We woke up this morning with ZERO wish to do a darn thing and we will cater to that wish by just lounging around the house enjoying each other’s company since it is a rainy day.

So, instead of a regular post, I give you a pretty pic to lust after.

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This hit me on the YouTube:

With all due respect to the great Harrison Ford, fuck you.

The Call of the Wild is perhaps my favorite book.  I cannot tell you how many times I have read it.  Dozens at least, maybe more.  It’s short, about 200 pages, and I can kill it in an afternoon.

The story focuses entirely on Buck.  Human characters come and go.

John Thorton only appears in the last half to third of the book.  Then, he’s killed by a bunch of Indians after striking it rich at his claim in the Yukon.  Buck then kills the Indians and runs off into the woods and fully embraces the call of the wild and becomes the leader of a wolf pack.

This movie is a perversion of what I believe is one of the best American novels ever written.

Also, a CGI dog?  That is just insulting.

It looks to be on the same level of abortion as the 1997 Starship Troopers movie (yemach shemo).

Call of the Wild, like Starship Troopers and Hatchet, is on my list of “if I ever had the money to start my own production company, I would make a true to the book film adaptation of it” list.

Except Starship Troopers deserves to be turned into a mini-series like Band of Brothers or Generation Kill, in order to capture all the political philosophy that makes the book as great as it is.  Starship Troopers, like Dune, was a political treatise with just enough plot to make it a novel and not a manifesto.

But I digress…

I’m not going to bother seeing Call of the Wild.  I hope this movie flops.  And as much as I love The Fugitive and Clear and Present Danger, Harrison Ford can go to hell for this travesty.

Telemundo asked the leading Democrat candidates who is the president of Mexico.

Steyer and Klobuchar did not know the name of the president of Mexico, in interviews w/ @TelemundoNews
“I forget,” says Steyer.
"Can you tell me his name?"
Klobuchar: “No."
Pete knew. pic.twitter.com/gUBqyxLfUW

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) February 14, 2020

They all got the answer wrong.

The president of Mexico is Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

He might not be the duly elected leader of the country, but the Mexican government surrendered to him back when they tried to arrest his son and cartel gunmen put Mexican federal law enforcement on the run.

A Florida Man in Tampa impersonated presidential candidate Bernie Sanders tonight, successfully convincing locals that he was indeed the Democratic Senator. He proceeded to draw several inappropriate images under the Sanders persona. pic.twitter.com/QV6H43dfwY

— Florida News Network (@FNNOrlando) February 14, 2020

Hat Tip Kotetu…I spilled my coffee, you bastard!

In case you missed the news, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was arrested and briefly detained during a protest by striking airline workers at the Metro Detroit Airport.

This is how some Bernie Bros responded to the news.

Sorry all 13th districts are now Rashida's.
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We don't make the rules
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Yet.

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) February 14, 2020

It’s good to see them admit that when Bernie is in power, representative democracy will be done away with and their favorite politicians will be appointed to rule in the American Politburo.

Socialism is totalitarianism, the two cannot be separated.

This is why I write so much about how to keep moderates from becoming supporters/useful idiots for Bernie, to make sure that Bernie and his dyed-in-the-wool ideologue supporters don’t have the slightest chance of getting into power.

I was thinking about my post from yesterday about McKinsey & Co and the false technocratic managerial class and it got me thinking about some of the ugliness of modern America.

The majority of human beings like to be productive.  Our brains are hardwired this way.  When we accomplish something, our brains squirt out a little bit of neurotransmitter called dopamine.  Dopamine is our motivation chemical.

This is most likely an evolutionary advantage.  The lazy hunter-gatherer starved.  One might be motivated by the survival instinct to work just hard enough not to die.  But a brain that rewards strong motivation and accomplishment is going to make a caveman that is going to be prosperous and have an increased likelihood of survival.

We see this in our lives all around us.  Having one lazy, restful day after a hard workweek feels good.  Being indolent for days on end feels like shit.

The highest rates of misery, drug and alcohol abuse, and crime are found in neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of welfare.  Neighborhoods, where the rates of employment are high, are generally peaceful, with happy people and low rates of crime.

Productive work doesn’t make people miserable, being idol makes people miserable.

But there is a caveat to this.  People need to feel rewarded for their work in order for them to feel productive.  There are many kinds of rewards, some immediate, others long term.  It is that reward at the end of the hard work that really makes our brains happy.

Just watch Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel.  The people featured in that show do hard and often disgusting jobs.  Overwhelming they are small business owners and they always love their jobs.  They work hard and at the end of the day, they make good money and can say proudly “I accomplished something.”

Enter the capitalist system.  In its purest, small-business-mentality form, capitalism is the economic system that best fits our brains.

You work hard, develop certain skills, produce a good or provide a service that people want.  You sell that good or service and make money.  You take that money, work even harder, make more money.  There is a direct relationship between hard work and success.  Motivation and accomplishment.

This is fundamentally why the capitalist system encourages success.  Any economic system that strays from this encourages failure.

Now enter the McKinsey mind.  The article I covered yesterday talked about how McKinsey gutted middle management and the idea of someone working their way up from the bottom.  Outsourcing, part timing, and gig work have become the name of the game.

Despite the booming economy, half of Americans didn’t get a rise last year.  Most of them were in the middle of the economic ladder.

So what has happened?

The McKinsey model means that while the middle class works, the management class gets the raises and bonuses.  Productivity at the middle level of the company is not rewarded in a real, tangible way.  No short term bonuses, no long term upward mobility.

The lean, mean, cut-to-the-bone, “employees are an expense to be minimized, not an asset to be invested in” McKinsey model has been the primary driver of the lack of raises, promotions, and bonuses to the non-professional management middle sector of our economy.

This is absolutely demoralizing to the human brain.  We need our accomplishment fix.

For many young men, video games provide this.  Video games are a digital microcosm of work and reward.  The more intense you play, the higher the score you get.  Do something really special and “Achievement Unlocked” appears on the screen.  It’s real, immediate gratification, and that is highly addictive.  It’s the same neurology/psychology as gambling addiction.

If video games don’t do it, you can just consume alcohol which forces your brain to release dopamine or opiate that stimulates the dopamine receptors in the brain.

We have seen how alcohol, drug, and video game addiction is increasingly prevalent among young men in the working and middle classes.

With no reward or upward mobility, and a very real sense that a career is non-existent and life is simply treading water between gigs, it is no surprise that the demographic that experiences this turns to artificial means of feeling accomplished.

Yes, I am saying that I believe that McKinsey is largely responsible for the drug and video game addiction of so many young men in America today.

Again, I want to make this clear.  I am not indicting all of capitalism.  I am a capitalist.

I am indicting this particularly destructive idea that has created a cloistered, self-protected, managerial and consulting elite, that exists only to reward itself at the expense of everyone else.

Hopefully, one day, we as a society will come to see McKinsey and the managerial consulting class activity for what it is, a crime against humanity.

Via Clayton Cramer:

 Immediately after the shooting, kind of two groups of students came forward. And one group got a lot more attention than the other.

The group of students [that] got attention said, “We blame the Second Amendment. We blame the NRA. We blame the gun for what happened.” The other group of students said, “We knew it was him before it was over. The student threatened to kill us. He threatened to rape us. He threatened to kill our families. He brought knives to school. He brought bullets to school. We saw something. We said something. They did nothing. They didn’t protect us from him.”

‘Exposing Everything That Went Wrong’: A Parkland Researcher Speaks Out

Don’t forget that still not a single member of the Broward County school board has been punished for the many mistakes that led to the killings and they even got rewarded with an infusion of taxpayer’s money. We rewarded bad behavior handsomely.