A while back I had an occasional series on youtube called American Success Stories when I talked to and interview the people who had worked and succeeded in America. One of those I talked to was Paulo from Brazil
I’m also sure his young wife and kids would like to see more of him nor do I doubt that his kids might have enjoyed it if this Sunday morning he had been at home during this labor day weekend rather than putting up siding early in the morning. But when those kids are 18, Paulo’s hard work today will almost certainly mean he’ll have the assets to send them to college if they wish, or if they are smart enough to follow in his footsteps might be in a position to have their dad co-sign for their first home to fix up or at least know how to fix anything in sight. And I suspect that if he has a daughter who wants a big wedding someday, the willingness to be hard at work on a Holiday weekend will be the reason he can afford to pay for one or two or more.
Unfortunately I kept missing Paulo after the house was completed but this weekend I ran into him as he was doing some touch up maintenance and he had a few minutes to spare to speak with me
The house has been rented but Paulo has not slowed down one bit expect to take the time to cut his beard off. He continues to work hard and notes that there is plenty of work out there but a lot of the younger people don’t want a job, they just want the money without the work that comes with it.
Paulo is now in his early 30’s and it’s very likely that by the time he is 40 and thanks to his hard work he will be living a whole lot more comfortably than a lot of the people who took hundreds of thousands of dollars in college loans for useless degrees in cultural studies.
He will have real property and real skills to show for his investment of time and money. He is an object lesson for any teenager thinking of what to do with his future.
FYI if you want to see the before videos of the house, here they are
While Da Tech Guy was technical hiatus, former Illinois Republican congressman Joe Walsh announced his presidential run, which is why I’m only now weighing in.
I’ve had mixed feelings over the years on Walsh, who was part of the GOP Tea Party wave in 2010 but was essentially gerrymandered out of office by Illinois Democratic Party boss Michael Madigan. His triumph, without any Illinois Republican Party financial support over Democratic incumbent Melissa Bean was a shocker, many people viewed his chances of winning as dismal because of a then-ongoing child support dispute with his ex-wife and a lawsuit, since settled, from his onetime campaign manager over fees he said were owed to him.
The only positive thing I heard during that 2010 race about Walsh was from my wife. She was thoroughly impressed by a speech he gave at a Tea Party event where I live, Morton Grove, Illinois. She predicted, “He’s going to win.”
Always listen to your spouse.
During his single term in Congress, for the most part I supported Walsh. I met him at a different Tea Party event and I was impressed that he was familiar with my blog, Marathon Pundit, and what I wrote about him. Still, I always thought he was a bit nutty. But that goes for many politicians of course.
Walsh seemingly found his place in 2013 after when Chicago conservative talk radio station WIND-AM hired him for its coveted afternoon drive-time slot. Early on his show was enjoyable and informative–regularly trashing President Obama on just about everything, including the economy. Salem Radio Network picked up his show for national distribution in 2017, while he was a third-tier talker, his future was still bright.
Then something snapped within Joe. If you are familiar with the 1970s movie, Network, like the mentally unbalanced TV anchorman Howard Beale, Walsh changed. Beale went from decrying big government and big business every night to preaching that the latter wasn’t really bad after all. Then Beale’s ratings dropped. As for Walsh, who was never completely on the Trump Train, earlier this year he began to sprinkle his program with bits of criticism of Trump–which quickly became a flood. I tuned out and so did many of my friends. How many others bailed? I dunno. WIND-AM stopped subscribing to Nielsen in 2016. I listen to other radio shows besides right-wing talkers, it’s a good idea to see what the other side is up to. But like Beale’s later performances, I felt I was being preached at by Walsh, not spoken to. Not fun. So on my way home from work I’d connect my iPod and listen to Mark Levin’s podcasts instead.
Since his announcement, Walsh has been struggling to get noticed, just as the other Republican challengers again Trump have. Those other candidates are another nut-job, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, and former Massachusetts governor William Weld, the vice presidential candidate in 2016 on the Libertarian ticket.
Presumably because last week President Trump made his first appearance in Chicago since his election–not surprisingly he trashed the city–Fox 32 Chicago’s Mike Flannery interviewed him this weekend on his Flannery Fired Up program. Playing devil’s advocate, Flannery mentioned the “booming economy” and Friday’s strong jobs report, Walsh countered on the economy, “It was booming under Obama.” Which one is true, Joe? What you said this weekend about Obama, or your unilateral condemnations of Obama as president, including of course on the economy?
No one should take Walsh seriously as a presidential candidate.
And then there is this Tweet.
Unemployment ticks up to 9.2% in June. RT if you think President Obama is failing the American people on jobs & the economy.
Actually, it’s better to have the economy in the care of the American people, as far away as possible from the destructive hands of government. Unlike Obama, Trump understands this. https://t.co/0QOMxXFEDe
But we will still be hearing from Walsh every now and then; the mainstream media, which mocked him for years, fell in love with Walsh after he announced his campaign against Trump, I mean that he is running for president. With the anti-Trump media it’s all about hating the president.
Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real.”
If there is one thing that you can’t avoid these days it’s unsolicited advice.
In the old days it would come from friends, acquaintance and relatives, now it comes from everywhere in the culture.
TV, Movies, Talk shows, podcasts, and social media are constantly telling you how you should live, how you should eat, how you should have sex etc etc etc. Furthermore in today’s cancel culture a lot of this is given in terms not just of advice, but as a command, do this OR ELSE.
Now of course both you and your spouse live in the culture, the place and the time where you are so while this bombardment can’t be avoided completely it can be ignored and some of it might even make sense or have merit but all of it, the advice and the culture should be taken in the context of what we said yesterday: No source of advice, not even this post can beat the experience of each day you have together.
The demands of culture are transitory. Even just a few years of marriage will outlast the fads of the day. Once you are talking lustrums (5 years) or decades you will realize just how hollow they truly are.
The notorious Milo Yiannopoulos reviews Joker. I didn’t have plans to see the movie, and I’m still not sure if I will, but this excellently written piece definitely pushes me into the ‘probably’ category.
I have read a few dozen reviews of Joker by now. Not a single one is written as intelligently as the movie is, which is the opposite of how film coverage normally goes. At most publications, reviewing Joker has been farmed out to the junior women on staff. Perhaps the men are too overawed and incapacitated by it, like the rest of us, to dissemble.
More likely, their editors are up to something. I’ve been watching verified imbeciles sperg out about it for weeks. It hasn’t been an ordinary kind of sperg-out. When they hate something, but are not afraid of it, they go to war: You see op-eds, tweet storms, endless invective. But when our social justice overlords are truly, madly, uncontrollably terrified by something, they pretend to be bored by it. They affect indifference. Except, they do it in perfect unison—which is how you can tell it’s a lie.
Like masculinity itself, Joker is equal parts beautiful and terrifying. It is a warning about the consequences of a godless world of runaway capitalism and easy mood fixes. It is a movie about a society that has become corrupt and degenerate and turned in on itself, saturated with sex, pornography and prescription drugs. Young men have become completely dissociated from their own lives, and from any sense of worth. It is a society that many of us would recognize.
(…)
Symbologists will tell you that clowns point to the sacred, as fools and jesters point to the truth—obliquely, but with great force. Arthur Fleck is what happens when the disaffected male fails to find that higher calling and instead wallows in the destructive power of manhood, wrenching apart institutions and power structures for the sheer hell of it. But this is the future our rulers chose, by elevating the destructive forces of gender and race studies at the expense of beauty and truth. Joker is set at the exact time in history that these parasitic disciplines were taking over the academy and the sexual degeneracy of Foucault become normative for educated elites.
