Schrödinger’s World

Lazy writing of dialogue in screenplays, The Matrix, and a cliché all demonstrate that the world we live in today is different from the one we’ve known for the last several decades – yet, they don’t.

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

I hate that phrase for any number of reasons, one of which is that it has become and continues to be a favourite of writers of screenplays too lazy to put in the effort to write superb dialogue.

After viewing the video montage, I’m hoping that you, Dear Reader, now hate it every bit as much as I do.

Chief among the reasons for my hatred of that stale, hackneyed cliché (aside from the fact that it betrays a laziness in writing dialogue for a screenplay) is that those who use it do so to project an image of someone in on a profound, enlightening fact only they and others similarly clued in can grasp – something like, “Trump is literally Hitler!”, or “Trans women are women!” Never mind that these patently false and disproven claims, and others, have become articles of faith to the left, and to Democrats, in particular.

That these falsehoods not only will crumble under even casual scrutiny, but have also been utterly rejected by the rest of those for whom common sense is a trusted companion, is of no consequence for them because everyone else in the echo chamber accepts it as incontrovertible truth. Further, they view all others unlike themselves as simpletons with an aversion to the complexities of today’s modern world.¹ Such is “life” in the Democrat Party death cult.

As loathsome as I find hearing it (especially by any number of vacuous pinhead entertainers), having to use it myself is almost as nauseating. Yet, I find I have no choice because far too many simply refuse to now acknowledge Trump’s election in 2016 was the first blow to the midsection that set up what could yet prove to be the knock-out punch to a system so painstakingly constructed by the left to gaslight us into accepting, if not believing, one false narrative like, “Trump is Putin’s stooge!”, or “Trump is a fascist!” after another.

In 2020, we saw that system’s minions in the deep state prevail and deny a second consecutive Trump electoral victory – but on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, the “red-pilled” voters delivered a critical shock to that system:

…the world in which we had been living since the end of the second Reagan administration – a kind of “matrix”

Granted, this is not yet reality, though perhaps prescient as it pertains to AI, but disturbingly accurate as it pertains to those whose understanding of the world around them is courtesy of only the synchronized corporate legacy media.

Where and When It Began, or, The Decline of Empire
Trump’s second election, and what has transpired since the inauguration are simply the most visible and obvious indicators that this now new world had been in the making since November 9, 1989, when the wall in Berlin (which not only represented but made manifest the physical separation of the East from the West), fell. Just a little more than two years later, so did the USSR. Then, few truly comprehended what those events would mean for the rest of the world. What has become clear in that time is there is now only one superpower, the USA; America is not beloved by most of the rest of the world as we were once led to believe; and there is no more Cold War – only several hot wars in various regions around the globe.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, so also fell Communism as a sustainable form of government, and while not apparent until 2025, so began the decline of American empire as it had been known since the end of the second world war which is also when the slow, almost imperceptible erosion of American cultural and economic power and influence began. Granted, the benefit of hindsight cannot be overstated, but it was the implementation of the Marshall Plan that laid the groundwork.

The Marshall Plan was intended to fund the economic recovery of western Europe. With the formation of NATO, each charter-member nation had the opportunity to do just that without having to concurrently maintain a national defense. For all its good intentions, it really just enabled those nations to serve as incubators for socialist-style government, albeit each reflecting that nation’s cultural ethic. Absent having to allocate a percentage of its GDP to its own defense, each nation instead allocated those resources to social welfare initiatives, propping up what might have remained of empire (see Belgium and the Congo, or The Netherlands, then England and South Africa), or to enacting industrial policy to gain artificial and inequitable advantage over its competitors in the US (even while having free access to US markets).

In contrast, it wasn’t so much funding from the US that fueled Japan’s recovery from being damn near wiped off the face of the planet as it was its own cultural ethos channeled into non-military initiatives.

Between 1945 and 1952, the U.S. occupying forces, led by General Douglas A. MacArthur, enacted widespread military, political, economic, and social reforms.²

In regard to Japan’s economy, those reforms allowed it to rebuild its industrial base from the ground, up. With a foundation of then state-of-the-art technology, applying the aforementioned cultural ethos while incorporating the recommendations (particularly as it pertained to quality control in manufacturing) of one W. Edwards Deming³ in its approach to corporate management and economic governance, Japan’s domestic policy transformed it into an industrial powerhouse.

Note that Western assistance to Japan did not include economic reconstruction, nor did assistance extend beyond 1952, while under the Marshall Plan such became all but open-ended – small wonder then, that as first pointed out by President Trump (however unartfully) in 2017, NATO is disproportionately funded by the US.

The West “Wins” the Cold War
The West (read as, the US) “won” the Cold War less by subduing its enemy into submission, forcing it to sue for peace, and negotiating an unconditional surrender as in past hot wars, but more victory by attrition – being the last nation standing in the global theatre – winning through default – the “free” market-oriented economy of the US bankrupted the USSR.

By now, it is well documented that were many reasons for the fall of the USSR – political, economic, cultural, social and societal, et al., but to my way of thinking, the leading one is economic:

The study, led by academics at the University of Cambridge, is the first to trace a direct link between the mass privatisation programmes adopted by several former Soviet states, and the economic failure and corruption that followed…⁴

Privatization was expected to emulate tax revenue as an additional source of funding for the state, but the USSR’s military and defense spending just couldn’t keep up with the US. In the wake of the collapse, these now non-aligned nations had to fund themselves, or at least, their oligarchs had to – and so, Soviet-manufactured weapons such as firearms, tanks and other heavy artillery began to become available on the black market to any number of rogue nations in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

With Russia no longer the geopolitical and military threat it had been since the end of the second world war, the West no longer had just one enemy – instead, it now had any number of enemies. To make matters worse, there was no distinguishing which represented a legitimate threat, which did not, and which current allies would remain so. This made the rest of the world a most unpredictable (read as, dangerous) place for the US.

The end of the Cold War also ushered in an era marked by rise of a JFK-era concept called American Soft Power: establishing or extending American hegemony abroad by non-diplomatic or non-military means – in fact, this is ostensibly why USAID was created,⁵ but now the agency could be leveraged to achieve all manner of ends forbidden the CIA in the wake of the reforms that came from the Church Committee.⁶

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that with no readily identifiable threats to its national interests, America was much like Alexander, seemingly left with nothing to conquer, gross misrepresentation aside.⁷ In reality, there were plenty of enemies to conquer (if only temporarily), but the folks in decision-making positions of authority, power, and influence were either incapable or (more likely), unwilling to adapt their thinking and strategic approach to modern military conflict.

Hence, the individual and collective mentality of this nation’s military leaders remained frozen as at the nadir of the Cold War: military superiority as defined by quantity and size of armed forces, weaponry, nuclear warheads & MAD. See the effectiveness of one George HW “Poppy” Bush (weasel, and carpetbagger extraordinaire),⁸ in organizing allies and friendly nations in the Middle East to keep in check Saddam Hussein’s Iraq via Desert Shield, then Desert Storm.

George W Bush (aka Shrub), the erstwhile AWOL idiot of the village of Crawford, Texas, was not to be outdone and certainly was not about to fall short of his dad’s “standard”. Enabled by Dick Cheney and a coterie of neocon “intelligence” analysts, not only did he completely disregard the history lessons of more than one and one-half centuries of failed invasions and attempted occupations of Afghanistan, it was under his command that the US invaded Iraq under any number of false pretenses,⁹ chief of which was that the US Marines would be hailed as conquering heroes by the Iraqi people, rescuing the nation from oppression at the hands of Saddam Hussein – a huge miscalculation.

The Forever Wars
Thus began two forever wars that cost the US taxpayers a combined total of $3.4 trillion,¹⁰ not to mention the more than 7,000¹¹ lives of active military personnel, and an untold number of lives of parents, spouses, and children lost indirectly to suicide, substance abuse & addiction, alcoholism, et al. but a result, nonetheless.

To add insult to injury, the world’s most vaunted military was routinely routed by much smaller, more agile guerilla militias in small skirmishes in urban areas using decidedly low-tech weaponry¹² that rendered the armed forces of the Western coalition all but impotent. Never mind that the coalition forces were equipped with allegedly superior and technologically more advanced & sophisticated firearms. Eventually, sheer numbers and firepower prevailed, but given the cost, it was a Pyrrhic victory and a temporary “triumph”, at best.

I don’t know how victory was defined by the military establishment that spanned the administrations of Shrub, The Kenyan Light Bringer, and Trump’s first, but as long as the US remains an occupying force in Iraq, there is no victory to be claimed.

Conversely, fleeing Afghanistan as we did screams “Failure!” “Defeat!” “Surrender” to the rest of the world. The president would do well to withdraw from Iraq in the manner he would have ordered the US out of Afghanistan – carefully identify and vet the Iraqis that wish to immigrate to the US and airlift them out; then draw down all personnel leaving behind all unnecessary weaponry, hardware and collateral, then bombing the bases and destroying all materiel so that it cannot eventually be used against us – but I digress.

To be even-handed, this nation’s military was not the only institution to remain stuck in the post-WWII mentality – the Political Class, and the Fourth Estate also held fast to it as well for any number of reasons, subconscious or not – such is the power of the familiar but with the benefit of almost perfect hindsight, it is clear that a very large part of the reason is that the now self-revealed delusion was woven into the very fabric of the matrix of the woketopia¹³ so carefully constructed by the left, as described earlier.

Returning to the present, if it is not clear to anyone alive (who is even paying casual attention) that it is an entirely different world from the one in which the Baby Boomers grew up, and from the one in which Generation X came of age is, it is likely that nothing will bring about such a revelation. In the interest of full disclosure, I am technically of the Baby Boom generation, but identify much more strongly with the Gen Xers.

Since the mid 1960s, the Baby Boom generation has owned the institutions of American society: academia, industry, government & politics, pop culture, art, entertainment, and even church – it is not going to cede control willingly. It is members of that generation which built that matrix, and while time is the ultimate arbiter of the forces of history, that doesn’t mean it won’t do everything it possibly can to keep it.

Yet, one of that generation’s own is largely perceived as an existential threat. There is plenty of evidence to support such a premise. Executive Orders to:

• Reverse much of the cultural madness of the past nearly twenty years: the pillars of the woke religion that are transgenderism (which includes the erasure of women from their own athletic endeavours by allowing biological men who identify as women to directly compete against biological females), racism, political violence, critical race theory, DEI, and ESG in the corporate sector

• Conduct mass deportations of illegal aliens, the vast majority of which poured across what should have been this nation’s southern border during the last administration but which also occurred on The Kenyan Light Bringer’s watch

• Put America’s welfare and national self-interest first:

  • Where the US has unfairly and disproportionately borne the financial burden of a common cause, demanding that the other participants pay their fair and negotiated share

  • Re-affirming America’s commitment to liberty and democratic principles of self-determination, among them free and fair elections, and putting on notice those “allies” who would abandon them in favour of the soft tyranny of socialism

  • Seeking to level the playing field vis-á-vis trade with our partners around the globe by imposing tariffs where appropriate, prompting negotiations that will bring about a greater degree of fair, or equitable trade between the US and its partners

  • Incentivizing on-shoring of manufacturing to bring back as many of the jobs that were sent overseas by globalists in every administration since that of Ronald Reagan; global financiers, labor leaders, and the CEOs of publicly held corporations in critical industries like steel, mining, milling; manufacture of durable goods like major household appliances such as Maytag whose exit left Newton, Iowa (my family’s home for three years) a virtual ghost town; pharmaceuticals made by the likes of Pfizer, and AbbVie; electronics manufacturers like Apple, Lenovo, HP, Intel, et al.
    The actions of these parties both individually and combined & in-concert over more than thirty years has left the nation’s local economies cratered, and the middle class in communities from Maine to California all but nearly destroyed.

In some instances, it is what is not occurring that serves as proof:

• No one on any social media platform is being censored for expressing an opinion, or shadow-banned by an algorithm that identifies them as “dangerous”

• No one is being de-banked or otherwise isolated from participating in this nation’s consumer commerce or losing their employment and/or livelihood because of their political orientation

• No one who has identified themselves as a political enemy of Trump has been subjected to lawfare, swatted, incarcerated, suicided or forced underground

• No US troops, sailors, airmen, or marines are being deployed in far-off nations to fight some internecine conflict under the guise of “national [in]security”

…all of which serve to violently disrupt the status quo of America in Decline (roughly since 1980) following the age of American Empire (roughly from 1945 until 1980). The first election of Trump was a wake-up call to this nation’s monied elite and Political Class, and the 2020 election was little more than a postponement of the inevitable, because in 2024 the majority of American voters put this nation’s unofficial ruling class on notice that they’ve had it with the current status quo.

One unmistakable indicator that the world is truly different is unprecedented transparency in the Executive Branch. At every rally, he publicly announced what he intended to do as president. He owns everything he’s done, and there’s no question that the buck stops with him. Contrast that with the preceding administration where the empty husk of a man was simply a figurehead while any number of other unknown and unelected high-ranking bureaucrats were acting on behalf of the installed president. We didn’t even see this kind of transparency during Reagan’s presidency.

Then again, maybe not…
In a recent post here on Substack, Sasha Stone asserted that the synchronized legacy corporate media’s elitism cost the Fourth Estate its credibility (assuming it had retained any). While perhaps true, it would appear that such credibility is unnecessary for the propaganda apparatus to survive, even thrive, much like Bob has absolutely no need for a brain.¹⁴

So, if the aforementioned is true, why is the synchronized corporate legacy media still around? Why do those of us who are neither on nor of the left equate irrelevance, untrustworthiness, and shrinking viewership with eventual extinction? Why are we expecting the same market forces that allowed for the growth and popularity of podcasts and alternative sources online seemingly to not pose an existential threat to every one of the alphabet outlets and their affiliates? Perhaps these aren’t even the right questions to be asking, but no others come to mind.

To my way of thinking, when the propaganda apparatus becomes completely unrecognizable because it is no longer under the control of its masters who have been captured by the woke mind virus, there will be no doubt that it is truly a new and different world.

Yet, as I write this, in my heart of hearts, I know that it will never be thus.

So, in the final analysis, it must be recognized that two things can be true at the same time. For example:

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

…is a cliché because it’s true. For all of the empirical evidence that it is a different (if not new) world than the one my in which my generation came of age, the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us that there is nothing new under the sun.¹⁵

What has changed is the zeitgeist, the sensibilities of our time. With every Fourth Turning, there has been technological advancement that, to previous generations, didn’t even begin to approach the unthinkable and until the current Turning, that advancement has largely been at an arithmetic rate – but what we’ve seen in merely the last twenty years has been exponential – and I submit that this technology has done more to splinter our society, rend our social fabric, and to isolate us from one another to such a degree that the world we knew even ten years ago is alien, and unfamiliar.

Even before then, going back to the late 1990s, I knew that the world had completely passed me by the day I recognized absolutely no one on the front page of the tabloids available for sale while I waited in the checkout line at the A&P. It was an odd realization, but also very comforting – it was one less thing of which to be aware, even remotely.

So What?
For all that has changed over the last three generations, there is one constant. It is the source, and the foundation of my faith.¹⁶ That foundation is the Creator of Heaven and Earth, and He is the same today as He was yesterday, and will be tomorrow.

Another constant is change – we can be certain that the world we will come to know ten years from now will, on the one hand, be no less filled with the evils that are running amok through our society today. In fact, the insufferable John Mellencamp observed as much:

Everybody's got their problems – ain't no new news here
I'm the same old trouble you've been having for years

The evils will be no worse than they have ever been…it’s the manifestation of those evils that will be worse – and in case you’re wondering, it won’t get worse before it gets better, it’s only going to get worse, and that begs a couple questions: “What are we to do, then?” and/or “So, are we to simply give up – surrender – forfeit entirely our own agency?”

I’ll answer the second question first: No – but regardless of spiritual disposition, we can manage the coming changes by developing some intellectual agility. By that I mean, recognizing the changes that are occurring without discarding that which you hold to be true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — anything that is excellent or praiseworthy.¹⁷ We can accept the fact that everything around us is changing, perhaps too fast for us to keep up, but without losing ourselves – or our sense of ourselves.

Regarding the first question, it largely depends on what I previously referred to as a spiritual disposition – in other words, the state or condition of your relationship to God. The good news is that only you can determine that, the bad news is that it’s rather binary in nature: every one of us is working out – not working for – working out his/her own salvation with fear and trembling,¹⁸ or we are not.

The tail end of the Boomers, and Gen X have had front-row seats to the decline of all that America once represented: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Morning in America will be a long time coming once again, if it does, at all.

My view is that the American experiment which ended with The Wrestler’s unconstitutional declaration of war on half of the nation but which has been dying a slow and painful death in the one-hundred-sixty years since, will eventually breathe its last, and be replaced by a tyrannical dictatorship. All of Europe, having devolved to individual principalities with no real national identity and having been overrun by adherents to Islam, accedes to a reconstituted cultural Ottoman Empire.

America, no longer the last, best hope of mankind and no longer available to serve as the backstop against existential evil, will be unable to keep authoritarianism and tyranny in check – and that is a different world by any measure.

I so very much hope that I’m wrong.

Thank you, Dear Reader, for your time and indulgence.

Until next time…

1. By claiming that almost every controversial issue is complicated, said claimant exempts himself from having to actually come down on one side or the other – and eventually, every issue boils down to two sides. Such claimants also cynically represent themselves with a false modesty that they recognize that they, themselves, cannot fully grasp such complexities, so they demur, escaping the condemnation of the intelligentsia for being so pedestrian as to not just have but express an opinion – even worse if that opinion is not the same as that of the ruling clique.

2. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/japan-reconstruction
A notable exception to the rule of the US occupation of a territory – usually, it is an abject failure – see the War of Northern Aggression.

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

4. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/how-the-west-rendered-ussr-bankrupt/articleshow/12456263.cms

5. See either Tucker Carlson’s or Joe Rogan’s interview w/ Mike Benz. While not surprising to see a noble intent utterly and thoroughly corrupted under the control of unaccountable government bureaucrats at the federal level, it is shocking to behold the scope and depth of the corruption, and graft.

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

7. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/03/19/and-alexander-wept/
With most sincere apologies to fellow fans of the very first installment in the Die Hard film franchise. A fan of the movie myself, the value I place on intellectual honesty and historical accuracy demands that I do my part to set the record straight.

The quote is a hash of three passages in Plutarch, first century CE.

Biographer Jon Meacham writes that Bush's relocation to Texas allowed him to move out of the ‘daily shadow of his Wall Street father and Grandfather Walker, two dominant figures in the financial world,’ but would still allow Bush to ‘call on their connections if he needed to raise capital.’* His first position in Texas was an oil field equipment salesman** for Dresser Industries, which was led by family friend Neil Mallon.*...With support from Mallon and Bush's uncle, George Herbert Walker Jr., Bush and John Overbey launched the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company in 1951.* In 1953, he co-founded the Zapata Petroleum Corporation, an oil company that drilled in the Permian Basin in Texas. In 1954, he was named president of the Zapata Offshore Company, a subsidiary which specialized in offshore drilling.*** Shortly after the subsidiary became independent in 1959, Bush moved the company and his family from Midland to Houston.**** There, he befriended James Baker, a prominent attorney who later became an important political ally.* Bush remained involved with Zapata until the mid-1960s, when he sold his stock in the company for approximately $1 million.*

8. *Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush
**https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-oct-11-me-bush11-story.html
***https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/1999/04/26/story2.html
****Bush, George W. 41: A Portrait of My Father. Crown Publishers, 2014, p. 64.

9. I’ll cut him some slack on the WMD only because failure to prove their existence doesn’t mean they didn’t. It’s easy to hide them when they can be relocated on short notice from the head of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, in this case one Hans Blix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blix

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War#:~:text=The%20costs%20of%20the%20Iraq,totaled%20just%20over%20%241.1%20trillion.

11. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military#:~:text=Over%207%2C000%20U.S.%20service%20members,have%20borne%20significant%20human%20costs.

12. Something that the senior flag officers of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines either failed to anticipate, or chose to ignore – in either case, the consequences were horrific.

13. See any of Sasha Stone’s posts.

14. Never mind that the synchronized corporate legacy media has revealed itself to be a large collection of liars – propagandists – unworthy of trust. Its various outlets have been hemmorhaging viewers since the presidential election so much so that Comcast apparently is unable to give away MSNBC. Its only audience would appear to be themselves, and a shrinking number of aging members of the Baby Boom generation who after a lifetime of relying on that propaganda apparatus for news & information, prefer being told the lies instead of consulting a variety of alternative sources and applying critical-thinking skills to sift through the competing narratives to arrive at their own conclusions about current events. The same holds true for any number of outlets on other networks. In this way, they too, are refusing to accept that the world in which they’ve lived most of their lives is no more.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

15. –Ecclesiastes 1:9
https://www.bible.com/bible/111/ECC.1.9

16. Anyone who has ever read anything I’ve written in the past knows that my faith is what forms my worldview, informs my political orientation, and shapes my character. I can no more deny it than I can my own flawed humanity, so if you are a new reader and you find you are offended, I understand, though I’ll not apologize for it.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.

17. https://www.bible.com/bible/111/PHP.4.8.NIV

18. https://www.bible.com/bible/111/PHP.2.12.NIV