You All Suck (#50 -- Survival of The Weakest At The Expense of The Meekest)

 "While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is best..." -- C.S. Lewis

An apology for the recent disappearing act.

The Overlord had the opportunity to make some serious cash these last few weeks and took it with gusto. A good thing, since I'm putting up the shutters on the business at the end of the year (some of that below), and I will probably need some extra scratch considering that it cost me $50 to fill the Nissan Tie-Fighter this afternoon...

...and I already HAD a quarter tank in it when I started pumping.

Thanks Joemala!

What I'll do next is still a mystery, at present, but at least I won't be starving and shivering in the cold this winter.

Assuming that Winter isn't swinging at anchor offshore, awaiting a berth, too.

Anyway, a few plums picked at the height of ripeness concerning the incredible self-absorption and stupidity of the Modern Human Being and some questions related to their continued survival, because it baffles me.

I don't know whether it is a testament to the success of Man, or an indication of our greatest failure, but it appears to me as if we have done an absolutely splendid job of fucking with Evolution on a grand scale.

What I mean to say is, in the past, people who one would normally describe as weak, clueless and mentally-challenged would not have survived for very long, left to their own devices, in eras past. 

In the 21st Century, we have progressed so far that even the dumbest, most-careless, self-possessed, useless bags of protoplasm not only manage to survive -- often through no real effort of their own -- but to apparently thrive, as well.

I have encountered a few examples of this phenomenon in recent weeks and would like to share some observations about them.

It is said that Jesus proclaimed that "The Meek shall inherit the Earth".

He was wrong. He was wrong about a lot of things. That's why I don't attend the weekly struggle session with a collection plate. I don't follow, nor worship, those who have been proven incorrect time after time.

I won't get a shot because Fuckface Fauci is obviously wrong, for example.

Anyway, The Meek have inherited nothing. Rather, and you can check this by simply wandering about your own neck of the woods on any day of the week, The Meek have had their inheritance stolen by The Otiose.

I'll save you the trouble of looking that up:

Otiose (adj.) - being idle; indolent. Ineffective or futile. Superfluous or useless.

You're welcome.

The Meek, far from being bequeathed all things in Creation, it seems to me, are instead doomed to have fallen heir to the assumed responsibility of keeping The Otiose in all the food, housing, medical care and trappings of wealth they can handle, and yet, The Otiose scream out for more, and The Meek are prevailed upon (forced) to provide it.

The Meek are The Taxpayers.

The Otiose are those who survive by forced extraction from The Meek, or, just as often, those who manage to scrounge what they can from The Meek, living like the pilot fishes that swim alongside sharks, opportunistically grabbing a shred of tuna here, a small morsel of grouper there.

Our first example is someone I would like to batter unconscious with a heavy object , and is someone the Overlord once considered a protégé. Here, we will have to explain how the Overlord makes (or, rather, made) his living this last decade-plus.

I am an Information Technology professional. I have been for the last 37 years, from the first day I walked into a data center in Manhattan and saw the Big Iron of a mainframe computing system for the first time in 1985 until the present day. The Overlord worked his way up the ladder, as the saying once went, beginning as a humble tape handler (in those days, data was stored on large reels of magnetic tape that were placed on reel-to-reel tape drives), eventually becoming a full-fledged Computer Operator (responsible for overseeing and controlling entire systems), a data center manager (responsible for a multi-billion dollar complex of mainframes connected to every Stock or Commodities exchange on the planet, supporting a world-wide network of 3,000 branch offices), and eventually, a Systems Programmer, with Automation as his specialty, responsible for writing programs that allowed systems to operate semi-autonomously, while the people who made them non-autonomous at one time, were sent to the Unemployment Line.

When the Madness that is the 80-hour Wall Street workweek, complete with all the alcoholism and mental illnesses that come with it, finally made me decide that this was not my life's work, nor did it make me happy no matter how much money they threw at me, I dropped out and went "off the grid" for almost a decade. When I returned, I figured out the only thing I wanted to do, still, was work with machines, but on my own terms, so I went into business for myself. There were plenty of places and businesses not Wall Street that could use a good dose of automation, but who couldn't afford the massive sums necessary to obtain the expertise and technology necessary to do so from The Big Boys.

So, I went after the Little Guys (comparatively-speaking) and made it affordable for them. But I did not (could not) do this by myself. I had, over the years, made many contacts among the IT community who in recent years have found themselves chronically un- or under-employed in various fields (this is now commonplace in the IT industry), and so I made them contactors. When I did not have the expertise to do something, I got someone who could and made it worth their while, split their hourly fee 75/25 in their favor, and collected the support contract fees.

And because these contractors were the very best that Wall Street had rejected, used to working on tight deadlines, long hours, getting it right the first time, and extensively experienced, the client got the absolute best available.

In 12 years, I think we had but a handful of complaints, and no lawsuits.

For brevity's sake, so long as there was a supply of under-utilized talent of a certain age available, this worked out fine. Eventually, Shit Happens. People have health issues and drop out, they get older and retire, or they just decide they've had enough and go on to other things. This means you have to start picking talent from the Younger Generation, which is a task on par with, say, splitting an atom in your darkened living room by the light of the television, utilizing a pair of tweezers and an Exacto knife.

The Talent lacks, or rather, the MATURITY lacks, and when you do find it, it pays to keep it happy.

Until COVID strikes and you discover that while you're shut down by lockdown orders, your young talent -- who you have trained and shepherded -- is setting up his own version of your cash cow and is stealing your clients.

And he's gotten some of the other Talent to join him.

And none of them has the balls to tell you what they're doing. You make this discovery by accident, when you sit down to renegotiate a support contract with a client and he tells you "I'm going with "Jeff"; he told me you're selling him the business" and you've done no such thing.

Now, giving credit where it is due, "Jeff" is very good at what he does. He pretty much sucks at everything else.

Having said that, "Jeff" once got locked inside of his own car when his "Smart Phone" battery died and he could not access the voice interface for the keyless entry system and could not operate a car door. If it hadn't had been for a passing colleague, "Jeff" may have been forced to eat his own flesh by lunchtime.

"Jeff" also once got lost on the Staten Island Rapid Transit system (check out the map at left). I'm not making that up.

"Jeff" could probably even mess up masturbating, given the right opportunity.

So, it was not terribly surprising when "Jeff", after I fired him, quickly flamed out.

But the damage was done. And COVID did the rest, with many of my clients simply going out of business due to prolonged work stoppages and lockdowns. Eventually, as always happens in business, the Big Guys finally figured out how to make the clients they formerly would have turned their noses up at remunerative (thank you, H-1B visas! As if importing COVID with our foreigners wasn't enough?), and the writing is on the wall.

Besides, I don't really want to do this, anymore, truth to tell.

The point being that "Jeff" couldn't start his own business -- I would have wished him well -- but only attempt to steal from someone else. If left to his own devices in, say, 25,000 B.C.. "Jeff" would have been eaten by wolves three minutes after he left the safety of the cave. "Jeff" is apparently Caveman for "very bad hunter".

The second example is the young...I hesitate to call him "man"...who I nearly ran down with my car about 10 days ago.

The Scene: The Overlord is stopped at an intersection by a red light, waiting to make a right turn (in New York, there is no "Right On Red" unless there is a sign present saying you can do so, but only after a full stop). The light turns green, the Overlord begins his turn...and here comes the dingus in the hoodie, riding his fucking kick scooter.

Asshole has his head buried in his phone, earbuds stuck in his ears, and is totally oblivious to the fact that he's about to glide right into oncoming traffic. I managed to stop without hitting the little fucktard, but he's angry that I almost did. The argument was futile, for no matter how many times you point to the "Don't Walk" signal and how many times you tell the little dipshit to "pay attention before you get killed", you're still a racist motherfucker.

Kick-scooter-minority-punk would have assuredly perished if dropped upon the Serengeti plains and left to his own wits to survive. Instead, he's possessed of a $1,000 iPhone, a pretty pricey scooter, and sneakers that probably cost the average person's weekly take home pay, and to judge from his limited vocabulary and hoodrat appearance, was probably raised in Section 8 or public housing, "educated" in a public school, the identity of his father is a complete mystery, and  born to a mother whose only talents are giving birth and screwing the entire neighborhood. He's probably been eating paint chips most of his life and currently repeating the 6th grade for the fourth time.

So, if you're one of The Meek (not in the Biblical sense, but in the reality of the sweat of your brow being taken to support this bag of shit), congratulations: all your efforts and hard work have been redistributed so as to allow a complete cretin to have survived long enough -- and obviously well-equipped -- to the point where his dumbfuck is the result of your assumed "racism", before he carries on the proud family tradition of a presumed life of repeated incarceration, unsupported bastards, and most likely being killed by his own kind before his 30th birthday.

Our next example showed up in the addiction counseling center the Overlord volunteers at within the last week.

Here we have a single mother of two (by different fathers who refuse to pay child support), who was "forced" to join the Air Force in order to feed her kids and make some kind of living. She is approximately 50 pounds overweight, at minimum. You only need to look at her to see the mental difficulties she's having, in addition to being hooked on Xanax, Atavan, Oxycontin, booze, and probably any other mind-altering/destroying substance she can get her hands on.

I wouldn't doubt she huffs paint thinner, too.

Usually, the Overlord just listens to them and then tries to help them get to the right resources they need to start recovery. I'm not a therapist or a doctor; I just tell people that I know what it's like to be where they are now, there is help available, and this is where you get it. And, hey, you can talk to me, if you need to.

This last is often a mistake, even excusing for the compassion that many of these people need, because you get the ENTIRE LIFE STORY and the thing is, you know it before they even really get started.

So, this woman "forced" to join the Air Force came back from Afghanistan two years ago with a truly frightening case of PTSD. Normally, I would have sympathy: I know what PTSD is like and it's a fucking hell. I began to imagine just what it was that happened to this poor woman or what she had seen that had affected her so adversely, but my reverie was halted when she revealed the cause of her mental anguish.

Her fucking sergeant yelled at her for six months straight, and you get the impression based upon every other thing you've heard that this is a massive exaggeration. We're talking about someone with the resiliency of an eggshell to begin with.

Long story short, she was Honorably Discharged with a diagnosis of PTSD obtained in a combat zone, where her job was apparently counting rolls of toilet paper in a warehouse to ensure that no one was stealing it. I reckon if her sergeant was yelling at her constantly, it probably meant she was too fucking dumb to count.

The rest of her story was predictable -- strict upbringing in a "devout Christian family" that disavowed her when she "came out" and then was further befuddled when she apparently changed her mind and started pumping out kids produced by the sort of truly-fucktarded dudes one sees on Maury Povich day in and day out, no one "helps" her (i.e. supports her financially so that she can sit on her enormous ass eating pork rinds all day, and getting pregnant again), she's been a victim of this, that, the other.

"No one understands" (you hear this constantly; it is a fallacy on par with "I have a disease" (addiction), or some version of "I've fucked up my life and no one will take the responsibility of unfucking it for me, because I'm obviously too lazy to do it"), and the trials and tribulations of dealing with the Disability system, the Welfare State, etc, etc.

Normally, again, I would have at least pretended to have some compassion here, but what I was dealing with was all-too-common, and frankly, I'm sick to death of it. What we have here is a 100%, bona fide, died-in-the-wool, USDA-on-the-hoof Drama Queen.

This is a professional attention seeker, with all the "classic" side maladies that are part-and-parcel of the syndrome -- (deliberately) failed suicide attempts, self-mutilation, the claim of "fibromyalgia" (a phony syndrome common to overweight middle class white females who can't get laid for all the negativity and ugly that oozes out of them), changing sexual preferences ("I'm gay! Wait, no, I'm Bi! Wait, I'm straight but curious! Wait, I'm now trans and my personal pronouns are "Huh" and "WTF"!", and when being attracted to dead animals or inanimate objects or being obsessed with "Hello Kitty" becomes next week's hot-ticket to victimhood, she'll jump on that train, too.

This sort survives through a myriad of handouts from charity and government, the prerequisites for both being "dumber than an Irish Setter", a level of immaturity that's off the scale, and the constant positive reinforcement of being rewarded for being irresponsible.

The drugs aren't a crutch: they're part of the act. This sort can quit anytime they'd like, but there's good money in being a helpless wreck of self-inflicted dumbfuck.

This sort, too, preys upon The Meek in a cleverly-indirect fashion, and when they get called on their bullshit they have a variety of shields to hide behind:

Single Mother

Veteran

Some form of abuse

And if you take the trouble to dig into these people's pasts (I'm not talking about this specific person, but the experience of others that I'm aware of) you find out that most, if not all of their story, is absolute bullshit, and that you're dealing with an infantile personality that has literally never had to take responsibility for anything, including themselves, because they've had a steady stream of "enablers" that they've manipulated along the way.

The dead giveaway is always "devout Christian family", which is a code for "my parents wouldn't let me stay out late as a teenager" or "my parents didn't approve of my boyfriend" which translates to "poor me: my parents cared".

And then you find out the bottle of Xanax she's carrying with her is a prescription from the ER, she's only been given quarter-milligram tablets, and they probably gave her that script just to get her whining ass out of the hospital. She's also got similar 'scripts from every other hospital in the area under different aliases, and she probably spends her days doing this with alternating days on various Welfare lines.

We have created something that once would have been thought impossible: a world where such idiots can not only live a very good life, but often not have to lift a finger to do anything positive or productive to do so.

So, as I've said, Jesus was obviously wrong. The Meek are being sheared like sheep.

So was Darwin, it would seem. Give the inferior examples of the species all they need to survive, and they quickly become the majority, instead of the Evolutionary dead-end.

The Meek had better start standing up for themselves.