Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
May 1, 2024 by Thomas Wictor
When facing a life-threatening emergency, you call “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” on the radio in the hopes that someone will hear and save you. May Day, on the other hand, was deemed International Workers’ Day by the Second International, the organization of socialist parties formed in Paris on July 14, 1889. Whenever I see May Day marches with all the red flags, I think of an aircraft crashing or a ship going down.
I’ve lived in five socialist countries: Venezuela, the Netherlands, Norway, Britain, and Japan. What unites all of those disparate cultures is the insistence on playacting. Everyone is supposed to pretend that things are working well. You’re required to pledge your loyalty to a system, and then you stick with it regardless of the unfairness, insanity, corruption, and incompetence.
Don’t get me wrong: The US has taken unfairness, insanity, corruption, and incompetence to stratospheric heights. But to all you Americans who’ve never lived in a socialist country, you need to understand that as bad as you think things are here, they’re much worse under socialism. There’s no such thing as a sincere socialist. It’s 100 percent consistent. People with no money claim to be socialists, but the second they start earning more than minimum wage, they bitch about having to pay taxes.
What about millionaires and billionaires who say they’re socialists? When people live in what are essentially castles, have private jets, and get all of their money from capital gains and thus pay a much lower tax rate than their limousine drivers, they’re not socialists. These are pretend-socialists, no different from this little kid.
Life in socialist countries taught me that collectivism is all about style over substance, lip service, and presenting a facade for others. This habitual feigning eventually dooms a culture, because you can’t compartmentalize it. If your entire economic structure requires that you exist in a fantasy land, you can’t be rational and clear-headed about anything.
Here in California both the ruling class and the voters are utterly delusional. The state has unfunded pension liabilities that may be as high as $1 trillion. Since California has a progressive tax system—the more you make, the higher your taxes are—the state will never be able to pay for anything it wants to do. The wealthy get most of their money from investments. When the stock market tanks, the wealthy have no income. If they lose tons of money in a given year, you can’t tax them.
This is so elementary that a child could grasp it, but collectivism is make-believe. So everyone in California pretends that we’re still the Golden State, and that businesses will forever flock here, and we can build high-speed railways and make sure that all jobs pay enough to buy a house and raise a family.
In 2009 I read a newspaper story about a bus driver who’d bought an $800,000 mansion. The article said that the woman—whose mansion was now being taken by the bank—was a victim of “predatory lending.”
Back in 2009 I was taking care of my parents in exchange for them letting me live rent free in a house they owned next door to their own. They paid for my health insurance and gave me a stipend, and I guarded them, did manual labor for them, took them shopping when needed, and saw them through their deaths. At that time I’d get e-mails offering to lend me money so that I could buy a million-dollar house.
I moved those e-mails into the trash without even opening them.
There’s no such thing as “predatory lending.” Nobody puts a gun to your head and forces you to do something as stupid as buying an $800,000 house when you’re earning $23,000 a year before federal, state, and local taxes. In California your take-home pay will be about $19,000. Add up state and local sales taxes, and it’s an extra 10 percent on the cost of everything you purchase. Gas tax is an extra 71 cents per gallon.
Recently I read a piece by a man who describes himself as average looking. He said he feels resentment toward women like this, because they won’t even glance at him.
That ad got banned in London because plenty of women complained about the model, twenty-three-year-old Australian Renee Somerfield. The British Advertising Standards Authority ordered the ad removed, and now they’re going to “investigate” it to see if it “breaks harm and offense rules or is socially irresponsible.”
Which is more socially irresponsible, running an ad with a skinny Aussie model, or creating this situation?
Security services are understood to be investigating links between Hani al-Sibai and his influence on the west London terror network in which Jihadi John - unmasked as Mohammed Emwazi - operated…
In a court case last year, he was accused of having “provided material support to al-Qaeda and conspired to commit terrorist acts”, an allegation he denies.
Despite being officially identified as an affiliate of the notorious terror network, al-Sibai, citing his human rights, has thwarted government attempts to deport him for more than 15 years.
Instead, the Egyptian-born cleric lives in a leafy street in fashionable west London in the same neighbourhood where Emwazi and his fellow jihadists in the London Boys terror cell hung out…
The rent on father-of-five al-Sibai’s home in Hammer-smith – owned by a housing association and worth as much as £1 million – is understood to be paid by the taxpayer.
The British import terrorists and pay them to live in the UK. Hani al-Sibai’s protege Jihadi John recruits thousands more terrorists. His beheading videos have made him into a one-man terrorist factory. Model Renee Somerfield poses for photos, starves herself, and works out. Which person is more damaging to civilization?
It doesn’t matter to me that Renee Somerfield wouldn’t give me a second glance. For one thing she doesn’t have time to glance at anyone, since literally all she does is work out and starve. Besides, we’ve got different priorities.
She wants to goober around(?) all day, while I prefer to buy postcards, watch the sky, and think. There’s no reason in the world for me to resent her or have any kind of negative feelings toward her.
Maybe most of you don’t understand what these models do to themselves. When I was a music journalist in Los Angeles, I hung out with a commercial photographer. He let me sit in on his photo shoots because they were so bizarre. The models all looked like Renee Somerfield, and they were so hungry that they carried emergency cans of tuna fish in their handbags. These were the little cans, like single servings of cat food.
Always chunk light tuna in water. When the models started feeling faint, they ran to their handbags, popped the top of the tuna can, and gobbled the fish with pink plastic spoons from Baskin-Robbins ice-cream shops.
I can’t tell you how many times I saw this happen. So I can’t find it in me to be jealous or resentful of models like Renee Somerfield.
Still, I can’t resist adding something that’ll make all the angry men and women even more indignant. At every photo shoot I attended, at some point the model would say, “I’m not wearing any underwear! Wanna see?”
And she’d raise her skirt and flash us. Guess what?
If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. It was about as titillating as watching a woman…eat a can of tuna.
The world would be a much better place if everyone lived their own lives and stopped thinking that others have it better than we do. Everything balances out. Carlos Slim is worth $76 billion, and he has a literal private army just to survive each day. Would you really want to be him?
