Stolypin's Corner

It is now 2023. No new posts have been made here since June of 2022. The remainder of that year has come and gone, with very little change in the life of this author, and great changes across the wider world.

Ukraine and Russia are still at war. The United States is still responsible. The US has in fact gone so far as to commit acts of sabotage to strengthen its position in the conflict.

Elon Musk has bought Twitter, and has in a manner, restored free speech to the platform.

Joe Biden still doesn’t know where he is, or what he’s doing there.

Kamala Harris is still a skeezy whore who slept her way to the highest circles of power. Pussy power, indeed.

The Republicans are now in control of the US House of Representatives. We’ll see if they are now in control of the US House of Representatives.

Why do male politicians from California (Kevin McCarthy, Xavier Becerra, Gavin Newsome) look like comic book villains? (I’m looking at you, Harvey Dent).

Hopefully, 2023 brings positive changes in the lives of the working, the ordinary, and the nameless. Hopefully it brings pain and misery to the powerful, the arrogant, the plutocratic, the autocratic, and the out-of-touch.

It must be said that American women are the worst. They are demanding, entitled, disrespectful, and ungrateful. They have been brainwashed with post-modern feminism, and as such make lousy wives and partners. American men should still seek out a wife and get married, and have a large number of children. But they should remain aware of the limitations of their potential spouse, and should make demands upon them accordingly, in the hope that an immovable position by a man can force his wife to reconsider her positions and to become a more traditional spouse who respects and honors her husband.

There is not enough water in the American West to support the projected growth in the region. This writer lives in a western state and is involved in western water use. It occurred to this writer recently that their state legislature should require a notarized affidavit, before allowing someone to claim permanent residence in the state, to be submitted by a person or persons planning to move to this place that demonstrates that that person or persons can show that they have arranged for an agreement to be in place that provides a firm water source to sustain their presence and planned activities, before moving to this state. This is a radical idea, but for western states like this one, how much growth can really be sustained?

A child’s birthday is one of the most important events there is. The child will have no recollection of their early birthdays, but such sweet moments are so fleeting in this life that parents are well-advised to hold their children close, to appreciate the subtle looks and expressions in the child’s face, and to make mental note of the day, what was around, what the weather was like, and what presents were given.

Our lives pass quickly. Children grow up and many times move away. Parents grow old.

Little moments, precious moments, they should be cherished and held. They’ll never come again.

It seems obvious that whenever a so-called “Progressive” is elected, or a “Progressive” mentality is at work or “Progressive” ideas are issued or promulgated, that division follows. No one with this ideology seems to have the slightest idea how to build anything of value. They have no idea in most cases how to actually build anything, at least in this authors’ experience. An acquaintance once tried to use a pair of pliers in front of the writer, and this person, a very booksmart individual, barely understood how to use the tool to remove a hex nut from a threaded post. Progressives don’t know anything about plumbing, or electrical conduit, or welding. Most know little about cabinetry or woodworking, although the writer is also no Bob Vila.

Correspondingly, most people of this persuasion also know very little about building anything esoteric or institutional. They don’t seem to care about process, or about efficiency. Planning, forecasting, quality control, reliability – these are all concepts that escape the modern western progressive. They seem to care very little if something they built actually works 100% of the time – the author has encountered this often when dealing with Microsoft products, and one may only ponder the blue-haired creature with designer glasses currently working on those things.

Service is an idea that escapes this lot. They don’t seem to feel as though they owe anyone, anything, and this is apparent when walking in a major American city. Who exactly are the officials of these places serving? The people definitely not being served by the elected officials in these cities are the citizens who have the fruit of their labors (read: taxes) taken from them without their consent. If this is the case and must be so, although it can be argued that it musn’t be so, then shouldn’t the ordinary worker being levied in such a way at least expect a basic level of service from those running their publicly funded institutions?

Who does Larry Krasner serve? Who does Chesa Boudin serve? Who does Mayor Hancock in Denver serve? What about Jay Inslee? or Gretchen Whitmer? One might argue that the author is cherrypicking examples only from the Left. This of course is right and would be countered by observing that the problems observed under the authority of these figures simply doesn’t happen in Republican-led jurisdictions. There is plenty to blame the GOP for in this day and age, but abandoning public spaces and institutions to disorder and chaos simply isn’t a criticism that can be made.

But back to the original point. Disorder and division is the point. Why are places like Ted Wheeler’s Portland the most dangerous place that a person with an alternative viewpoint could go to openly espouse those views? By contrast, a rabid, foaming-at-the mouth progressive could likely walk into an establishment in Hays, Kansas, mouth something edgy or provocative at one of the locals, and would probably only get strange looks or perhaps quiet chuckles in response. They might actually find people who wish to debate them on their merits as an act of goodwill. This isn’t conjecture, it’s the author’s observation. A political debate at a local school in the 2010’s confirmed this personally. Why are those places in the United States that shout the loudest about division, the most divided and toxic?

How degraded do things have to get before Americans begin to make some demands? Specifically, how much homelessness and disorder has to be suffered until people begin to ask those in charge to begin enforcing the law, and to begin making sure that regular people can go about their lives unmolested by degeneracy? Do families have any rights in this disaster of a society? Do kids have a right to not see drug addicts shooting up on the sidewalks that their parents pay for with their tax dollars? Do regular people have any right to clean, orderly public spaces not covered in delinquents and ne’er-do-wells? Does a retail worker have a right to work and to not get maced in the face by a common criminal who’s shoplifting in their store?

At what point does this stuff end? Does it end with the police state being installed, or does it end only when enough people get pissed off enough that they can’t be ignored anymore? This whole thing (i.e., United States of America) is a dysfunctional joke.

There is a lot in the “news” right now about Russia and Ukraine, and whether the former may invade the latter. The American “media” (more like “principal propaganda organ of the State”) is busy running around squawking like defeathered poultry about this supposed situation. Brief thoughts and opinions are in order.

This has nothing to do with America or its people. There is nothing about it that America or Americans should care about. This is or isn’t an issue for others located thousands of miles away to settle. No one living in the US should waste one moment of their time, or one single firing of their cerebral synapses, thinking or worrying about Russia or the Ukraine.

During the previous American presidential administration, there was a refreshing hiatus, largely, from all of the ridiculous saber rattling and interventionist idiocy that has come to be a hallmark of American foreign policy. If a person was paying attention, there were many other things going on that were domestic in character and which were much more relevant. Opportunity zones, protectionist trade policies, the American trade imbalance with the Chinese autocracy, border control or at least the attempt to control the border, manufacturing on-shoring. These and many other things could be read about if one knew where to look, and to someone just trying to live their lives, these things tended to be much more meaningful and impactful then why anyone should care about Syria or Iraq or Russia or wherever.

Now that the “adults” are back in charge, however, the “Status Quo Ante Trump” must be resumed, says these supposed exemplars of American statecraft. This means that Americans must be convinced that every few months will bring a new international horror to light, always recalling the epic confrontation with German National Socialism, in which the American government at any moment could be called upon to send thousands of landing craft swarming towards a cold and frothy beachhead somewhere to deliver the “Arsenal of Democracy” towards some tyrant threatening the existential rights and freedoms of some helpless and hapless people (or corrupt Eastern European government, take your pick).

This buffoonish tendency is now manifesting itself once more with the deafening warnings about what the Russian Federation is supposedly threatening to do to Ukraine. Russia is Nazi Germany, Putin is Hitler, Boris Johnson is Churchill, and Joseph Robinette Biden is Franklin Roosevelt (except this time, it’s the brain, not the legs, that isn’t working and demands a wheelchair).

We no longer can indulge ourselves with such petty worries as the opioid epidemic or the pillaging of American middle class liquidity and assets by the American oligarchy and financial class. NOW, there are bigger fish to fry. Now we have to distract ourselves with what Russia (a state with a GDP equal to that of Italy) is up to because Democracy! demands it. We don’t get to care about this country or its people. Our country, and our people. We don’t get to have leaders who care about this country or its people. We don’t get to solve our own problems and leave others to solve theirs. We don’t get to have a long-term vision of our society and then seek to implement it one step at a time. We don’t get to have our own country. We aren’t good enough for that, and our leaders are reminding us of this fact when they use their puppets in the media to bleat at us about the Slavic nations in Eastern Europe.

Editor’s Note: This is an old comment from an earlier site that was written before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022. The intent of this post remains unchanged.

It has for a while occurred to the writer that there is a particularly dehumanizing aspect to the way in which the American political Left, by which is meant the Democratic Party, treats the “Non-White” citizens and residents of the US.

It seems that there is a unusually cruel and vicious attitude at play by the Party when it comes to these people. Take for example the killings of Asian people in Atlanta in the last year or so at the hands of black criminals. Now, in this case, virtually no whites were involved. The victims and the perpetrator were in this case, “People of Color”, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean (more dehumanization at the hands of the Left, the writer is afraid to say, to all people, including whites, as white is a color.). The American media, along with big business, seized upon the events to once again pillory the white population of the US as bigots and racists, while declaring their supposed solidarity with the “AAPI” population, “AAPI” standing for “Asian-American and Pacific Islander” or whatever (another invention of the Left to seize what they see as the moral high ground).

Now, the fact that the perp was black was completely ignored, and for obvious reasons. The sudden, out of nowhere, and strangely coordinated AAPI solidarity campaign also was, in this writer’s mind, brought to light and emphasized for exactly those same reasons, or perhaps it should be said, the inverse of those reasons for which the color of the criminal was ignored. It is this writer’s belief that the Democratic Party, which make no mistake is run at its highest levels by very powerful white people, loves to see the “non-white” population of this country as a swirling block of what this writer will call “Mud People”, an amorphous mass of people with no identity, no peculiarities, no distinctions, and no differences.

Hispanics are mud people to the Democrats. The distinctions between Mexican, or Cuban, or Venezuelan, or Dominican, or Peruvian, do not matter to the rich white ladies on Martha’s Vineyard. Black people are mud people to the Democrats. The differences between a black American from Alabama, whose ancestors came here centuries ago, who suffered in the bondage of slavery, and who broke free from that bondage and who has worked to assume their rightful, full participatory place in the American polity, and a recent immigrant from Nigeria do not matter to the young tech overlord in Silicon Valley in his designer jeans and stink of patchouli. The commonality that may or may not be had between Koreans and Japanese or Chinese, who have all waged war against each other and in recent memory, relatively, is completely irrelevant to the CNN pundit busy shrilly screaming about “White Supremacy!!” as they attempt to conjure the angst and fears of the great amorphous blob of Mud People against the hated mass of white racists and bigots supposedly primed (we’re told by CNN) at any moment to rise up and take back control of the control that was supposedly held by that mass in an iron fist of domination (even though as already stated, it is white people who run the media and the Democrats. Repeating one’s self does get tiring.).

How long can this unbelievably condescending, insulting, and dehumanizing stuff continue to go on? If the demographic projections come to pass in this century as they are predicted to, and the non-Hispanic white majority becomes a minority in this country, what sort of changes might be expected due to language like this? Will people of the innumerable ethnic categories that make up the USA finally tire of this endless spin and race hustling, seeing through the lies and deceit of the rich, liberal, white minority inhabiting the wealthy enclaves on the coasts who truly do intend to rule this country through an American apartheid? Or will all of these disparate groups come to hate each other so much that dislocative and tribal balkanization will occur, tearing the communal polity apart so much so that the country ceases to function as a cohesive whole (thinking Western Roman Empire here)? Will intermarriage and mixing occur on such a mammoth level, unseen anywhere else in history, that new groups of people with new and distinct identities (dare one say, truly American identities??) come to the fore that challenge and render inoperable to sad and terrible woke ethnic and race hustling nonsense of today’s American elites?

These are distinct possibilities here that this writer theorizes could all happen in part and parcel, or perhaps one of them completely, or none of them, though this last option seems unlikely. In any case, what will it take to end the cruel and disgusting dehumanization of the peoples of this nation by the political Left?

As mentioned previously, an introduction will be made here to Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of the Russian Empire from 1906 through 1911. Below is an image of the man:

Pyotr Stolypin, Last Hope of the Tsars (image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin was born on April 14th, 1862 in Dresden, which was then part of the German Confederation, the son of a Russian envoy to Germany. Stolypin’s family had been members of the Russian aristocracy since the 16th Century; Pyotr grew up on estates near Moscow, and near Vilnius in what is today Lithuania.

Stolypin was a high achiever academically, and wrote his thesis at St. Petersburg University on tobacco cultivation in the southern areas of Russia. He entered public administration after leaving school, remaining there for the rest of his life.

Stolypin is a remarkable figure, a man of immense energy and bravery, who took enormous personal chances with his own life at a time when Russia was becoming more and more volatile, and when public officials were often in grave danger of assassination from left-wing radicals. Stolypin saw that the emancipation of the serfs which occurred in the 1860’s in Russia had not gone nearly far enough, and that the peasant class had not really been given anything tangible as part of that reform. The conditions for unrest, instability, and revolution, therefore, had not been quelled and likewise, the rights and dignity of the people within Russia had not been fully realized.

Stolypin saw this as a situation that had to be rectified if Russia was to become truly great, and if its people, in particular its working class, were to become truly free. Russia in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was an enormous agrarian empire, with the vast majority of its people living and laboring on the land. These people, however, had no ownership stake in that land, unlike the farmers of Western Europe and United States. Stolypin saw that in order for a stable and prosperous agricultural middle and working class to be created in Russia, the peasantry must be enfranchised personally, meaning that they could make decisions for themselves and their families, that they could actually hold title to the land that they worked, and that they could gain access to financial services that would help to grow their enterprises and purchase the necessary goods and equipment to farm their land properly. The farmer would also need to be trusted enough to make his own decisions regarding what needed to be planted and how the land should be worked, based on agronomic factors and not the whims of outdated laws or the whims of an estate holder who owned the land and essentially, the serf who worked it.

Pyotr Stolypin believed that if an educated and prosperous middle class could be built out of the Russian peasantry and if their freedom could be realized through several decades of vigorous reforms, then the revolutionary fervor roiling Russia, particularly after Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905, could be eliminated once and for all. Stolypin believed that such a class of people, with their private ownership of land and capital, would create an enormous class of naturally conservative people who would have no need for the theories and violent actions of the Left in Russia. Pyotr worked very vigorously to try and make this a reality and in future posts, more aspects of this immensely fascinating and tragic figure will be examined.