How to start smoking pipe: a review

Full disclaimer: I did not get paid to write this. I did not even get a discount on the pipe or anything, since nobody had any idea that I would be reviewing it. I decided to review it when it arrived.

This is the long-overdue review of Kade's Small German Clay Pipe-Green Bit. I ordered one of these a few weeks ago, and it shipped a lot sooner than I expected, which is always nice. Please find below a picture of the product, with a zippo for scale:

As advertised on the website, it is a compact pipe design that fits into basically every pocket. The bowl is also small, lending itself to quicker smokes. So far so good. But how does it smoke?

It is at this point that I must preface that I am a beginner to the fine art of the pipe, and to smoking in general. I picked up my first pack of American Spirits three months ago, and this is the first dedicated pipe that I have ever owned. The reason I feel qualified to review the pipe is that Kade describes it as "perfect for beginners". I am as beginner as it gets, and I will not write how many times I had to re-light this tiny bowl, because the number is shameful.

The pipe smokes well. I used some lousy tobacco that I bummed off of my roommate for free, but I still enjoyed the smoke. It's easy to operate, but still pleasant to smoke. That being said, I have had more pleasant smokes with nicer tobacco out of nicer pipes. To Kade's great credit, he does not pretend that this is a fancy pipe. It is exactly what he says it is: a beginner's pipe, good for quick smokes and trying new tobaccos, since the clay does not retain flavor.

Therefore, I recommend that anyone trying to get into pipes buy one of these. If you are already into pipes, consider getting one anyway, since they are cheap and they can be used to try new tobaccos without risking the retention of a lousy flavour in one of your fancy pipes. I for one will definitely keep it around, first to practice my technique, then to try new tobaccos.

Out of five stars, I give this pipe all five. Not because it will blow your mind, but because it is exactly what it purports to be, and a good deal to boot. Show our man Kade some love!

Staffing the next system

 As most of you will know, a lot of people are choosing something right now that will kill some of them [1]. You also know that this excess mortality might be intentional, somewhere on the chain of causality. Let us assume that it is intented to work as it apparently does, for a thought experiment.

If you've ever created anything, you understand that certain specialist skills are required.

Would you like to make a website?
Someone has to code that.

Care for central heating?
A whole lot of people need to build that system.

How about a functioning war machine?
Add several orders of magnitude more infrastructure.

As the storms in Jacksonville shows, complex systems will collapse simply by people taking a day off [2]. It gets considerably worse when the specialists in question are six feet under, as the bad weather brigade can be convinced to come back and eventually train the next generation, whereas a bunch of rotting corpses cannot.

Consider also this historical precedent [3]. Stalin's ballistic implementation of cancel culture did not take out nearly as many people as the famines or the war did; he only caused the execution of various paper-pushers that had fallen out of favour in Moscow. Nevertheless, the combined loss of talent and experience destroyed the Red Army in 1941, to the tune of 4 million men lost in 6 months [4]. It can be concluded that whoever decided to push some random poison knows perfectly well that you can't just take out the talent and expect to run anything. Hence the question:

How will the next system be staffed?

There are two answers I can think of.

First option: certain groups of people and their families are getting their "Your papers, please" without the associated Faucian Roulette needles. It would also explain Newsom's odd behaviour; maybe his daughter did not make the list and is earmarked for the aforementioned Faucian Roulette [5]. This would leave the required staff alive and well for the next system to run reasonably smoothly.

Second option: they don't care. Everyone gets the same mixture of God-knows-what. Since the Prince of this World is hardly fond of human life, maybe system-wide collapse and mass slaughter is the actual top-level plan.

Personally, I am torn between the two, because option one is something already explored in popular media [6], whereas option two makes perfect sense in the supernatural analysis.

Muth Be Nice: Musings on privilege

Privilege is real. It does not take the forms that we are asked to check, and it is often situational. Nevertheless, privilege exists, and the Christian needs to understand what this means for his or her individual situation.

For the purposes of this post, privilege can be defined as an advantage which the individual happens to have at the outset. Examples include height in men, visual beauty in women, as well as wealth and high intelligence for both. It should also be noted that privilege is never good or evil: that would be a category error. The whole point of privilege is that one does not choose it, so there is no moral element. Yet.

Similarly, most privileges are situational. Being a giant among men is all fun and games in most sports, but not in most buildings, cars, or shower stalls. High intelligence is a pain when interacting with the cognitively normal. Nevertheless, privileges exist. So what is the privileged Christian to do?

More.

That's the short answer. Luke 12:48 elaborates: " And unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required: and to whom they have committed much, of him they will demand the more". Christians who have received more than average, have to do more than average. This provides two valuable insights.

First, there is no need to feel guilty about being born rich, handsome, intelligent, tall, or anything else. It's part of the plan, and not in the Qtarded sense of the term. Life is not unfair, at least not in the sense that matters.

Second, there is no need to be envious of anyone who has it better than you do. Sure, they got a nicer house or car or whatever, but they also have more asked of them. Every time you get done in by circumstance, you know that God is giving you an easier time of it. If you'd gotten that promotion, pay raise, gold medal, or whatever, then more would be required of you. So thank God, and move on with life.

This begs one final question: do more of what? Love more, that's what. Love God more, and love thy neighbour more. It's the greatest commandment, so it's as good of a general direction as you're going to get. Got funds to spare? Support your church and community! People listen to you because you're good at rhetoric or just an Alpha? Tell them the truth, and the Truth! People trust you with their problems for no reason at all? Listen to them, it literally helps them! Humans are weird like that.

Whatever you got, love God and neighbor with it. It's both simple to understand and hard to do, but you got the Almighty on your side, so you should be fine.

Much Love!

PS as PhilosophicalBear on SG put it, the biblical term for "privilege" is blessing.

A Vaccine for Rhetoric

Disclaimer: The following is not entirely clean speech, due to the nature of the topic involved. A clean TLDR is provided at the bottom.

There is a vaccine that actually works, and the side effects are not life-threatening! Of course, this vaccine does not involving injecting God-knows-what into your bloodstream. As the title suggests, this vaccine prevents any and all damage from rhetorical attacks. Here's how to get this vaccine.

Call yourself the term.

That's it. Just start using it on yourself, and use it often. It's a combination of exposure therapy and hyperinflation. Own the term and make it meaningless at the same time. Trump did this to great effect with "deplorable". But we can do it with every other term too.

For further evidence, one but needs to consider the term "queer". This used to be a playground insults for boys who acted weird. Now it is one of the Qs in LGBTQQKKKNSDAP. How did this happen? Easy: the freakshows just started using it on themselves. They got vaccinated against "queer". It's past time for you to vaccinate yourself against "racist". Much Love!

TLDR: Use the rhetorical device on yourself, and use it often. Just call yourself the "-ism" or "-phobia" du jour.

How to dress well with minimal effort/funds

Many of us never got into dressing up. And why would we? Our jobs require more practical clothing, and there are much better uses for surplus funds anyway. However, as Christian men, we have a moral obligation to be a role model to the young men in our congregation. When we were young, we looked to the adult men for role models, for someone to aspire to be like, especially when our Boomer parents did not provide much direction.

But now we are the adult men. Now the young men and boys look up to us. Let us all strive to never disappoint them. Let us, among many other things, present ourselves properly in church. Let us make our 'Sunday best' be pretty good.

This guide will work from the bottom up, starting with the cheapest/simplest setups, and building from there. This will allow every man to commit as far as is appropriate for his situation.

Stage 1: the absolute basics

Get a light blue or white dress shirt and navy blue chinos. If you get both colours of dress shirt, this should still be around $100. Definitely buy these in person. Make sure that they fit properly. It is a better use of your money to get the cheapest stuff altered than to buy the slightly nicer ones and have them not fit well. What does a good fit look like? It looks like the dudes on the pictures displayed in the store. They were all fitted perfectly for the photoshoot. If needed, work on your posture. Good posture saves money in the long run, and it makes almost every outfit look substantially better.

Stage 2:

Get a charcoal-grey sports jacket and a tie. Stay away from fancy patterns. With alterations, this may set you back up to $300, but then you are covered for every occasion.

Stage 3: 

Get a pair of khakis and a white polo shirt. This is essential for warmer climates, since the polos have short sleeves. Do NOT get a dress shirt with short sleeves/Hawaiian shirts. Leave those for the celibate vocations and the Boomer filth.

Stage 4: further reading.

A lot of men dress a lot better than I do, and some of them have written about it. Below is a list of links for your perusal. Note that I do not vouch for their adherence to clean speech rules.

https://pushingrubberdownhill.com/2015/12/28/a-non-idiots-guide-to-idiot-advice-on-getting-dressed/

"Critical Race Theory" might be bait

I do not believe in online privacy. I spend my entire digital life under the assumption that someone is at least taping it, and that they can access it as needed. If I want something kept a secret, it stays on pen and paper.

Therefore, Google knows what I read, whom I follow, et cetera. Anything that Google recommends for me, it must be aimed at an at least right-of-centre, if not far-right audience. And boy have they been pushing the "critical race theory debunked by [jogger]" headlines! They show up on my Google News about as much as a certain injection. This is getting pushed hard.

As you know, anything that makes any media headlines is automatically suspicious. Why is it being pushed? I initially thought that 'muh critical race theory' was just the usual mix of fear, division, and incitement-to-cortisol that makes up every news feed, whether it leans left, right, up, down, front, or back. But something that gets pushed this hard is definitely worse. The usual suspects must really be up to something serious. But what are they up to?

This morning, a SocialGalactic post containing the following image solved the query:

It should be noted I was unable to locate this tweet. It might be fake or just deleted already. Either way, I will assume that the information presented is somewhat factually accurate. If parents have indeed been letting their school boards know how they feel about critical race theory, then the whole push makes sense. Here's why:

This theory was insane to begin with. It debunks about as quickly as the wage gap, since it posits that white supremacy somehow makes it easier for blaqs to get into college and makes asians richer than whites. It's a complete joke. Real propaganda is subtle, such as pushing self-destructive lifestyles as 'freedom' and 'cool' and whatever else the Boomers called it.

I posit that the real goal of this 'debunking of critical race theory' is to make the right trust the schools again. You see, we got them libs! They couldn't push critical race theory into the schools! Nevermind all the other propaganda about sex-ed, climate change, and socialism that is still very much in the curricula! Disregard entirely the absolute torture that a 103-IQ teacher excersising their petty tyranny on a 140-IQ student inflicts! Really avoid paying any attention to the pathologisation of masculinity, where every insufficiently castrated boy gets put on amphetamine compounds to suppress the entirely natural and healthy impulse to move around and be physically active! We can trust the government schools now!

Don't fall for it. Homeschool or die is still in full force and effect. Much Love!

Read Better Words [corrected]

Rare is the day that yours truly finds himself disagreeing with Vox Day, but today is one such day. Usually, Day discusses topics which he is interested in but I am not, so I just roll with what he says, because he is honest, intelligent, and wise. That being said, there is one publicly expressed opinion of his that I must offer a rejoinder to, since it is my belief that we are not in a post-literate age.

It is absolutely true that less books are being read. I've read exactly one book since Christmas, and that puts me above the average of my social circle in uni of all places. But I still read a lot, on a daily basis. I read social media feeds and blog posts and such things. Excluding vocation-related reading, I would estimate that I read some five thousand words a day, and that is in line with what I have observed among my 'post-literate' peers.

However, there is a readily apparent difference between reading books and reading social media feeds. Said difference is probably what the word 'post-literate' is used to get at. While 'post-biblio-[suffix]' would be more dialectically acccurate, the bibliophiles have a point. We should be reading more books. Reading five thousand words takes less than 20 minutes in your native tongue. I wonder how many books each of us would get through in a year if we took half our 'reading stuff on the internet' time and read books with it instead. It's the same activity. We are already literate. But the words are better.

Hence I ask you, dear reader, to read better words. There are many better words out there. If you have no idea where to start, I recommend the Bible for about five minutes a day. For the other fifteen, ask about any genre on SG and the bibliophiles will help you out, guaranteed. Much love!

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Correction: I stand corrected by people wiser than myself. Post-literate is the correct term. Mea maxima culpa for getting into a semantics spit in my seecond language with a bunch of bibliophiles in their first language. I should know better. I should read better words.