@Fawking_Gay

I dress in an unusual manner because I just have a weird sense of style and I DGAF. People (usually women) come up and talk to me ALL THE TIME. The weekend before last I was in a grocery store and three women complimented me on what I was wearing. Most of those interactions are brief, but some turn into conversations. Within the past five days I've had two women approach me and engage in lengthy conversations. It's like "Funky Cold Medina," though... you never know what you're going to get. The most recent one was in a Starbucks when an enormous black chick with close-cropped orange hair was absolutely captivated by me. My wife grabbed her coffee and wandered off to an outside table. Thanks a lot, honey.

Obviously as an old married dude I'm not trying to close any deals, but if I was in the hunt I probably could do so at least occasionally. Obviously it helps that I'm funny.

I recall once when I was single, and a buddy and I went to a club in Canada in our dress blues (we were American lieutenants at the time). It was pretty amazing... like shooting geese in a barrel. Unfortunately, a cougar decided she wanted summa' dis, and I had to play dumb to get rid of her. Fortunately there were a bunch of Canadian Army guys there who invited us to their table and were buying us Molsons.

A guy doesn't have to wear dress blues, of course... anything that stands out can work: an unusual tie, your grandfather's WW2 unit patch on a jacket, a Tinkerbell hat (that your niece gave you, of course). The point is not to look like a PUA sleazaball, but to give a girl an excuse to do what she wants to do anyway: start a conversation.

archive.org/details/tone_loc_funky_cold_medina

@deeplydisturbed

I've been thinking about that a lot the past couple of days, especially since it's still possible for the Democrats to hold the House of Representatives. Let's be real: our elections are completely compromised: no other nation has so few safeguards regarding election integrity except for dictatorships and oligarchies. The last legitimate election we had was in 2016.

And it's not that the Republicans are the guys in the white hats, either. They're almost as bad as the Democrats. It's that Donald Trump was an outsider and didn't like what was happening. Whether that's because he had moral objections or because he wasn't invited to the party may be an open question, but the fact is that he scared the crap out of TPTB., and he had to be destroyed before his movement could survive without him. (That's just Counter-insurrection 101.)

Even if Dinesh D'Souza hadn't laid it out in detail in 2000 Mules, there was enough evidence to cast serious doubt on 2020. 19 of the 20 bellwether counties went for Trump. We had energy independence. Unemployment (including for minorities) was at the lowest point since they started collecting data. Inflation was negligible. Presidents with that sort of record always get reelected. But several states openly gutted their own election integrity laws, and swung from Trump to Biden after they counted a few hundred thousand unverified ballots. Every single case where the results were close went for Biden... they just counted and recounted and recounted some more until Biden won, then immediately stopped counting.

Does that prove fraud? No, but if any other country did that we would not hesitate to question it. If the same thing had happened the other direction it would be the top story on every channel for the next four years... but the story was immediately swept under the carpet and labeled "misinformation" (even by Fox News). We had four years of election denial over a transparently fraudulent conspiracy theory of Russian collusion that many on the left still believe to this day... yet the worst sin a person can commit is to "undermine democracy" by questioning the results of elections that Democrats "win" under murky circumstances.

Now we have a mentally-compromised pervert sitting in the Oval Office, and in less than two years we're begging hostile regimes for oil. Inflation is the highest it's been in decades (and if we calculated it the way we did back then it's far higher). Crime is high. Inner cities are open-air drug markets, shooting galleries, and homeless encampments - I've been in Portland, OR recently, and parts of it are more like Mogadishu than Martha's Vineyard. More than half of American families are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Personal debt is skyrocketing as those families use credit to cover living expenses. People have to choose between heating and eating. And low-and-behold, not only did the Dems not get shellacked (like even Obama did under far more favorable circumstances), but the Dems will keep the Senate and might even keep the House.

Future historians (if there are any) will marvel at how readily Americans allowed such obvious B.S. to occur.

But you know what else I think? I think it doesn't matter whether the elections were stolen or not. I say that because either, 1) Americans are wiling to go along with it, or 2) Americans actually voted for it. I'm frankly not sure which is worse, but in either case it's the end of the end. I agree with you that 9/11 was the beginning of the end, but the rot goes back to before any of us were born. Shoot... I can trace a fairly clear line as least as far back as the Wilson Administration. And this is it: we're cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey... all that remains is for the knife to carve us up to be dished out and devoured.

We can't save it. We can't create a new nation to our liking. All that's left is to live our lives as best we can and hopefully find a tribe that can hold out without drawing too much attention to itself. I've been looking at where I can take my family and go where the insanity has not fully taken hold, and is far enough from centers of insanity to go unnoticed and unbothered. There's no perfect place, of course, but some areas are (currently) less vulnerable than others. I also looked toward the future... a place can be as secure as Fort Knox, but if it contains a large group of radicalized young people it won't stay that way for very long.

James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg were writing about this stuff forty years ago, and they were right: we're atomizing (becoming more tribal) as large polities come apart. The US isn't immune. Frankly I'm a little surprised we've lasted as long as we have. But unlike other times in history when this has happened (the fall of Rome and the "Gunpowder Revolution," for example), the Information Age has created tools to counter that. We're living in the Omnipticon now, and power abhors a vacuum. Being left alone may not be an option, either.