsistence farmers.

Back when Katrina hit, we heard a lot of media talking about the poor victims. Texas invited them in, and promptly experienced the biggest crime spike in its history, something it later carefully covered up. Conspiracy or reality?

Watch the narrative change from observed reality to spun and controlled false reality:

The police noticed a jump in crime after the evacuees arrived. Homicide spiked in September and the following months. The Houston Police Department says a fifth of those killings involved Katrina evacuees. In some cases, evacuees were both victim and suspect. In others, the crime involved a Houston local. Houston’s mayor downplayed the role of the evacuees in these crimes. He said violence was on its way up before the flood and he said anytime a city suddenly gets 100,000 new residents without proportionate growth in the police force, you’ll see a spike in crime.

The mayor was on point with an easy explanation: this is just normal, nothing to see here.

Even international news noticed that Katrina fugees = crime and murder:

One in five of the murders in the city over the last year involved an evacuee as either the suspect or victim.

There was also a marked increase in the overall number of killings.

Spin control won out a few years later:

Five criminologists who reviewed crime statistics published a study in the current issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice, and found only a “modest” increase in the murder rates of Houston and Phoenix, and none in San Antonio, three cities that took in thousands of evacuees from storm-ravaged New Orleans.

Nothing like getting some “experts” in there to find a way to exclude any problematic data and then inflate the number of refugees so that the crime spike appears proportional. And yet, we saw what we saw (and not all of the Katrina criminals were Black).

Not only that, but media sought to invert the narrative; instead of portraying these people as victimizing Houston, they were styled as the victims of Houston, having moved during a storm only to get hit again by the sheer racist caprice of chance:

Almost two decades later, more than 30,000 former Katrina evacuees still live in Houston. Many of those who stayed did so because Houston offered better jobs and schools, as well as more affordable housing than New Orleans. Last year, the average income in Houston was almost $11,000 more than in New Orleans. Before the pandemic, unemployment rates in Houston hovered around 3.5%, compared with 5% in New Orleans.

Black New Orleanians, many of them close to the poverty line, made up the bulk of the evacuees who settled in Houston. They also experienced some of the largest growth in income in the years following Katrina. The average Black family in Houston makes about $47,000, compared with $31,000 in New Orleans.

For many, it took years to rebuild after Katrina, only to have their homes destroyed by Harvey. And many families still haven’t recovered from Harvey, according to Mtangulizi Sanyika, chairman of the New Orleans Association of Houston. Harvey damaged around half of the homes in the Houston area and caused more than $125bn in damages. The recent winter storm, which brought with it broken pipes, flooding and spoiled food, is yet another cost for residents to shoulder.

Now a look at the nuanced data that 99% of humanity will ignore, the Katrina Houston homicide spike:

While Houston’s murder rate is up 23 percent for all of 2005, it spiked 70 percent in November and December compared to last year’s levels. At least 35 percent of Houston’s December increase in homicides—five of 14 over last year’s level—directly stemmed from the presence of Katrina evacuees.

This, of course, is what those big bold headlines were designed to conceal. You can look into the “studies”… if you are one of the one percent who can understand and analyze them, and have the spare time, oh and are not a Leftist so you care.

Those two million people saw through the fa¸la;ade but can shout it from the rooftops and no one will care, since it is much nice to sell to three hundred million idiots than to three million critical, thoughtful, moral, and otherwise hard-to-sell-to brains.

Now, again, the media wails about how people suffered here. In reality, this was nonsense; you can live for a few days without power or water if you are willing to set aside some water, poop in a hole or plastic bag, and wear sweaters and huddle under blankets. Bonus points if you have candles since those provide both some warmth and light.

Was it scary not to have a working refrigerator? No, you stick the food outside; just about every apartment has a porch, and if your place is in the forties anyway, you can just store the food on the table.

Was this an international humanist crisis, as the media implied? Some people managed to die of carbon monoxide inhalation, but that happens every time a hurricane hits too and they run their generators in connected garages.

Everyone else was just cold and uncomfortable, but they seemed to panic. Just like during the hurricanes, the big problem was human behavior. People bought everything in the stores, hoarded supplies, and drove around aimlessly in a fugue state of mental disorder. The people who were prepared least were the ones who showed up the most at the victim centers, drove around most looking for warmth and power, and bought up food in amounts that they could not store, in types that they did not know how to prepare, and then threw it out when they threw up their hands at the non-working fridge instead of storing their food outside, on the roof, on a windowsill, or so on.

The sane people had water, food, and candles stashed — we live in Texas, after all, where storms knock out power just about every year — and some kind of water supply. They bought what they needed at stores or went through freezers.

It was the panic of the herd that caused the situation to become dodgy, not to mention the panicked herd decisions to leap into new energy sources and a COVID panic so that normal maintenance was delayed.

Nature just did what Murphy’s Law claims it will do, which is that if anything can go wrong it will at the forst possible time. We might apply the same analysis to COVID-19 and the BLM riots.

We did not have many riots in Texas, since outside of Austin, people here tend to view those as free target shooting competitions. Can you blast all of the Antifa before they get to your position? It’s a high-stakes game.

However, a Texas response to George Floyd would be to say we should wait and see what the autopsy shows. If he died of a fentanyl overdose, the riots were unnecessary, but we had sleight-of-hand as usual:

Medical examiners said the fentanyl levels were at a potentially “fatal level,” but that it was a combination of factors that led to Floyd’s death.

But:

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner (HCME) said the cause of death was “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual restraint, and neck compression.”

It continued to list arteriosclerotic and hypertensive heart disease, fentanyl intoxication and recent methamphetamine use as being significant conditions that were underlying causes in Floyd’s cause of death.

In other words, they punted. The political climate demanded that they find a police cause, but if we look to but-for causality, expressed in the term “but for this, he would have survived,” we find a fentanyl overdose. He could have survived the police restraint; he could not have survived cocktail of fatal doses of fentanyl, heart disease, and methamphetamine use even without the police restraint. Floyd was dead as soon as he swallowed his stash.

At the very least we see a man dying of what would normally be a survivable event. The Crowd always wants to blame whoever is in power, but if we wait a bit to see the results come out instead of surfing the panic wave, we see a different story.

Today the panic-mongers are raving on about the horror of Texas lifting the mask mandate through whatever propaganda they can generate:

This week, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Tuesday that he would rescind the statewide mask mandate while the vast majority of residents remain unvaccinated, the tough choice to enforce public health guidance fell to business owners, and Picos announced it would continue requiring masks. But, after such a challenging year, the reaction to their decision was disheartening, co-owner Monica Richards said: Several people sent hateful messages through social media and called the restaurant, threatening to report staffers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Classic Leftist tactic here: equate whatever you do not like to “racism” immediately.

If we read carefully, we see that “several” people are allegedly involved with no proof, and the statement comes entirely from the co-owner.

A cynical take is that she needed publicity for her restaurant which is failing, probably because of not being that great — in a city with lots of great Mexifood restaurants — and the high costs of lockdown and masks on restaurant profits.

If you look at where the mediocre restaurant is located, all becomes clear: right below River Oaks, it sits in the midst of a wealth nexus where that convenient location means that anyone can make it as a restaurant unless they are outright awful, at least until COVID-19 keeps home most of the customers.

However, what she is signaling is obedience. She is saying: I, too, am obedient to the denial in which we find ourselves that says that our system is perfect as it is, and that we are all living the best possible life, because anything else is inconceivable. She is selling denial more than tacos at this point.

In other words, this, too, like the Katrina story and George Floyd stories, is a lie.

However, those lies were popular because most people want to believe that they are victims of the world, and therefore they adopt an underdog mentality. This enables them to justify their failures as well as excuse their greed, conditions which in nature or a caste system would not be a problem but recognized constants.

If you want to believe that you are a victim, and use your self-pity as a weapon to justify your future acquisition and absorption of others, you must always believe — per equality — that the problem is not incompetence, but competence. The people who are competent oppress the incompetent, so you can overthrow the competent, and then competence will not matter; everyone can exist in peace, harmony, equanimity, and so on, because there will no longer be a goal, standards, or hierarchy.

Each person wants equality in order to conceal, camouflage, obscure, and explain away his own failings, while also giving him something that he can use to control other people; “you want to be part of the good guys, yes? so you must also be in favor of this egalitarian principle…” begins just about every solidly effective scam.

And people fall for it time and again because most of them simply do not care; they only want a reason to explain their failure as success so that they do not have to change. To them, maintaining the illusion that all is perfect right now and always will be is most important.

My cynical view of humanity is that we all lie to ourselves, but those who lie to themselves least — who get in their own way the lowest amount possible — are the ones who achieve great things. Everyone else fills their own heads with lies and justifications and neuters themselves, and they hate those of us who do less of that.

For the victim-mentality people, life only makes sense if George Floyd was innocent (and not a multi-felon, both in past and on the day he was arrested) and the Hurricane Katrina victims were honest normal people instead of lazy felons who waited around for a handout instead of preparing for the storm.

They want to believe that we should live in masks and gloves forever, locked down against the storm, while someone else — it’s always someone else (unspecified) who does all the work, especially the gross or awful stuff — takes care of providing food, roads, security, and safety.

Victim mentality has a problem, however. It leads to us choosing a person for one qualifier only, which is that they identify with the victims. It is how we pick companies, celebrities, friends, and politicians in an egalitarian time.

The bourgeois mentality of the middle class shopkeepers centers around the victim narrative and self-pity. Their customers want to feel like they are perfect as they are; the only way to do this is to explain away their failings as victimization.

That leads to choosing absolutely corrupt leaders for the mitzvah (a handy word) for being a member of a minority group:

“We need some kind of ethical reforms,” King told reporters at a Monday morning news conference. “I’ve been around this city hall for 40 years. I am not naive about the way cities work. I’ve had government contracts. I made plenty of contributions over my life. But this is the most corrupt administration I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I’ve never seen the pay-to-play as out of control as it is right now.”

In fact, the mayor in question is so much of a diversity clown that even Leftists have begun to notice the trail of destruction left by Sylvester Turner:

• Turner has spent around $400 million of tax payer money without city council’s approval (up to $50,000 maximum). This happened during a budget squeeze. After being asked to show documents related to this spending (which is legally required under the Texas Public Information Act), Turner insisted it would take 155,000 hours to assemble the documents (the equivalent of 75 people working full time for a year) and the cost of copying the contracts would be at least $2.8 million.
• Turner gave health insurance provider Cigna information about medical claims during the bidding process for Houston’s healthcare plan but failed to share that information with competitors. Cigna was eventually awarded the contract. Turner’s close personal friend, Cindy Clifford, is the lobbyist for Cigna, according to city records. Cindy has been seen in photos on social media visiting with Mayor Turner and his family, despite swearing in lobbying reports that she hasn’t given gifted them. The budget for health benefits for Houston in 2019 is $435 million.That’s big money.
• Turner was unable to manage the city budget after voters overwhelmingly passed Prop B, a decision to pay firefighters a livable wage. This pushed our city further into the red and caused a budget crisis. Houston spent millions of dollars training these firefighters and now hundreds of them will lose their jobs because Turner couldn’t (or wouldn’t) manage our city’s budget in an effective manner. In the entire history of Houston we’ve never laid off firefigthers until now (including during the Great Depression).
• During a hiring freeze in response to Prop B, Turner hired almost 900 new city workers despite suggesting we didn’t have enough funds to pay firefighters. Many of those employees still had their jobs in April.
• Turner’s Communications Director used a city facility to work on her personal pet project: a reality TV show concept that had nothing to do with Houston residents or tax payers. This is the local government equivalent of taking the company car on a road trip with all your friends and charging them for its use.
• In 2015 Turner campaigned on the promise to fix Houston’s potholes. Since then little to nothing has been done to fix the potholes and more recently Turner actually instructed a city employee to create a new pothole with a jackhammer so Turner could participate in a photo-op in which he pretended to fix the recently created hole-in-the-street. Amazingly, there were thousands of real potholes he could have used for the photo but he chose to create a new one instead.
• Turner has consistently misused funds from the Rebuild Houston infrastructure plan for non-relevant spending on pet projects.
• Theft crimes in the city has spiked despite a thriving economy. Historically crime usually goes down when the economy improves, but not under Turner’s watch.
• Turner gave a $6.735 million contract to his former law partner, Barry Barnes. This contract wasn’t assigned to handle legal matters.Instead it was for “outreach, intake and case management services” related to “potential” applicants for the Federal Housing Disaster money.
• Turner spent a half a million to hire a team of lawyers (more of the mayor’s personal friends) to fight the firefighters in court. (Side note – Houston lawyer and mayoral candidate Tony Buzbee offered his services pro bono to Houston firefighters if the city proceeded with litigation against them.)
• And let’s not forget the insurance fraud allegations:

Perhaps the city has no idea that the mayor is influence-peddling in plain sight because in diversity USA, minority candidates — and Leftist rioters! — can get away with anything:

“I will donate $500,000 to city or other charity firms that Mayor wants,” Yoo wrote at the end of the email, which would be contingent on the deal going through.

On August 22, 2017, one day after Thomas and Icken sent Yoo a follow-up email, Thomas emailed Turner’s executive assistant, Brenda Murphy stating clearly that the Mayor said he would meet with Yoo regarding the BP deal.

In fact, after Thomas wrote that the Mayor would meet with Yoo, Thomas sent the thread of internal city emails to Yoo, writing, “I’m on this! Relax.”

We should crawl more deeply into the Obamaesque scandal-ridden background of Sylvester Turner the scam artist who once tried to run for mayor of Houston in the 1990s:

A week before the runoff between Turner and Lanier, Dolcefino took to the air with a report linking Turner to an old $6.5 million insurance scam. On film, a young man named Dwight Thomas nervously denied knowledge of the affairs of a man named Sylvester Foster. The owner of a chain of hair salons, Foster had hired Sylvester Turner to draft his will—just after he was indicted for credit card fraud and three days before he disappeared in an alleged boating accident. Dwight Thomas had reason to look nervous; he was identified as Turner’s roommate, and he had been named the trustee of Foster’s estate.

Overnight, the story cleaved the city in two. Turner-leaning whites quietly made plans to switch their votes, while many blacks, Turner-leaning and otherwise, vocally descended on Channel 13, charging racism. Just after a boycott of the station (which is number one among black viewers) was organized, just when it looked as if Lanier would be blamed for the Turner smear, Wilson came forward—on Channel 13, of course—and confessed that he had leaked the story.

It turns out that Wilson was on to something, but Turner has moved on to a new method of corruption, “patronage,” where he hires the friends and family of his allies in exchange for kickbacks or honoraria, keeping it technically legal, but raking in the money, as one instance shows:

“I have no idea who you are talking about.”

This is the response KPRC 2 Investigates received from Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner on Thursday when asked if he knew Marvin Agumagu, a 31-year-old who was put into a $95,000 City of Houston internship position. The mayor on two occasions made it quite clear that he did not know anyone named Agumagu.

A plan was hatched between two City of Houston directors and in a matter of weeks, while in the midst of the mayor’s hiring freeze, Agumagu was offered a position as the first candidate for the airport’s Executive Internship program. The mayor signed off on the deal, creating the $95,000-a-year internship.

The lies do not stop once one digs down a bit; they simply become more normal. That is, we accept certain forms of corruption — based in the popularity contest for illusions that is democracy — as how things are done and then refuse to think about it further.

Texas may have had a rough freeze, COVID-19 may have stopped maintenance, and the disproportionate number of the wind farms may have failed, but that was not the crisis. The freeze screwup revealed the crisis.

In particular, while the voters have slept (they always do) the forces of bureaucracy have gradually conspired to take everything of value by going after non-problems while ignoring real problems.

The same is true in the wider USA, which is going to serve as the historical footnote that even a thoughtful, highly-architected Constitution cannot restrain the forces of mob rule.

Just as nature strives to exist somewhere in the sweet spot between repetition and randomness, human societies aim for that brief area of successful function between anarchy and dictatorship where life can thrive.

Texas seems likely to be the first to break away from the groupthink in the USA despite the onslaught of Californians, New Yorkers, and Mexicans inundating the state. The “great freeze” non-event was a wakeup call, like Katrina and Harvey (and, more ominously, Tropical Storm Alyson, the not-dry dry run for Harvey).

This nation — Texas — grew because it filled itself with Anglo-Saxon pioneers instead of cosmopolitan city people. Pioneers operate by realism: does this work? City people operate by popularity, like democracy.

As a result, Texans tend to be post-political. They do not trust symbols; they trust function. They have just gotten a wake-up call about how incompatible those two turn out to be in our leadership.

Tags: great freeze, harvey, katrina, sylvester turner, texas, tropical storm alyson