House of Eratosthenes

Five weeks left to the year. Plenty of time for people to apologize to me, others like me, they criticized in years past for “paying too much attention to politics.”

You can do it in a Zoom call. Wear your mask. Observe social distancing. Don’t go anywhere. Use proper pronouns. Don’t say “Chinese Virus.” And be sure to buy enough vouchers to offset your carbon emissions!

Seriously, though. It’s obvious we are deeply polarized and it’s been getting worse and worse. How come? It’s because of the Voldemort Virus and our response to it; made up “learning disabilities” in our kids; “global warming” or “climate change,” whatever it’s called today. Plastic or paper grocery bags. Plastic or paper straws. American exceptionalism. Nuclear power, fossil fuels, alternatives.

We are polarized because we are surrounded by a message of “Stop doing anything or else you’ll die and take everyone with you.”

Therefore there is a deep division between those who have been waiting for just such a message so they can stop doing anything, and those who would be enslaved for their maintenance. Between those who can, and cannot, afford to stop doing things. Between those are free to do as they please because they haven’t acquired the necessary skills for anyone to rely on them, and the ones upon whose efforts others depend. Between those who think they already know everything worth knowing, and those who regard it hellish and unthinkable to ever go a day without learning something new.

All of the scolding comes from that. Haven’t you noticed? From one hemisphere it’s all “How dare you” and “Listen to the experts.” From the other hemisphere it’s an eyeball roll, a protest of incredulity…and a job that has to get done, that the first one can’t bring itself to comprehend. All of the arguing ends with “Yeah but you’re going to get Grandma killed.” (So I win.)

It’s not just the virus. It’s this way with everything. It’s all Don’t versus Do.

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Our Passive-Voice Society
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

I have been saying for years now, in so many words, that anonymity has a dazzling effect on us. If we hear a commission has decided such-and-such a thing, it’s in our programming to accept this and even elevate it, like to Ten Commandments status, just because we don’t know who is on the commission. This is extremely dangerous because it makes us into a passive-voice society.

What a great time it is to demonstrate the truth of what I’ve been saying.

“The election has been called for Joe Biden!” carries gravitas.

“Such-and-such a thing has called the election for Biden” doesn’t carry as much.

“Bob my next door neighbor has called it for Biden” carries far less…and arguably should. But look what’s going on at the other end of the spectrum. Go passive-voice and lop off the subject of the sentence, conceal the identity of the persons making the call, and you give extra weight to the call. The exact opposite of the way it should work.

There is a word for this fastening of an identity to the content of an idea, to give weight to the content: imprimatur. It’s a word rarely used, and when it’s used it’s usually for sake of criticism: “You have placed this silly idea above your imprimatur.” The symptom of our mental disease is that we have forgotten how to manage imprimaturs. We think the 800-pound gorilla imprimatur that cannot be defeated, or even subjected to challenge, is the one that doesn’t exist. We don’t know who’s saying it? Then we cannot appeal it. And we’d better accept it.

Not good!

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Veteran’s Day 2020
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Shopping list for my day off is getting kind of long. I should be sure and take some extra cash, I suppose, for the guy (real vet I hope?) handing out poppies. I’m sure this year is not being kind toward that particular effort.

The difference between Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day:

Memorial Day is, as the name implies, a time to pay respect and honor those who have died either while serving their country, as a result of military service, or after they have finished serving as a retired or separated veteran.

Veterans Day honors those who have served in the past, present, and even pays tribute to those who will serve in the future.

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Memo For File CCXV
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

One week.

All of my discussions with liberals have been started at the behest of the liberal, although I’m sure in most cases the liberal doesn’t remember it that way. They tag me in a post on social media, or they call me on the phone, or whatever. The script in their head says they’re supposed to be jubilant and I’m supposed to be sullen and twitchy. They’re genuinely curious about whether I’m holding out unrealistic hopes, or have sunk into a catatonic state, or both. Instead they discover I’m in good spirits; the Trump era may be coming to an end, but all good things must come to an end, and in this case we have a near certain shot that Trump is going to uncover just a few more things. Just a few more flies in the ointment, clumps of crap in the air hose, skulduggery, shenanigans. Maybe some malicious intent, or at the very least, hard evidence that the reforms made so hastily earlier in the year constituted nothing more than a regrettable mistake. I give Placeholder Joe the odds but only just barely. Gun to head, I put my betting money on him and Proud-of-Rapists Gigglepuss…as little as I can. Nothing more than what I can afford to lose. Trump has a one-in-four chance, I think. And that’s climbing. And as the days tick on by with no concession out of him, I’m enjoying watching people around him reveal their true selves — yet again. Munching my popcorn. Having a good time.

Our roles unexpectedly reversed, the liberal rings off with “Well, I don’t wanna get into it” or some variation of that, forgetting that the discussion began in the first place because of their inquiry.

They’re not well.

I do have one frustration burning away right now. I’m all about learning the true nature of our polarization. It’s become something of a lifelong goal, one I am sure I’ll never completely finish. This is a big split. It’s bigger than our country, of that much I’m sure. My frustration now is that it’s been the key factor in all of our distress, all year long. The Chinese Virus, and all its attendant hardships, isn’t responsible for our problems; it is revealing our problems. Now it’s too late to do anything with what we’re learning, but this is where we’re gaining yet more insight on what is really dividing us.

We are having, it seems to me, a difference of opinion. It’s international, sprawling beyond the borders of the United States, but it falls short of global. It’s a First World schism.

Common ground: Life is short. Stay away from assholes.

Follow up question: What, exactly, is an asshole?

Their answer: He goes on Twitter and calls people “losers”!

My answer is a longer one, and this is the schism. If it were just me saying this, there would be no division. But millions upon millions see it the way I do.

Whitmer “Loser” is not a figment of anybody’s imagination. There really are losers out there. They’re energy sucks. If you’re worried about staying away from a certain kind of person because life is short and you want to make the most of it, these are them. And, far from laboring under some sort of asshole-pollution in which we have way too many people calling out the losers, we’re really struggling with something of a shortage. We have been coping with a sort of toxic mythology that good manners have something to do with pretending losers aren’t losers, and in so doing, we have spent generations and generations handing unearned influence over the most intimate aspects of our lives, to people who don’t even rightfully deserve to have influence over their own.

They’re losers!

Kind looks like I hate them, doesn’t it?

See, that’s also part of our toxic conditioning. If you see someone for what they really are, you’re hateful. The only way not to be hateful is to pretend what is so obviously true, cannot be. Meanwhile…if you’re feeling sad or depressed or angry about something, it’s important that all negative emotions are expressed. If you bottle up those bad emotions they’re going to come back on you, cause health problems, drive you nuts, etc. Have you heard that one? Of course you have. For half a century or more. “Don’t bottle up your feelings”…but…don’t say anything that might make someone feel bad about someone else, or themselves. We are therefore at liberty to — in fact, encouraged to — go around identifying any and all “problems” as long as they’re properly confined to our feelings, so that they are lacking in actionable solutions. Which multiplies the assholes, since we end up drowning in people moping about how sad or “triggered” they are and how they need help and can’t do anything…

No one can count on me to [Thing] until someone brings me a [Thing].

It’s healthy! Another person not bottling up their feelings! But once again, we have one more person pulling the wagon, one fewer person pulling it…

Meanwhile we have these problems with actionable solutions, usually because some “public servant” has been elevated to deity status — almost always a democrat — and is just screwing around, playing with their “toy.” Making judgment calls that have consequences, as the Owner of the ship not the Captain of the ship. We’re not allowed to notice that. Someone obviously has to be defrocked of their high position, everyone understands it, but to say so out loud is something we’ve identified as “hate.” The asshole is the person who says what we all know to be true.

I do not like the notion of small children looking up at the President of the United States, and learning it’s appropriate to say “Gretchen Whitmer has been doing a horrible job in Michigan” or “Hillary did a very, very bad job” or “Hunter Biden is a loser!” I’m displeased with these anecdotes of kids running out on the playground and calling each other losers. I suppose I should question the verity of such claims, but I don’t. I’m sure it’s happened.

But I have a unique take on it. Your children shouldn’t be watching the President that closely. That’s not his purpose. Article II of the Constitution doesn’t mention anything about the nation’s executive being a role model for children.

We have losers among us. Real assholes.

Our common ground is the notion that a life well-lived, has something to do with staying away from them.

We know — from repeated, and repeatable, experience — that if we do not define what asshole-ism is, not only will we fail to properly isolate it, but we will elevate it. Every. Single. Time. It is our ancient, timeless, common frailty. It is burned into our wiring. It is the way we are. Asshole-isolation is just yet another important thing that has to be done, that we can’t do without establishing, maintaining, validating and reinforcing strong definitions.

It’s impossible to get this idea across to the #NeverTrump crowd. They’ll misunderstand and think you’re talking about The Donald…or they’ll willfully misunderstand…and translate this wisdom to their own joke, at everybody else’s expense. There will follow the forced, non-jocular, horse laugh — HAR HAR HAR — and, the point will be lost. But they’re nuts. They seriously do agree with people who have more sense, that it’s important to call out the assholes. And here they are, defining the “asshole” in the room, as the guy who’s actually calling out the real assholes for being them. They want more of the same, more of the mistake we’ve all been making: It’s very important to stay away from a certain kind of person, but “good manners” means you’re not allowed to notice who they are, and you’re certainly not allowed to notice it audibly where others might hear.

I started my own adult living. I left my hometown for a bigger one, with the support of exactly nobody. I was full of enthusiasm, maybe a bit of youthful rebellion, but I had no guidance. Millions upon millions of us begin our adult living that way, and I think it’s common for us to learn the real secret to happy living the hard way. Maybe my story is so common, that it is the source of this real-split? Because at the beginning of my adult life, I ended up getting eaten alive. I will never forget. If I live to be a thousand years old, I will not forget. Stay away from assholes. If you choose your friends wisely and resolve to do right by them, you still have to work hard but others have had to work much harder before you came along, and things will pretty much fall into place. If you do not stay away from assholes, nothing else you do is going to matter very much. You will become one yourself. Or you will lose everything and live a life devoid of purpose. Probably, both of those things will happen, but definitely the one or the other.

But you can’t stay away from them if you don’t define what they are. And you have to call out people who’ve been elevated to positions of high authority, who aren’t doing any good there. The #NeverTrump crowd thinks they’re doing exactly that. They’ll say so on cue. But deep down, they know we don’t have any problems today — not a single one, not even the Wu Flu — that doesn’t predate Bad Orange Man. Deep down, they know he’s been revealing the problems, not creating them.

If they didn’t understand that, they’d be the happy ones. Things the way they are, they’re apprehensive and miserable. They agree with me: We’re still learning about what’s really broken, and we’re almost sure to learn a few more things, no matter what happens with this election’s outcome. They’re “winning,” in theory, but all of the genuine confidence is eluding them. All of it is on our side of the net. They can see this is so, but they don’t understand why. They’re not savoring this.

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Happy 245th Birthday Marines
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020

This annual wishing of a happy birthday to The Corps is a family thing, not a professional thing. I’ve actually been working around Army and Air Force guys. No leathernecks where I work. But we put up our shout-out to the jarheads every November 10th, because they’re our oldest branch, and Mom would’ve wanted me to do it.

This year things are a bit different. It is, just like with lots of other things, full of suck. So now we all get on the same side, and we fight. But fighting is what Marines do. They’re the first to do it. You know that old saying: If I can’t shoot, I’ll load, if I can’t load I’ll help with the wounded…etc. That’s where my family is right now.

We can’t make the trip for Thanksgiving, so our thoughts are with our warrior. Get well. Kick some ass.

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We’ll Be Fine
Sunday, November 8th, 2020

At least, I think so.

I’ve lived through…let’s see. Carter was the big education for me. I was actually for Carter at first. How much wisdom can a ten-year-old have? I’ve said before many times that I owe a huge debt to Carter. He did more to get me voting Republican, than any Republican ever did. And he forced me, before my 14th birthday, to endure the most hideous experience imaginable for a young teenager: I had to admit my parents were right about something and I had been wrong. What a priceless head start and at such a tender age.

I was breathing air throughout the last two and a half years of Johnson’s presidency, so I suppose that doesn’t count. Of course I don’t remember it. Those thirty months, from what I’ve read, were pretty much a big flame-out. It takes some digging, historians don’t like to write about it. There was “unrest” due to the Viet Nam war, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King got shot, and at the end of it the democrats lost pretty much everything.

I was very much politically engaged when Mondale challenged Reagan. In the aftermath, I could see everyone else understood what I understood because Mondale lost everything except Minnesota.
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Adult responsibilities and relationships with wounded, incomplete unstable women had distracted me from politics and lured me into the “don’t care zone.” I became one of those casual-living casual-thinking types, the “Not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties so what’s the point” types. Bill Clinton cured me of that. I remember after the Gennifer Flowers scandal had started to die down a bit, and Bill Clinton made an appearance in a Kindergarten class I suddenly realized: That’s our next President, no doubt. It made me sick to my stomach. Not because he was a democrat, but because he looked and talked like a computer software salesman and at the time, people in this vocation had made my life miserable. My adult responsibilities had grown to include developing and testing the products they were promising people…

Clinton’s presidency resulted in the 9/11 attacks. Hoping we don’t get another one of those.

Then there was Barack Obama. Too soon to say, we’re still anesthetized against the damage He did around the world, although we did get a front-and-center view of the War On Cops that He promoted nonstop. Our media blames all the fighting and distress on Trump, which just goes to show we can’t rely on them. I think the worst thing about the Obama era, among the travesties upon which we can rely for a new Biden era, is the fawning press. Questions they asked of Obama were not the same as the questions they asked of Trump. We never would have heard “Obama suggests, without evidence, that blah blah blah…” The running joke is that the harshest question Emperor Obama was ever asked was “What’s it like to be so awesome??” It’s not completely a joke.

Now before I came along, what sort of damage did democrats do? JFK shut down the loonie bins and to this day our streets are crowded with mentally challenged people who can’t get access to the services they need. Truman flooded our federal agencies with communists, and from what I understand we have yet to figure out if he knew what he was doing or was in denial. The historians are covering for all that. FDR failed to pack the Supreme Court, but succeeded in making the judicial branch into his lapdog, which in turn created misery for all sorts of Japanese-Americans who were wrongfully imprisoned…including George “Sulu” Takei, who somehow blames Republicans for it. FDR also created a whole new chapter in American liberalism, in which we’re supposed to sit on our asses and wait for the government to feed us. Lots of things are wrong with this. The worst is the mental abuse, since this romantic vision of the bold young revolutionary is supposed to remain in place. So we’re supposed to sing our revolutionary songs and join unions and march in the streets and show our strength and really stick it to The Man…but then cry like little birdies waiting for the momma-bird which is the government, to spew some pre-chewed food into our little beaks. We’re the resistance but we’re also the obedience. That cognitive dissonance started with Roosevelt.

Woodrow Wilson? Do I even need to go there. Racist. Segregationist. Eugenicist.

So…dunno…the damage democrats have been doing, is evidently on the wane, but nowadays there is a lag-factor and it’s hard to remain conscious in the moment of the consequences of the damage they’re doing. They, of course, would like to blame it on whichever Republican comes into office after them, and with a willing and complicit press, they tend to succeed at this.

But overall I think we’ll be okay. You’ll notice the revolution is never complete. And they keep losing. People figure out the effect they have is not good, and so they require young children who are idiots like I used to be, to come to voting age still being idiots so they can maybe win elections again.

Supposedly they’re representing the “poor” who would be helped by progressive taxes and redistribution schemes, with their opponents representing the “rich,” the very few who would be taxed to pay for this sumptuous buffet of social services for the poor. Should be a cakewalk for them. Obviously it isn’t. That’s what gives me hope. People are learning, like I did back at age 10, and they’re doing this learning pretty reliably.

I’ve already asked if Clarence Thomas has another four years left in him. I’ve been assured he does…these people wouldn’t know for sure. But I got to hear him when he swore in ACB, and he sounded alright. We’ll be alright. I can’t promise it for sure, but I’m betting on our good health for the long term. And as far as election shenanigans? We just rewarded them so for the short term they’ll get worse. But we’re going through a learning experience and over the longer term of time, we’ll come out of it wiser.

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Insurmountable
Saturday, November 7th, 2020

We’ve got a lot of people walking around out there, who have actually voted and are free to vote again, saying “Trump supporters need to give it up because the math is insurmountable” even as they admit the process of counting votes has been shady as hell and there likely has been some shenanigans taking place.

This is looks to me like some kind of mental enfeeblement. This is why I say things like “thinking like a grown-up” versus “thinking like a little kid.” Math is derivative of the counting process. Do I even have to say it?

Let Us Steal The Election! I noticed earlier this week CNN was putting up graphics of the electoral vote totals, things like “BIDEN 247 TRUMP 213” …without having put Alaska in Trump’s total for some reason…counting Michigan and Arizona for Biden, after both states had spent the night swinging back & forth…Trump within one percentage point in AZ, WI, NV, PA, NC…were they, perhaps, not looking at that and just fixated on the deceptive electoral vote totals the whole time? I’ve noticed we have a problem with widespread ignorance about the Electoral College’s purpose. Stands to reason we must have a lot of ignorance about how it works.

It takes a tiny bit of fraud to produce an enormous change in the Electoral College result.

What you’re getting here is a good look at what liberalism really is. You have millions upon millions of people who are reaching the same erroneous conclusions about things because they don’t understand the basics, don’t think in terms of cause and effect. And they’re hooked on the feeling of “I know something nobody else knows”…can’t stand that healthy humble inversion of it, “Everyone else seems to know something I don’t, I need to shut up and listen.” So, fresh after uttering something that reveals their ignorance, they strut, pose and preen. Oh yeah yeah yeah I know how the Electoral College works, I’m like an expert on the Electoral College. But you red-hats need to totally give it up, the math is insurmountable.

Related: “Glitches” in Michigan gave thousands of votes to Biden.

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Bobulinski
Wednesday, October 28th, 2020

Tucker Carlson’s Show last night.

A real whistle blower, covered by way of real journalism. We used to have that kind of stuff.

Update 10/29/20: Had to replace the video, the first one got yanked. Not surprised. May have to do this a few more times.

Funny how these “oopsies” always seem to go in the same direction…

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Election Year Bananas
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

Okay we got one week left. This is an unusual election in that all three are a toss-up or close to a toss-up: House of Representatives, Senate and White House. After today it’s pretty pointless to pass on any sort of deep-thinking to people who don’t already agree with me.

So if I could call it, here is how I would like people to envision it.

I wish to address the issue of the mommy-state providing us things for free. It’s become a big issue because looking after the public debt has gone out of style. Politicians have figured out they’re not going to make a lot of headway promising people raises so they can afford things, or easing regulations to make the things cheaper to buy. People just want their free stuff. They can see everyone else is getting free stuff so they want theirs.

So. I’m leaving a lot of pressing issues unmentioned so I can concentrate on this one thing. It’s that important.

I want you to envision a sort of alternate reality in which we all need and want our bananas but there is a banana shortage. If I use the example of “contraceptive shortage” I’m going to lose half of you and if I say “ammunition shortage” I’ll lose the other half, so let’s say it’s bananas.

Can you envision the fringe-kooky hard-lefty liberal politician jabbing his finger up in the air and proclaiming, with lots of righteous indignation, that “bananas are a human right”? Deep down inside I think we all understand it takes more than that to make something a right; just emphatically saying it is one doesn’t make it one. But I recognize a lot of people are well past that now. We need our bananas!

The point I seek to make is about a critical difference. It is relevant to the situation and the times in which we live.

There is: I will make sure, wherever someone is going without a banana, they get one…

There is: I will make sure, wherever someone is going without a banana, no one has two or more.

See where I’m going with that? Two different things. Not the same. When people say stuff like “Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried” they’re talking about that. Oh, this bait-and-switch game doesn’t fail. There’s something in the human psychology. People think they’re looking at a promise to make sure everyone has a banana, when they never even heard that and no one ever gave them that promise. The promise is “equality”; it has to do with taking bananas away, rather than giving them to people who don’t have them.

Now that I’ve defined this critical distinction, go back and look at what these fringe-kooky hard-lefty liberal politicians are telling you. And think back in recent history. A decade ago, the bananas were health care coverage, right? The guy whose name was on the bill got to be President of the United States for two full terms. He used executive orders to modify the provisions as He saw fit. It was like putty in His hands, because if anybody got in the way of what He wanted to do they’d have been called racists. Here it is a decade later. And all these people are still missing their bananas.

You vote them in ten more times to give you the free bananas, it’s going to go this way ten more times. The plan is not to give people bananas. The plan is to make it all “equal” by taking bananas away from people. Listen to what they are telling you. They’re explaining it to you. “It’s just awful that in the richest country in the world people are missing blah blah blah while we have millionaires and billionaires.” They talk this way ALL the time. The problem isn’t that someone is missing a banana. The problem is someone is missing a banana while someone else has two. There’s a difference.

Okay, I’ve said my piece. That’s okay. Maybe I didn’t manage to educate you, but if you’ve read this far you’ve lost your excuse. Now vote wisely.

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McConnell’s Speech
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

I found this to be nothing less than brilliant.

The truth is, on all of this, we owe the country a broader discussion. Competing claims about Senate customs cannot fully explain where we are…

Catastrophe looms right around the corner. The country will be fundamentally changed forever. When a Republican president makes a Supreme Court nominee. They have hauled out the very same tactics for fifty years. Some of the opposition’s more intense, but the doomsday predictions about the outcome of nominating these extremists like John Paul Stevens, David Souter? Why, somehow, everyone knows in advance that nominations like Bork, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are certain to whip up national frenzies… while nominations like Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are calm events by comparison. This blaring asymmetry predates our recent disputes. And it comes, my colleagues, from a fundamental disagreement on the role of a judge in our republic.

We just have a fundamental difference of opinion. We just heard the Democratic Leader name all of these things that are threatened by this nominee. It sounds very similar to the tunes we’ve heard before. We, like many Americans, want judges to fulfill a limited role the Constitution assigns to them: Stick to text, resolve cases impartially, and leave policymaking to the people and their representatives, which is what we do here…

But the left thinks the framers of our country got this all wrong. They botched the job. The people who wrote the Constitution didn’t understand what a judge ought to be. As several Senate Democrats have reaffirmed in recent days, they find it quaint and naive to think a judge would simply follow the law. Scalia used to say if you want to make policy, why don’t you run for office? That’s not what we do here…what they are looking for is a small panel of lawyers with elite educations to reason backward from outcomes and enlighten all the rest of us with their morals and political judgment. Whether the Constitution speaks to the issue or not. They know best what’s for us. No matter what the Constitution or the law may say. And for the last several decades, in many cases, that’s what they have gotten. One activist decision after another, giving us subjective preferences of one side of the force of law…

President Obama actually was refreshingly honest about this. He said he wanted to appoint judges who had empathy. Think about that for a minute. What if you are the litigant before the judge — for whom the judge does not have empathy? You’re in tough shape. So, you give them credit for being pretty honest about this. That’s what they’re looking for…And that is clearly why we have taken on such an outsized, combative atmosphere with regard to these confirmations…

The democrats aren’t afraid to play politics with the Supreme Court. Republican Senators have consistently applied a more congenial standard to nominees to the nation’s highest court: Is he or she certifiably crazy? If not, then confirm. Don’t worry about how many conservatives or how many liberals are there already, and don’t worry about going home and telling your constituents “I kept this liberal whack-job out of there.” Just confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Which they did, 96 to 3. That was not — I think both sides would agree — because RBG represented the mainstream of the country’s thinking on issues likely to come before the Supreme Court.

This is important because the Senate is important. Keeping the Senate, in 2020, is almost as important as keeping the White House. It might even be more important than that.

A lot of people are out there ready to punch the chad for Placeholder Joe and Proud-of-Rapists Kamala because they don’t like President Trump’s combativeness. Or, they’re ready to stay home over this genteel-language issue, even though they support Trump’s policies. As we’ve seen over the last few days, a lot of the heated and counterproductive bickering is in Congress, and I’d really like to know what people think about this “blaring asymmetry.” Some liberal ACLU hack gets nominated to the Supreme Court and everybody falls in line, and starts fawning. Remember Elana Kagan’s nomination? Oh, she’s so funny! Just adorable.

Republican President nominates a learned and steady voice like Barrett and it has to be World War III. Seriously, what do they think about all that?

Truth is, for this function…and maybe for any other…we don’t need any democrats in the Senate at all. They’re just there to scheme for power, slander their enemies and stir the crock.

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The Captain of the Ship or the Owner of the Ship
Saturday, October 24th, 2020

Explaining 2020 in a single sentence…and a question that follows it. “It’s my ship, I control where it goes.” Who’s saying it? The Captain of the ship, or the owner of the ship?

This is how our red and our blue states have been governed during the pandemic, in the aftermath of our infection with the Chinese Virus. The Captain of a vessel, and the owner of the vessel, are both within their rights to declare that the ship should follow a course. But it makes a big difference who’s saying it, if you’re on the boat!

Red-state governors have governed like the Captain of the ship, who goes down with it if it sinks. They say: Let’s have this mask mandate…or not. Let’s open these schools…or not. These are predictions of what will or will not be okay. They are predictions made by someone whose goose is thoroughly cooked if the predictions are wrong. And they may very well have been wrong. But those are the vital ingredients of real leadership: You figure out what’s going to happen as best you can, you err to the side of caution within reason, and you accept the residual risk. If you bungle it, everyone gets onto a lifeboat before you do, so you do your best not to bungle it.

Blue-state governors have governed like the owner of the ship, which is very different. This is more in the spirit of “If I break it no one can complain because it’s my property,” like a child abusing his own toys. Hey, I won the election, what I say goes! This is not like the Captain of the ship at all. Not even close. “Guessin’ Gavin” Newsom, I call him, decides day to day…I’m going to use these colors on these counties, there’s no such thing as “green,” you can’t advance to the next-safe tier even if the numbers say you can, unless I’m pleased with the racial equity in your COVID statistics. Oh yeah and bar food isn’t food, because if you order beer without a proper sandwich and side of mashed potatoes, the VID is gonna getcha. I decided that! I’m Gavin and I won the election. Ships’ owners, more often than not, are on dry land. If the ship sinks, they’re safe even if all hands are lost…and they just lose their personal property.

We are a law and order society so it’s easy for us to forget this distinction. “Do it my way I have the authority” may be true, but it could mean: Do it my way, it’s my skin. Or it could mean: Do it my way, it’s my toy so who cares if I break it.

It bears repeating: When you’re on the boat, it makes a huge difference.

Okay, so a single sentence, a question, and then an explanation that’s a little longer. But anyway. That’s 2020 for you. We just learned painfully what leadership really is. And we’ve got a big problem with some 2 dozen states being governed the way a spoiled child governs his toys…that he’s about to wreck. Our blue states are sinking ships, with owners who don’t care because they have no reason to care, they’re just playing with their toys. But there are real lives in those toys, with hopes and dreams.

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Old Economy Steve
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

This is old. But it’s important, and since I’m just finding out about it…

The Atlantic:

Meet Old Economy Steve. As a proud member of the class of 1970-something, he’s got a doofy haircut straight out of “Dazed and Confused,” along with a sunny financial future. With commencement season drawing to a close, his awkwardly smirking face has become the canvass upon which some angry Millennials have decided to vent their frustrations with the economy, not to mention condescending Baby Boomers. There are almost 700 of these on quickmeme.

Definitely check out that QuickMeme link if this is new to you. As the article promises, it goes on and on…and on. Not that it takes a lot of talent to create a meme, but I’m sure a lot of the makers have talent to do something much more impressive and they chose to squander it by whining and crying about the older generation getting all the breaks…so they could sidestep any appreciation for their own breaks, and pretend to be wallowing in nothing but hurt and tragedy. How sad.

Old Economy Steve Yeah kids. Grandpa stormed Normandy dodging machine gun fire so you could whine and cry like this.

Article continues:

But wait, how good did Steve really have it? Assuming he finished school some time in the late disco era, probably not so hot. Remember, the 1970s were the time of stagflation — that awful combo of high unemployment and spiraling inflation that left policy makers flummoxed. When the Federal Reserve finally jacked up interest rates to combat it, the bank induced several rocky years of recession. In 1982, the unemployment rate for 20-to-24-year-old men peaked at more than 18 percent. For teens it was in the twenties. Meanwhile, the late 70s also kicked off America’s first plunge into industrial decline. Little remembered fact, Chrysler actually needed a government bailout to survive in 1979.

Meanwhile, there’s a decent chance that Steve saw his 401K cut in half come the 2008 financial crisis. Or, if he was a Chrysler worker, he might have gotten laid off just a few years short of retirement. So, maybe we should give Old Economy Steve a break.

When an enlightened, woken, no-comments Internet tabloid like The Atlantic is telling you to stop sniveling and pick yourself up by your bootstraps, something’s way off course. Here the problem isn’t that the meme-makers have never been told how to work hard at something; the problem is that they’ve made it impossible for anyone to tell them that. They live in their dungeon of despair. Say a word to bust them out of it, or a sentence or a paragraph or a whole essay, they’ll pigeonhole you as “Old Economy Steve” and let it all roll off them like water off a duck’s back.

It’s a popular idea now: The generation before ours, got all the advantages. You go back a few years before bad-haircut Steve, and you hit another crew that didn’t have to worry about expensive college tuition. In what would have been their sophomore year, they were worried about landing the plane after coming back dodging anti-aircraft fire. How’s that figure into the morose, angst-filled ruminations about dopey ol’ Steve and how he doesn’t realize how good he had it?

These “woe is me” kids were made and not born. It’s a manufactured problem, conjured up not by the requirement to try harder or to jump through a few hoops, but by the lack of such a requirement. It’s that soft sheltered space in mom’s basement with the electricity that always works and the video game console that’s always ready, that makes the problem. In my day, I didn’t have that, I had to pay rent. That created a necessity to get a job, and cope with rejection. There was no safe space for me to build memes or to play video games, unless I made one for myself. But that all begins with “In My Day” so you just try telling these kids that.

It should be noted that the Atlantic’s list of hardships for poor Steve, whatever relevance it has, is not complete. In my day, it was Black Monday. I saw it on the front page inside a newspaper machine — yes we really had those — waiting for my first-real-job job interview. Yes, at eight in the morning, Monday, October 19, 1987, getting my start at the very instant it all turned sour. I remember looking at the newsstand, maybe with my head cocked a little bit like a quizzical puppy dog. Looked like a dark omen. Still waiting to find out if it really was one! That’s life. But I guess not…I have a two-story house, with a mortgage I’m still paying…which makes me you-know-who, in the eyes of some.

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Greatness Is Scary
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

Let’s discuss this with honesty: #MAGA stands for Make America Great Again. This is offensive to many.

They are not offended because they think America was already great, although many of them have said so. They are not offended because America has never been great; many have said that. These would be two irreconcilable factions, fighting with each other, if they meant what they had been saying. They never did. We never saw them fight with each other and there’s a resaon for that. These were dishonest cosmetic statements lacking any matching underlying sentiment.

It’s offensive because greatness is decision-based. If you’re some slacker living in your mom’s basement with no job, and you wake up this morning and say “This stops now” and you mean it, you’re already great. The resulting education, job, saving, marriage, house etc. are merely following through on the awakening, like the position of a boat following a new bearing. If the boat is following a bearing of greatness, the boat is great already. That’s how people are. That’s how communities are. That’s how societies are.

Similarly, if you’re a nation and you’re the world’s superpower, but you let a bunch of commie filth design your school curricula and your government policies and your big budget entertainment and your evening news and your late night comedy; you have given away your greatness. If you build “sanctuary cities” in which you reward lawbreakers and you pass progressive income taxes and unlimited property taxes and lawn watering restrictions and silly little laws against plastic bags and straws, just to screw with the people who work hard and follow the law and let them know their place; you have given away your greatness. It doesn’t matter if the resulting decline in standard of living takes decades or a century.

#MAGA means: Let our nation conduct itself the way truly positive and spiritual people conduct themselves, not like these poor miserable hot messes you might meet late at night in a bar who you end up marrying right before they run up your cards and take off with all your stuff. It means to embrace standards rather than to abnegate them. It means recognize greatness in each other, where it exists, and to reward it rather than punish it. Stop finding excuses to fail at things before we’ve even tried.

It means, when some among us succeed at something, GO AHEAD AND CONGRATULATE them. Skip this little decision-point we’ve been reaching. You know the one…well now wait a minute, is there an opportunity for ME ME ME to do some virtue signaling here? Is he an amputee or special needs? Gay? Black? Female? If none of the above, then let’s peck at him like jealous chickens in a barnyard, make him step back and let a designated-oppressed person take his place because it’s all about ME ME ME. No. It’s not about you. Being great means recognizing greatness. It doesn’t mean to punish mediocrity and it doesn’t mean to pretend mediocrity is great. It means to inspire the mediocre.

Treat greatness…like greatness.

Don’t punish it or displace it to make room for another. Study it.

Treat friends as friends. Make it easy for people to be your friend.

Treat enemies as enemies. Don’t destroy them right away. First give them reasons to stop being an enemy, and consider becoming friends. If that doesn’t work, then by all means light ’em up.

But it should be easy and rewarding to be our friend, and difficult and expensive to be our enemy. Not the other way around!

In short, greatness means acting like we have some business being on the planet. Like we belong here.

Our country has spent the better part of a century going the other way. Too much apologizing…not for an ugly history or anything like that, but merely for existing. We’re discussing this honestly, remember. And honestly, if it wasn’t for the legacy of slavery, it would be something else. Negative, ungrateful people always look for a subject of complaint, and they ALWAYS find it.

And that is why #MAGA is controversial. Greatness means, ultimately, depriving hostile, negative, ankle-biting wounded incomplete people of their voice, until such time as they make up their minds to become positive people who treat friends as friends and enemies as enemies, and stop behaving like bar trash.

Because once you go down that road, the conversion is hard.

Not impossible. It’s doable. Others have done it.

That’s why it’s scary.

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I Couldn’t Possibly Care Less If “We’re All In This Together”
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Who needs to be told “We’re all in this together”? I daresay no one. Not even people who are severely depressed, psychologically and economically, teetering on the brink of doing something tragic and drastic. I don’t think even they care about being in it alone versus together. If you’ve ever been in a situation like that, you know it’s not terribly helpful to have it suggested someone else is suffering the same way. In fact, all that really does is diminish any residual hopes that help might be coming.

I care about young, inexperienced, confused kids struggling away in retail jobs suddenly charged with the responsibility of being miniature public health officials. “Sir! Sir! Where’s your mask?” The poor tykes think if they ever allow someone to walk past a line barefaced, the Wuhan Problem will flare up all over again and the blood of thousands will be on their hands. And I care about those kids maybe getting fired or laid off, then having to figure out how to collect from an overburdened unemployment system weeks & months behind in the process of figuring out which claims are fraudulent. Or, with maybe possibly getting another job. Right now. In this.

Mostly, I care about being told no. I care about losing my cool, not quite so much over being told no, but over the knowledge that my request is not COVID-related even in the slightest. I worry about losing my sense of perspective, as I struggle with a negligible inconvenience, knowing others have it so much worse. Because my intelligence is being insulted by the latest “No can do, because COVID” coming from some guy who can’t even be bothered to look up from his text messaging conversation.

I care about the end game. I’m one of the ones who resolutely refuse to accept the “new normal,” but are legitimately wondering how we get things back again if the answer to every little thing is: Nope. Sorry. COVID.

It’s dishonest because the people who are making the rules about how much suffering we’re all doing, as “we’re in it together,” enjoy immunity from the effects. That’s the real concern people are supposed to have when they wonder whether or not we’re all in it together. In the ways that matter, we’re not. And yet — we are. In a most unhealthy way. To those who make the decisions, the real harm is merely delayed. They’re going to have a lot of trouble collecting taxes from a base that has been so wounded. They’re already crying to Trump. Trump told them no, so now they’re campaigning for Placeholder Joe and Kamala Proud-Of-Rapists. If those two are victorious next month, the answer may change…and the bailouts will materialize. We saw that kind of stuff back in the seventies, right before the dollar price of every little thing doubled and tripled.

In fact, throughout the twentieth century there was a lot of excitement — the wrong kind. Lots of misery. Lots of Keynesian policies, micro-managing, totalitarian dictatorships across the globe. A pandemic came before all of this. And this gives me cause to wonder.

I wish people would stop popping up on the teevee telling me we’re all in this together. It’s the answer to a question no one was asking. The people who are saying it, are showing how little they understand of the real problem. And they’re addressing the sort of people I would hope went the way of the Dodo Bird: The kind whose day brightens just a little bit knowing someone else is suffering. If there’s anything we don’t need right now, that’s it.

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Progressive Taxation
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Once again, I’m venturing into a college town, a stranger in a strange land. This is where you can finally find one or two Biden/Harris signs. Which isn’t so bad, but there’s a prevailing sentiment that Bernie Sanders is an okay guy and might still have the right idea. Months after he took the money & ran. People can’t figure out what smells.

Resentment appeals to people, especially to people who pay attention to politics only occasionally. I suppose it’s like a smoothie, that first sip is enticing and delicious. Nobody wants to suck away at it all day, but that’s okay because with politics people only pay attention long enough to form an opinion. They can’t see what their resentments are doing to them, and to the rest of us.

Alright, I’ll explain here we can’t afford to have resentment in our tax policies. Let’s inspect the intersection between economics and politics by making it simple: I’m a collectivist-type politician, running on a platform of absolute collectivism. If I win, everybody’s money goes into a big pile, and then everybody gets back the total amount of money divided by the population count so everyone ends up with an equal amount.

To keep things simple, everyone votes their own interests. If you know my scheme will extract more money from you than it will give back to you, you’ll vote no, and if you know it will give back to you more than it will take, you vote yes. If you line everybody up according to how much they have, and take the property value of the guy standing at the halfway point, that’s the median. If you put everybody’s property in that big pile and divide by the number of people, that’s the average, or mean. So I lose if the median is greater than the mean. I win if the median is less than the mean. It all has to do with whether there’s a slope, and which way it goes.

The way economics works, this will always win. There’s always a slope and the slope always goes one way. The wealthiest guy has a whole lot more than the second-wealthiest guy. The poorest people have roughly the same amount as each other. An “Us Against Them” mentality emerges. But I don’t need to rely on the us-against-them mentality, the numbers are on my side. I can take to the airwaves and truthfully say “If you have less than X, you will benefit under my plan” and if people vote purely selfishly, like rats on a sinking ship, I will win.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Suppose a blue fairy godmother emerges from on high and says “I will straighten your curve.” She would wave her magic wand and do merely the first step of what I’m promising to do — curing inequality. Note, though, she’s offering merely to straighten the curve, not to go so far as I’m going to ensure everyone has the same amount of stuff. No curve means the median and the mean are the same. Poorest guy has 1, wealthiest guy has 100, so the guy in the middle has 50 or 51.

Well! If you ask me, I’m going to say not only no, but Hell No. I can’t win that way. Or — I could win, but I would only squeak through with barely 50% of the vote, best case scenario.

I, the collectivist-minded politician, M-U-S-T have the inequality and the inequality must have the curve to it. My whole political career depends on it. I have got to have those 70%, 80%, 90% continually shafted, continually possessing less than the mean, so they have an incentive to support me. I can’t have: Poorest guy has 1, richest guy has 100, with linearly spaced gradients in between. If it’s like that, my goose is cooked. Note that my plan is supposed to go leaps and bounds beyond that, ensuring that the wealthiest guy and the poorest guy have the same amount. The point is that to achieve merely the first step of that, would already be unworkable because it would be contrary to my interests.

Progressive taxation is supposed to do exactly what it has in fact done, which is to take this glorious fantasized instant of Bastille-raiding and stretch it out endlessly. It’s supposed to promise the whole cookie while offering only crumbs…across decades and generations. It is the ultimate in the counterproductive bureaucracy, which is incentivized to preserve the problem it was formulated to solve. The median has to be less than the mean, in order for it to work politically. Its proponents are not on the side of the rich people, and they’re not representing the interests of the poor people either.

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The Polls Have Problems
Friday, October 9th, 2020

The polls have Biden up over Trump. And the gap, I’m told, is consistently much greater than Hillary’s lead four years ago, which turned out to be phony. This Biden-advantage gap is also durable. Time to start worrying.

Some conservative bloggers, fearing a momentary episode of 2012-like disillusionment that could impact the future of the country for generations to come, have taken to characterizing these polls as inaccurate. They have their justifications, but I’m not going to churn up reasons to doubt the accuracy of the polls. I wouldn’t believe in this; the polls are not inaccurate.

But they are plagued with problems.

1. A nationwide poll doesn’t gel with the Electoral College. We have suffered massive and predictable confusion every four years from nationwide polls and the skew always goes in the same direction. A huge chunk of our blue-state electorate is all pooled up in places like California, Washington State, Oregon, New England…these don’t move the needle, nobody is wondering about them. A state like, say for example, Oregon sending its slate of electors to the Electoral College to vote for Biden, is a disaster that can only happen one time. If the state’s voters have gone 90% Biden it’s no different than if they’re 51% Biden. So the other 39% is, effectively, a waste. The Biden column has a lot of waste here. The Trump column, not so much.

2. Oversampling of democrat voters in the pool. The pollsters keep getting surprised the same way and they just keep doing it. I don’t know why. You have to ask them. Oh, I have my ideas. I think they’re in the entertainment business and not the news business, whether they know it or not. More on this below.

3. Liberals run the polls, and liberals inhabit liberal echo chambers. That has traditionally been safe, because the tinge of the echo chambers tends to drizzle outward, like the blue thing you toss in a toilet tank coloring all the water. But it’s different now because public trust in our news media has dropped to an historic low. It hasn’t been this low, in fact, since…2016. Yup.

4. The Bradley Effect, or The Wilder Effect. Historically, this has to do with people lying to pollsters about their vote for a black candidate, and then on Election Day voting for his white opponent causing an eight-to-ten point surprise. This year it’s more of a “shy Trump voter” effect but the principle is the same: People are lying to pollsters. They’re consistently lying to pollsters in the same way. They will vote Trump/Pence, but they don’t report that to the pollsters because they just don’t want to get into it. They got interrupted while they were cooking & getting ready for dinner.

5. The Flotilla factor. There is a serious enthusiasm-gap problem plaguing the Biden/Harris camp. If our polling resources were trustworthy, they’d at least discuss it, but they aren’t discussing it. Meanwhile, there aren’t any Biden signs out there. No Biden bumper stickers. No Biden flotillas to counter the five thousand boat Trump flotilla. That’s something.

6. Supporters of Biden/Harris have lead in their pants. It has always been true that people tell the pollsters they plan to vote, and when the time comes they just stay home and watch reruns. It’s a safe generalization to make that Trump/Pence supporters are not going to do this. In 2020, the bulk of the lead-in-pants vote is “committed” to Biden/Harris…and they’re going to screw that ticket. Again, if the news were trustworthy, they’d discuss this. They’re not discussing this because they aren’t trustworthy.

7. Contrasted with that, Trump/Pence supporters do not have lead in their pants. This may seem redundant with “The Flotilla Factor,” #5 above, but it’s not. Things are different in 2020 because the stakes are much, much higher and everybody understands this. If Trump/Pence loses, it’s not just a matter of putting up with smarmy liberal jackass nephews at the Thanksgiving table. Pedophiles are roaming the streets burning down the businesses, some of which are family businesses that have been built with caring, dedication and love across the generations. People are getting hurt and killed, because we have a need for law and order that far exceeds what we have. This isn’t a mystery and it isn’t something that’s affecting some unknown person three time zones away. It’s happening right in front of us and it’s real. Most elections, each side is motivated by revulsion and fatigue with the other. This election, only The Left is motivated by fatigue. The Right is motivated by self-preservation, political and personal.

The democrats do not process a dopamine flow the same way normal healthy people do. To a democrat, the dopamine flow is everything. Remember the Saturday Night Live sketch, when “Biden” put “Trump” on pause with a remote control? When strong-woman Kamala came out to lecture the two of them? Not “parody,” because these events bore no resemblance to anything that actually happened. That’s the liberal brain for you; they can’t distinguish between “It makes me happy to have this thought” versus a funny joke. And they can’t distinguish between their happy thoughts, and reality. They’re that hooked on the dopamine flow: Fantasy, reality and punchlines are all in the same Vitamix blender together and that sucker is revved up on high. This is why news can’t be trusted. They’ve given up real news, and have gotten into the business of delivering liberals their dopamine.

I don’t know that all this means Trump/Pence will win, or if any of it means that. I do know it’s a mistake to try to predict what will happen by what we have been told, without taking into account the above factors.

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My Unpopular Opinion
Saturday, September 26th, 2020

I have some opinions that are unpopular, but this one is perhaps the least-popular out of all of them. But I must say, I’m not being given credible reasons to change my mind.

I think we can all agree that 2020 is not a very good year. Suffering abounds. We who are extremely fortunate have to redefine our notions of “suffering” so we can pretend we’re doing some of it and sharing in the misery, but deep down we know that we’re merely struggling with some occasional trifling inconveniences. Whereas others are literally wondering where their next meals are coming from, or their next month’s rent anyway. We know it’s entirely understandable for us to do some bitching. But we also know we need to be very careful about when & where we’re doing it, and of what’s making us feel like bitching. A lot of the time, in fact most of the time, we have to recognize these feelings as the feelings they are, and STFU about all of it. The old metaphor about the sadness for not having any shoes, “until I met a man who had no feet.” That’s us.

I have an unpopular opinion about masks, but it’s only unpopular among those who make a lot of noise. Among the quiet ones, I suspect — in fact, I know for sure — it’s not really unpopular at all. The idea that the efficacy of masks is on the fringe of established science, and that their applicability is more political than medical, is reinforced so frequently and just so blatantly that you’d have to live in a deep dark hole in order to keep yourself from at least considering it. Which I notice is where a lot of people are living, and those of us who do not live in deep dark holes, are strongly encouraged to do so. Encouraged by the loud people who make lots of noise to live in these deep dark holes. Watch only what you’re told to watch. Don’t think unsanctioned thoughts, etc.

I have an even more unpopular opinion. I think the rules aren’t going to save us. In fact, I think there is something terribly wrong, not only with the rules themselves, but with the people who cook them up and promote them. I think that they think rules are the answer to everything. Once again, it’s not the conclusion reached that I want to criticize, it’s the method by which people get there. Wear a mask! The advice is not wrong; in fact, I support it wholeheartedly if the conditions are right. Seven million people with the Chinese Virus means one out of every 50, and you don’t want to get this. We’re six months into this so that’s ample opportunity to share airspace with an asymptomatic carrier. But why are you riding a bike out on the trails all by yourself with a mask on your face? “I’m a transplant patient and I can’t afford to get this”…so, you wear a cloth mask? That’s the wrong equipment for what you’re trying to do. Such an error could be deadly. It makes an impression on me that I don’t see anyone in a hurry to correct it.

But, the rules people…rules, rules, rules…let’s establish another rule, that’ll solve everything.

They’re way out of control. That’s another one of my opinions, but this one is by no means unpopular. Everyone who’s taken the time to observe and then to give it so much as a moment’s thought has to agree. It’s our second-virus, these “Karens” interrogating us about “Where’s your mask?” and reporting us to the snitch lines if they see us embarking on non-essential errands. They’re not completely wrong. Intelligent people, by definition, have to adapt to new situations by way of changing their own understanding of what’s normal vs. what’s not, and it was always a given that we’d have to accept a new way of life. But they’re not completely right either. The reluctance to re-evaluate these new rules after we gave the rules a fair try and found out they’re not the right way to go. If you can’t admit you were wrong about your new rules, then what good does this adaptive intelligence do for anybody? And yet the situation persists. We’ve got a lot of people walking around among us who think rules solve all problems. Real life gives them a mid-course correction, but they don’t get corrected. They keep marching along in the same direction and at the same velocity, not surrendering even so much as a blip of momentum. They learn nothing…even when the suffering is their own…which it rarely is. Hmmm, maybe that’s the issue.

When we’re chasing arrow decals on the floor while shopping for groceries, turning into quivering neurotics who’ve discovered we’re pointing the grocery cart the wrong way even though we can’t do anything about it, it’s gone too far.

But that’s not an unpopular opinion.

I have an unpopular opinion that this “rules solve everything” mindset is not only in error, but may in fact be a serious mental illness. It would have been officially diagnosed as such if we lived back in the days where your continuing survival was fastened to your ability to think clearly. My opinion is that it’s not being officially diagnosed because, and only because, this is not the case. Everybody’s continuing survival is everybody else’s responsibility, and this has driven us crackers. I think there are people out there who simply cannot recognize that these useful technological innovations we enjoy, are the products of independent thinking. Chaotic, ramshackle roughshod thinking, in some kind of “Frankenstein’s Lab” — some cloister in which rules did not apply. We have new things we didn’t have before because someone had to say “I’ll do this because I’m not seeing any rules telling me I can’t do it”; maybe they even broke a rule to do it! And there are people who can’t even consider the possibility of that. They are so far gone that they think we have electric light because someone made a rule that we should have it. They think we put men on the moon because JFK expressed the desire that we should do it. They think we’re going to hit “climate change” targets in 2050 or 2100 because of these unelected, unappointed, unaccountable busybodies on commissions and panels make their “accords” and other rules saying we should hit them, and once we hit them the credit should go to the busybodies…who’ve never produced a thing someone else would want to buy, or helped to so produce, ever, for a single moment in their entire lives. I think there are people who don’t acknowledge the ones who sweat out the details, who go through the trial & error to see if something works, because they’re simply unaware of the necessity. They think forming the “vision” is all of the hard work that has to be done. I think they’re that far gone, because we’re in the Idiocracy now, not chased by any natural predators or threatened by any natural threats. I think the entire human race, at least that part of it that manages to make some noise, is a failure-to-launch kid who doesn’t know what a farm is, doesn’t know how food is grown, slaughtered, processed, and thinks the process of acquiring it consists solely of yelling at your mama that it’s time for her to bring a Hot Pocket to your bedroom.

I’ll say right now that’s not my most unpopular opinion. I’m still going after something else. But let me elaborate on this one: Politicians just love these “mom-wanna-hot-pocket-now” people. These people think we have cars and air conditioning and elevators because someone made a rule, and that means they’re giving the politicians all of the credit for everything. They think Barack Obama actually busted out His own wallet, pulled out some bills, and gave them the health care they need. My own Governor is kowtowing to them with a new rule that says no gas-powered cars sold here, at all, starting in 2035. Such bold leadership!

It’s not an unpopular opinion that this is the wrong way to go. It may be an unpopular opinion that this has all the trappings of a mental illness, but I wouldn’t write a blog post called “My Unpopular Opinion” about that. It’s not that unpopular.

No…my unpopular opinion is about bullying.

These days it has become quite popular to take part in building a new world that has no bullying. Now as I think about this just casually, at first I have to agree. It seems hypocritical not to climb onto the bandwagon. As a child I was one of the unpopular ones, I didn’t hit my growth spurt until rather late, and although I came out of it taller than most I spent nearly all of childhood shorter than most. I was bullied a lot. I understand bullying. There’s something wrong with the bullies. My own bullies were wounded, incomplete people and I could see that at the time.

In adulthood, as I look at some of the problems I solved, I can see I’m now paying my mortgage entirely by way of solving the problems that weren’t supposed to be solvable. I suppose in some way or another that’s true of all of us who pay mortgages, or at least some of us. A big chunk, more than just me. Now, how do we solve the truly vexing problems, the ones that are sufficiently challenging that maybe lots of others have tried to solve them and haven’t been able to do it. The problems that are sufficiently difficult that the solution, should it ever be presented and found viable, is naturally imbued with economic value. Such problems cannot be solved simply by way of following instructions. How do we do that?

The very first step is to conquer the feeling of frustration. To move past the “Well, this sucks” sentiment. To click past that notch, into the “So what are we gonna do about it?” And put some thought into that. The evaluation of whether or not the problem is solvable, with the resources currently available, comes right after that.

Bullying is essentially tapping on the glass to get the fish to move. It is the act of placing the bullying-victim in a situation he can’t escape, one in which his desire for the bullying to stop, intense as it may be, is entirely irrelevant. It is the creation of a situation in which all that matters is how the subject chooses to respond. Like many who make a living with their intellect, I am paying bills because — and only because — it is in my nature to obsess over how I choose to respond to perplexing situations, and how I feel about the situation is far less important to me. Like all of us who have a pulse, I did not emerge from the womb this way. I had to be changed. It’s not that I don’t feel bad when situations make me feel bad. I just naturally click past the notch because my clicker has been worn down to an un-clicker. It’s because of something missing, not because of something that’s there. I guess you could call that childhood abuse of some kind?

But the fact remains, that’s how we solve problems. Maybe I should hunt down the bullies from my childhood and give them a big thank you. I’ve often thought so. Maybe I should shower them with some huge checks? But if I did that, I’d have to leave enough in reserves to pay off the piece-of-crap cowardly “teachers” who didn’t do anything about the bullying and told me to handle it myself. I’d have to pay them even more, I think. They told me to handle it myself, so I did. Then the bully and I both got hauled off to the Principal’s office for fighting…and I learned firsthand how hollow and fake authority can be sometimes. The bully never bullied me again though. So many valuable lessons in one day…and none of them in the classroom.

I have to admit that if none of this happened, I’d be just another useless martinet folding his arms across his chest, and obsessing over “I don’t like this” and “we need a new rule.” I’d be just another one of these oxygen-thieves only pretending to solve problems, just chipping away at the liberty of total strangers. Just another amateur sculptor, deluding himself into thinking he’s making art, when he’s really just reducing a beautiful marble block to rubble.

Every justification a hardcore lefty-loosie progressive has for his most intrusive and destructive reforms, boils down to some statement beginning with the words “Don’t you see, we’re trying to build a new world in which there’s no…” followed by the thing they’re trying to eradicate from existence, forever. Today, progressives are turning boys into pansies. They’re actually offended by anything and everything that might possibly turn the boy into a strong, resilient, rugged man. They’ll get rid of all these resources, one at a time, systematically and methodically. In fact they’re already doing it. They’re fairly far down the checklist.

So we’re trying to build a new world in which there’s no bullying? Careful with those wishes.

My most unpopular opinion is that bullying is Chesterton’s Fence.

I note, here, that this does not mean I want to keep it. Bullying is unethical, unjust, and cowardly. There’s something wrong with the bully. We need to figure out what happened to the bullies to make them that way, and if we’re successful at that, then of course we would end up getting rid of bullying. So I’m not entirely opposed.

But it’s not like Cancer. If you really think we have a shot at getting rid of bullying forever, we’d better think long and hard about what we’re going to put in its place. It does have a function.

That’s an unpopular opinion. But let me go even further and twist the knife a bit:

We are living in painful times, right now, because these strutting martinets who always want more rules more rules more rules, weren’t bullied enough. We needed some bullying we didn’t have, back in the day, to stop these assholes from turning out the way they did. Between them, and bullies, they are the bigger problem by far. And we’re paying the price now because we didn’t have enough bullying. Someone unfortunately reached adulthood, and is now filling out their role in adulthood being very loud, seizing influence for all the wrong reasons…never having learned to think like an adult.

That’s why they think a new rule is the answer to every problem that comes down the pike. They never learned otherwise. They needed a bully or two in their lives and they didn’t get them.

They think, way too much, of how they feel about things. Whether or not they disapprove. They obsess over this when nobody cares, and become quite tedious.

They don’t think, nearly enough, of how they’re going to respond.

When that old “legacy bullying” is going on in the playground, that’s all that’s on the bully’s mind. That’s all that’s on the victim’s mind, too. What’s the response? That’s the Chesterton’s-Fence part of bullying. Get rid of it if, and only if, you can replace it with something else; and if you don’t have something to replace it with, or you don’t understand it, maybe you shouldn’t get rid of it quite yet.

We have this “new normal” of new rules that don’t make anything better and make lots of things worse. Those rules come from people who want all of the control but will accept none of the responsibility, and just like to crank out rules without regard to what effect the rules have. These people are that way because they only care about “do I approve of this?” and they’re not putting any thought into how they’ll respond. And they got to be that way because they weren’t bullied enough.

I can’t blame good-hearted, conscientious fellow citizens for disagreeing with me about it. But I have to be truthful: Every year I see come and go, in fact every week I see come and go nowadays, I am more and more sure of it. We’re buried up to our necks in rules that don’t make any sense and that hurt many while helping nobody, because some assholes weren’t bullied enough. I will even go so far as to say, if we’ve been trading the problem of bullying for the problem of these new-normal more-rules people, we should do a system-restore and reverse the transaction. Bring back the bullies. Because this was not a win. All we managed to do is change one flavor of bullying for a different one. In fact it hardly even qualifies as that sort of change. It amounts to a continuation of the same bullying with the same misguided zeal, with some “shelter in place” orders being written down and circulated, and some fancy speeches.

Does that mean I’m yearning to see Dr. Fauci, Gov. Newsom, Mayor Garcetti, Gov. Whitmer, Gov. Cuomo, or Mayor de Blasio subjected to playground harassment as I was? Subjected to the gum-on-the-bus-seat treatment? The “Indian Burn”? The pink-belly or the nipple-twist? Noogies? Loogies? “Stop hitting yourself”? Towel-snapping? Jammed into a trash can or a locker?

Let me be clear about that:

Oh no, I just realized this post is too long and so I will stop.

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We Wouldn’t Even Be Having the Argument
Friday, September 11th, 2020

Biden’s backers are swaggering like they’ve got this thing in the bag, but they’re generally too young to understand how many times their guy ran for this thing and lost.

If he shared Trump’s strengths in actually being elected President, or if Trump shared his weaknesses, we wouldn’t even be having the argument.

The “beltway insider” thing is a serious Biden deficiency. In previous elections it was tossed around as a pejorative, casually and frequently, like spitballs. Biden is Mr. Insider. He was elected Senator at the very earliest possible age, in 1972. Not many people realize this. Had Congress been seated a few days after the election, or a couple weeks, as opposed to a couple months, he wouldn’t have been constitutionally eligible. Then he chafed his butt on the Senate chair right up until 2008 when Barack Obama chose him to be His running mate. You can’t get more insider than that. This guy’s asking for some real trouble each and every time he claims to be the liberator and fixer-upper who’s going to make it all better. Which is often.

Odd that Trump’s attacks are mostly veiled references to his opponent’s diminishing mental faculties. “If Joe’s got the answers, why didn’t he try them before?” is something you mostly see on social media, written by someone else.

My current theory about the President is that he’s keeping his powder dry. The evidence doesn’t point anywhere else. That could be significant.

Time will tell.

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Duct Tape Them to Chairs
Friday, September 11th, 2020

Software weenies should work according to their own Hippocratic Oath of sorts, to first do no harm. I would have counseled my earlier self, given the opportunity to time travel back to the beginning, to pay closer attention to this “first do no harm” stuff. “Don’t be that guy.” Maybe make a list of that-guy types to try to not be…yes, that would have been good.

But I did pay at least some attention to it. This Dilbert strip, in particular, helped me acquire a little bit of practical wisdom, albeit perhaps a bit too slowly or too late. Don’t be that guy who burns the midnight oil, to put his team two steps forward and three steps back. Don’t be the guy everyone else would like to duct tape to a chair.

Seems like lately we have many sources of acute misery that have arisen to torment us, each one of them due to liberals not being duct taped to chairs. They’re roaming the streets of our cities after dark looting businesses someone spent their whole lives building. They’re ruining Star Wars. They’re promoting pedophilia on Netflix now. They’re running into the hills setting fires, after having pushed a bunch of absurd rules on us for years and years making it impossible or impractical to apply sound forest management. They’re still coming up with absurd lockdown policies and banning Halloween. They’re teaching college students to hate their own country.

I could add to this list throughout an entire afternoon if I really put my mind to it. Unfortunately, I haven’t got the time. Gotta make that living. It’s that “not been born independently wealthy” thing, sure does suck sometimes.

I’m among the riff raff who can’t close down hair salons to get my own personal, private session you see.

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Trust Issues
Sunday, August 30th, 2020

Once I worked in an office that had a liberal in it. It happens. And he was actually a pretty smart, compassionate guy. That occasionally happens too. He was pondering the climate change scam– er, crisis — and came to realize that since it’s so undeniably true and everybody knows how true and not-scammy it is, it must logically follow that all of us people who possess and use critical thinking skills and have concluded it’s a scam, must actually be in the process of committing suicide or something. And so he wanted to know my take on it, since he knew I was one of the deplorables. What’s my angle? Why don’t I believe the science?

Or rather, why don’t I go chasing off after their perversion of Pascal’s Wager: If we prepare for climate change and it turns out not to be a thing, then hey no biggie, but if we don’t prepare for it and it turns out to be real, we’re screwed. So we better hedge our bets. Why does this not magically flip over the deplorables on the climate issue, like a pancake? Could I please speak on behalf of all the others and help enlighten him because he really wanted to know.

In my third paragraph I come to the heart of the matter. My answer to this has not changed across this handful of years. I cannot speak for each and every single deplorable, but for the ones who are like me, it’s a trust issue. We do not trust the progressive political movement. Nobody with common sense trusts them. We think of these made-up issues as sales pitches to enthrall us with, or get us acclimated to, socialism. Period, full stop. And with “climate change” it’s pretty darn easy to test: Transforming capitalist societies to socialist collectives, by rights, should have zip zero nada nothing to do with whether we’re approaching a climate Armageddon. MAGA! In fact, if the threat were really serious, what we should then be demanding is that both capitalism and socialism persist, and all these models come together and learn how to coordinate to address the threat. But this remains a problem across a panoply of unrelated issues. Save the whales! Americans with Disabilities Act. Hate crime legislation. Abolishing the Electoral College. Raising the minimum wage. Gun control. All this stuff chips, chips, chips away at the individual’s right, obligation and ability to provide for himself and rely on himself, to think for himself. They’re all baby steps toward socialism. They attack businesses, starting with the small businesses. When you speak of deplorables, you speak of people who have figured this out and are rejecting your agenda. And you’re trying to gaslight them into forgetting what they’ve seen for themselves, playing the “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” game.

And that brings us to these “peaceful protests.” Liberals are such liars. They say this is the first step in the “progressive tradition” of demanding needed change. Imagine the deplorables taking to the streets to protest the unfairness of a progressive tax scheme. The liberals would haughtily intone to us — and they’d be completely right to do so — that we’re wrong. This is not the way. Our Constitution is malleable, and so are all the inferior laws that derive their statutory authority from it. The Constitution can be amended. All of the laws can be updated or rescinded altogether. Our elected officials serve at our pleasure. Yes taxation without representation would be wrong, but there’s a difference between guaranteed representation and guaranteed winning. So go home you deplorables. Go home, start trying to muster up the votes for the change you seek, and if you can’t do that then STFU.

Somehow, this doesn’t apply to them. Their rules only work one way.

That’s because they’re lying fakers. Oh, not each and every single one of them, but the ones who drive the agenda, the ones who really matter, are unabashed fake phonies. This is why people don’t trust them. They have an enormous problem here. I mean, think about it: As you rank the populace according to net worth, or annual income, take your pick; the median is far below the mean. That’s a fancy way of saying, by representing the people on the economic bottom who would benefit from a redistribution scheme, they’re representing far, far more than fifty percent. A political party that opposes redistribution because it represents those who would be asked to give more, should be getting creamed consistently, bashed and bashed until it’s pummeled into nonexistence, following a brief series of a few elections that turned out to be all but pointless. Why isn’t it happening?

Maybe I shouldn’t say this in social media. Liberals lose elections in the United States because of the trust issues. They’re just so clearly laboring toward ulterior motives they can’t spell out in detail, so obvious in the biases that drive their passions, and just so brazenly out to destroy things and hurt people. Republicans are winning with the votes of people who aren’t at all crazy about Republicans. People shy away from the negativity. Liberals are too close to it and they can’t see it.

The rank-and-file really do think they’re “fighting for the rights of” poor people, blacks, women, LGBTQ+ …really do think they’re trying to make the environment cleaner. They really do think anyone who questions them must want oppression for the minorities, and dirty air.

So they smash, break and burn our stuff. They’re becoming the very thing they hate.

And now that we’re in endless campaign season we get to see it all of the time.

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Quietly Revising Guidance
Thursday, August 27th, 2020

What’s this now?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is no longer recommending testing for everyone who’s been exposed to Covid-19, saying people who don’t have symptoms “do not necessarily need a test.”

The agency quietly revised its testing guidance for asymptomatic individuals Monday, advising people who are vulnerable to the virus to get tested if they have been within 6 feet of an infected individual for at least 15 minutes.

The agency previously recommended testing for anyone with a “recent known or suspected exposure” to the virus even if they did not have symptoms. The CDC’s previous guidance cited “the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission” as a reason why people without symptoms who were exposed to the virus should be “quickly identified and tested.” Numerous studies have shown that people who don’t have symptoms can still carry and spread the virus — even in the presymptomatic stage a few days before symptoms appear or if they are asymptomatic and never develop symptoms.

I don’t object to these changes. I really don’t. They call this a “novel virus” for a reason and I would expect there to be some learning along the way. Beats the alternative, right?

What I object to is this “quietly” business. A hundred-eighty degree hairpin turn should be loud, loud, loud. Dedicated bureaucrats, it has been said, act primarily to preserve their bureaucracies and any motivation toward solving the problem the bureaucracy was chartered or mandated to solve, comes in a distant second place. People are struggling to figure out if the CDC has passed that point, and this business of “quietly revising” direction is a pretty big clue.

Only a dedicated bureaucracy would quietly revise guidance, on anything, related to this plague that has touched so many lives, directly or indirectly. And there are all sorts of new evils attendant to a dedicated bureaucracy that’s been elevated to this position, er, or maybe I should say, painted into this corner.

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The Rioting Has to Stop
Thursday, August 27th, 2020

Okay I’ve been gone, and while not gone I’ve been a bit distracted. While not gone and not distracted I’ve been irrelevant, because now the conventions are going on and I’m not watching them. I find out about the highlights and the low lights the next day along with everybody else, and who wants my warmed-over opinions about that? So I’ve been quiet. All month.

But this…this…is amazing…

“The rioting has to stop, It’s showing up in the polling. It’s showing up in focus groups. It is the only thing right now that is sticking.”

People predicted this way back at the beginning, and common sense says it can’t go any other way. Even if you sympathize with the riots and want Trump to lose, the only logical effect the riots would have on you might be one of: I’m totally down with a change of leadership but it looks like now is not the time. We’ve got roving hordes of looting hooligans smashing in stores and setting fires, so Trump 2020.

It’s happening.

A recent poll from the Pew Research Center indicates violent crime is a significant issue amongst registered voters, heading into the 2020 presidential election. And a Zogby poll, reports record approval for the President, partially driven by the increase in violent crime and riots, particularly in Democratic Party-run cities.
:
News that American voters are more concerned about violent crime than alleged racial inequality, economic inequality, and climate change will undoubtedly come as a surprise to the Democrats. The latter failed to address rioting in the streets at last week’s party convention.

Rioting is not the only violence making voters take another look at Trump. In many cities such as Chicago, L.A., Washington D.C., and New York, liberal mayors have put “handcuffs” on law enforcement, causing spikes in violent crimes.

Allie Beth Stuckey put it in a way the mainstream media isn’t going to understand, at least, not on their own (H/T to Instapundit):

Liberals suddenly want the riots to stop because they realize it’s hurting their election chances. Conservatives have always wanted the riots to stop even though we know it’s helping our election chances. The former cares about votes, the latter about lives.

Mr. Lemon made reference in the video linked above, to the prospect of fixing the problem over the next 73 days, 68 days, whatevs. Liberals have a lot of trouble with the concept of fixing problems. They’re driven by something primal, something hormonal, like the endorphin rush you get when you’re in the process of fixing problems. Which means they’re really interested in going through the motions of fixing problems. We might think of it as playing a video game, finishing a level by beating a “boss” character. No state is being changed and the victory is not reproducible. You can play the same level minutes later with an entirely different outcome, maybe lose your last life when the boss beats you. So nothing is accomplished, not even in the pursuit of playing a game, it’s all about the rush.

That’s how they “solve problems” in the real world. They go through the motions to get the endorphin rush when they “solve”…homelessness, illiteracy, illegitimacy, blight, drug crimes, violent crimes, theft crimes…pandemics…nothing reproducible, no achievements verifiable, it’s all about the rush.

So I’m not entirely sure what was ever supposed to get “solved” here, and I don’t think anybody else knows either.

The Press has been reporting, with an undertone of contempt that comes through in varying degrees of subtlety, that the Republicans have hit a law and order theme hard in their conventions. Seems like that’s true. They’re being pretty smart this year.

Now that the democrats have decided the rioting must stop, assuming they have…I’m a bit lost on what they can do about it. Stop delivering riot supplies to the rioters maybe? That might help. But this is like putting toothpaste back in a tube. It was a stupid plan from the start and it’s not stoppable or reversible.

Picture a jackass building an enormous pile of tires out in a field, big enough to cover an entire city. Then setting fire to it and, in the ensuing months, discovering the fire is hurting his election chances. So he tries to extinguish it. He tries water drops via helicopter, he tries sand, he tries fire extinguishers with some kind of baking soda mixture…whatever…it still blazes away…then he turns to the camera and says “Oh well, you get the idea. Anyway you should totally put my people in charge.”

That’s what’s happening.

As a grouchy introverted curmudgeon, I’ve always had my issues with people in general. But I can’t work up enough resentment against total strangers who are innocently just going about living their lives, to seriously consider voting democrat. It takes far more genuine hate than I’ve got, or can ever get going and I haven’t got what it takes to wish that much suffering on people.

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The Chinese Virus Boat
Saturday, August 1st, 2020

The fact checking is awful. It’s the same thing that always happens when there are no standards. Things degrade.

This may be the worst fact check of the year. I suppose it depends on the question being asked. In my situation it was “Is that the true and unaltered lettering on the box?” Fascinating things happened when I used this link to prove that the box lettering was genuine. See…you’re supposed to come to a different conclusion. And wear your masks. It’s important! So…in response to those who say “the masks are no damn good” or some such, they rated it false. I suppose that’s alright because the people who say the masks aren’t doing anything, are leaping to an unwarranted assumption. What fascinates me about the liberal mind though is, the issue being discussed was whether the lettering on the box was being accurately represented, and it was.

So obsessed are they with this business of “the authority figure awarded me the point” that they can’t see anything else. I guess maybe this is what Harry Potter did to that generation.

These poor kids can’t think through anything. They don’t understand the meaning of things.

I envision it through this fragment of imaginary dialogue:

Lefty: Together we can do this!

Righty: ++facepalm++

Lefty: Come on! Blow! We’re all in this together! (blows)

Righty: You…can’t…be…serious…you…can’t…sell…this…b.s.

Lefty: (Smug, lopsided I-can-sell-anything grin) Your intransigence is going to get us all killed. We’ve come a long way! We’re not there yet!

Righty: (Exasperated) WE’RE SITTING IN THE BOAT.

Lefty: Sails that catch moving air exert a force. There are many studies about this!

Righty: Yes, but we’re IN the BOAT.

Lefty: These studies are peer reviewed and everything!

Righty: Yes, but we’re IN the damn BOAT.

Lefty: The vast majority of scientists agree with me! Don’t be a denier! (blow blow blow)

Righty: Blow until your face is blue. I’m grabbing an oar.

Lefty: You’re endangering the public health. There ought to be a law against people like you.

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Rules, Masks, and Rules About Masks
Thursday, July 30th, 2020

We are divided into red state thinking and blue state thinking. Both camps have rules they’d like to impose on others. They do not look at the concept of “rule” the same way.

When red staters try to get people to follow rules, it’s to achieve a positive outcome or to avoid a negative one.

Don’t let water get into the diesel fuel tank. Know your target as well as what’s behind it. Bring your tools in out of the rain. Bring the hay bales inside before it rains. The gun is ALWAYS loaded. Don’t get her pregnant until you marry her. If your dog doesn’t want to be around him, don’t trust him. These are good ideas.

When blue staters try to get people to follow rules, it’s to assert their dominance. They don’t really comprehend the concept of “a positive outcome.” If they did, recent experience would have altered their understanding of what masks do. It has not.

Blue staters want everyone else to wear masks, so they can play alpha-dog. And so that they can see masks everywhere, because then maybe Biden will be elected. When blue staters wear their masks, they often leave them dangling around their chins, or letting their noses stick out Gavin-Newsom-style…they haven’t got a care in the world about what the masks actually do.

They tell other people to wear masks. And then they themselves don’t wash their hands. They figure they don’t have to do it. Because they’re so smart! Everyone who agrees with them is super smart. Everyone who disagrees with them is stupid.

When a red stater tells you “Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire”…you can rest assured, he’s doing that himself. If he didn’t see fit to do it himself, he wouldn’t be telling you to do it.

Liberal Wearing Mask Everyone who’s paying any attention at all, understands this. Oh sure, 9 out of 10 of them will get in my face about this and assert that this is a terribly damaging and terribly false way to look at it all. Needlessly polarizing. Divisive. Don’t I realize “We’re All In This Together”? But that’s just lip service. Who wants to bet their next paycheck a blue stater is following the rules he so capriciously imposes on others? Didn’t think so.

I really don’t know if we have a compliance issue about masks. I’ve opined on this before. Blue staters like to presume there is one, because that would justify a whole new round of enforcement measures, and maybe more rule-making…new rules about the not-as-new rules. I just don’t know. Masks are required here, they’re required there…wherever people are required to wear masks, they wear the masks. There’s no actual scientific evidence they do what we’ve fantasized about them doing. California’s experience suggests rather strongly that they don’t.

For the record, I think if you’re in proximity with others and you can’t avoid it, you should wear something. It’s well established that you can go around carrying this thing without showing any symptoms, and when you start talking excitedly about your latest story about whatever…maybe about how you caught someone not wearing a mask and you properly scolded him…your droplets fly all over the place even though you can’t see them. If you’re infected, a cloth mask is very effective at stopping that. It’s very effective at stopping sneezes. But there are many problems with this. A lot of people who want to talk animatedly or excitedly about something, are going to remove the mask anyway before telling this latest exciting story. Also, you shouldn’t be asking me anyway. I’m not a doctor or anything. But I do remember why we started down the bunny-trail of masks; we can be asymptomatic carriers, and if we infect someone they might not show any symptoms either, in fact they could be healthy as a horse but maybe have to go visit someone weak, old and sick after we’re done sneezing on them. That was the idea, that was the rationale. That, and Slow The Spread. Well, slow-the-spread has been given a fair trial here in California and it didn’t work that well. Compliance was not the issue.

The far more important point in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth, is this. How much time are you spending within six feet of others…lots and lots of others? Why is that?

If you need to wear a mask that often because you’re in proximity to others that much of the time, something else requires changing. I cannot prove it, but I surmise that California’s situation exists because not enough people are doing that. We like to think of California as a leading-edge state, but what I’ve seen here over the last thirty years is that people like their established routines, a whole lot, and don’t want to change them. Oh sure we here in California are mighty quick to modify them superficially. Zoom meetings! Zoom meetings everywhere! But no not really. We’re gregarious creatures here. The statistics that are making everyone unhappy about us, are simply reflecting this. We’re going through the motions of sheltering-in-place like hermit spiders and logging on to our Zoom meetings, but…no.

Now I’m hearing Louie Gohmert wasn’t wearing a mask at the hearings Tuesday. and Wednesday he tested positive for the Vid. Bad Louie! “Gohmert’s aversion to wearing masks and following other practices intended to mitigate the spread of the new coronavirus led many to believe he might eventually contract the virus.” “Sure enough, he did.” People who say such things are not the least bit impressed by the enormous number of “sure enoughs” we have here in California, where masks are required and have been required throughout much of this pandemic event. This is cherry picking.

Cloth masks are all about liquids. They may offer some protection for the non-infected to keep from getting the Chinese Virus, but their primary purpose is to keep infected people from spreading.

A cloth mask is intended to trap droplets that are released when the wearer talks, coughs or sneezes. Asking everyone to wear cloth masks can help reduce the spread of the virus by people who have COVID-19 but don’t realize it.

Cloth face coverings are most likely to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus when they are widely used by people in public settings.

Blue staters don’t care about any of this.

To a red stater, the noun “rule” has very little, or nothing at all, to do with the verb.

To a blue stater, the noun and the verb are the same. It’s all about ruling. They pay some lip service to what the rule actually does, if there’s some medical literature that happens to go in the same direction as whatever bludgeoning they’re trying to do in the moment. But they don’t really care, they just want to rule over others.

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On Common Ground
Friday, July 17th, 2020

Most of the frustrations involved in living as an adult human, have to do with conflict between appealing narratives vs. inconvenient realities. And perhaps the best example of this is the narrative that conservatives & liberals can, and should, “sit down and work out their/our differences, find common ground, labor toward the common good and learn from each other.” I think deep down both sides really do want that…so long as it doesn’t involve giving up anything. If it’s cost-free, most people with political opinions would like to be Archie & Meathead after they’ve softened up and learned to see eye-to-eye.

Our parents did that with other grown-ups who didn’t share the same political affiliations, right? Should be easy!

The problem is that what we today call “liberalism” has eschewed any & all notion that its adherents have anything at all to learn from those who are not adherents. This is non-negotiable. All electoral contests and all differences of opinion involve illegitimacy and ignorance on the side of the argument that is not theirs. Every election they lose, was cheated. Every dissenting opinion, indeed every statement or question that bleeds off some of the momentum, intentionally or not, comes from someone who shouldn’t have opinions at all.

Liberalism has devolved into a slightly off-center “I know something you don’t know” smirk. Worn by people who haven’t accomplished anything. And want to make all the decisions that matter, without accepting any ownership of the eventual results.

As such, this notion of “common good” has melted down into the floorboards. It used to be that liberals wanted to get rid of some — perhaps all? — of what we have, and re-do it so that the needs of the forgotten might be met. Like…gay marriage for example. Here are some people who are marginalized through no fault of their own, so let’s dismantle a little bit of what makes society go, and reassemble it to meet these needs. Reactionaries might suspect the desire has little to do with meeting the needs of the marginalized, and has a lot more to do with the process of dismantling and wrecking. They were eventually proven right about that. The liberals who wanted gay marriages haven’t attended any gay weddings — aren’t interested. The dismantling, wrecking and re-defining has shifted into overdrive. Transvestite revolution. New pronouns. Polygamy. Onward!

The tender recruits would protest, with some variation of “But I’m part of that…I don’t want to wreck anything, I don’t want marriages of five or more, or women marrying goats, I just want to help people.” And this is true. It’s also true that the liberals insist “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” They just want the process of transformation, the rioting and protesting…the constant wreckage.

We who want society to manage a foothold so it can thrive and grow, don’t really have any common ground with these people. If there’s too much prosperity then there’s too much individual ambition and hope for success with things the way they are; more conservatives. And their wreck-everything revolution loses steam. Liberalism has reached the point where they’ve come to realize this, and so are invested in widespread suffering — at worst — but, at best, a keenly felt limit to our success without something being wrecked. They don’t want us to keep enough money after taxes to take our families on vacation, or acquire the access to health care we need, or to get our children properly educated. They can’t afford for that to happen. If it happens, it’s too hard for them to recruit new members to their cause, or to win elections, and those are the two things they must do.

Common ground? It’s an appealing narrative…reality doesn’t smile upon it though.

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What I Saw
Sunday, July 12th, 2020

Here’s what I saw in the first half of 2020.

1. China lied to everyone and infected the rest of the world with SARS-CoV-2. President Trump restricted immigration and travel from China.

2. Joe Biden and other liberals asserted, without evidence, that the travel restrictions were xenophobic.

3. Trump listened to the experts, Drs. Fauci and Birx.

4. Some talking head predicted 2.2 million Americans eventually dead.

5. The pandemic fatalities petered out in late June with 130k +/- deaths. Hopefully they stop there. Trump saved 2,060,000 to 2,070,000 lives.

6. Liberals asserted, without evidence, the Trump rally would be a super spreader event.

7. Liberals asserted, without evidence, that the “George Floyd protests” would not be.

8. Liberals worked hard to manufacture “social unrest,” report on it as if it were spontaneous, and “defund the police.” Libs think the solution to a breakdown in law & order is less law & order.

9. Liberals evidently figured out this “social unrest” they were manufacturing from nothing, had an effect on the election in their favor. They may have figured this out before they started manufacturing it. At any rate, the places run by liberals began to make silly concessions to the protestor-terrorists, that the protestor-terrorists never even requested. Statues, dairy company emblems, rice brands, syrup brands, etc. Evidently these apologies, changes and removals were supposed to deter the protestor-terrorists from protesting and terrorizing. They did not.

10. Places run by liberals also had more violence, more COVID infections, more COVID casualties, more deaths and injuries from protests, and more unemployment. These places run by liberals also had less freedom. Their lockdowns were more stringent and the harm done to their business communities were much greater.

11. While all this was going on, our mainstream media, run by liberals, began hemorrhaging its credibility even faster than it had been hemorrhaging it in recent years…which is really saying a lot. They began to use the phrase “mostly peaceful protests” to excess, applying it in places where it clearly didn’t apply. One anchorman even waxed lyrically about these “peaceful protests” in front of a burning liquor store. This proves the media thinks we’re all stupid. Well who can blame them.

12. Liberals don’t have a clue what all this looks like to grown ups because they never have doubts about anything and can’t be told anything.

Now, I’m told, the COVID numbers are looking bad bad bad. A creepy narrative has set in that we’re having a “second wave,” or rather that the first wave never really ended. Something must be done! Trouble is, no one has come up with any ideas for the new-something that are in any way different from the old-something. Just more orders, more scolding, more tattling…more Karens.

Well hey Karen, I have some questions for you I think everyone else should have for you too. I’m not entirely sure giving you more control and more authority is the answer. We’re already living in your world, are we not?

You told us to shelter in place. We sheltered in place. You told us to wear masks and we wore masks. You told us to practice social distancing so we did. You blocked entrances to our grocery stores so we used the one that you left available to us. Then you made rules about which way to point our carts down the grocery aisle so we complied with that.

Then you set up hotlines so that our neighbors could snitch on us if we didn’t wear our masks, or if we got in our cars and headed somewhere that didn’t look like “essential” work.

You got back total compliance. Total. The very few among us who protested mask-wearing or social-distance-practicing or any of your other weird stuff, were put into situations where someone else would force the correct behavior. You blocked this you barricaded that. Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir! I can’t buy a half pound tub of butter without hearing that execrable word eight times or more. It’s become something like a jaackhammer, pounding on our skulls, and in fact strapped in place so it’s constantly pounding on us…and we, against all odds, have become accustomed to it.

TOTAL.

COMPLIANCE.

You insisted on it. You would accept nothing less.

Now you see there is a second wave and you have leaped to the conclusion…without evidence…that the problem must be people didn’t comply enough. Uh, no. People didn’t agree with you enough, that’s the real complaint you have. And it’s different from not complying enough.

The level of compliance you received was unprecedented in written history.

Testing is increasing so cases are up. Deaths are down. You say that’s a lagging indicator…this is true…but, it’s also true that the virus is spreading rapidly, while people are complying with your diktats without question…

Herd immunity works.

Masks and social distancing don’t work.

And you people who think you haven’t been obeyed enough, have started a whole new epidemic. You are scarier than the actual virus. You’re like straight out of a Twilight Zone episode. One of the earlier ones, the cautionary tales about Cold War paranoia. That’s you.

You’re creepy as hell and no, you’re not going to get more compliance than you got already. It’s not because people are childish or rebellious. It’s because it’s simply not possible; greater compliance is not within the capability of the human genome. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see how much compliance you got. You got all you can get, all anyone who’s human can give. You got the dial ratcheted up to 11 already.

Here we come to an interesting observation about people. People, in general, like to think they’re “doing what works.” But if you watch them carefully without filtering out your specimens in any way, just looking at the broad, truly-randomly-chosen cross section, what you’re going to find out on average is that people do what’s comfortable. When they give power away, they give it to the people who ask for it, not to the people who demonstrated their ideas lead to success. And they’re heap-big-lousy on taking the power away from the ones whose ideas led to failure.

We’ve got a lot of people running around right now saying they’re doing exactly that, wanting to boot President Trump’s ass out of there and replace him with…they don’t know. Whoever would end up being President if Biden wins the election. Which would be someone who isn’t Joe Biden. But that’s neither here nor there.

They cannot complete the thought. They can’t point to anything specific that was done half-assed or wrong in response to China infecting us, that another President would do better. No really, just listen to their complaints, and listen for specifics. There are none. Just “He said this” or “He tweeted that.” It’s become embarrassing to listen to, as in, proxy-embarrassing.

If we really want to redirect power away from the ones whose ideas didn’t work out well, we should be redirecting it away from the “wear your mask” people. It’s not that their idea is entirely wrong. Masks have their place. When you must be crowded together with other people and there’s no avoiding it, you should wear a mask. But then again, if that situation really does exist, you should be asking yourself two or three times why you’re in it.

Flatten-the-curve is over. That’s been done. What we’re trying to do now is keep people from getting it when their immune systems are compromised, or when they’re old or otherwise infirm.

After what I’ve seen the first half of this year, I’m having a tough time concluding that masks and social-distancing are really all-that. But you have to define what the goal is. Is anyone anywhere defining the goal, any better than I just did? I don’t think “Hide until the germ is gone” is a very good plan.

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“Fighting Misinformation”
Friday, July 10th, 2020

I’m seeing a lot of various resources in a big hurry to tell me what they’re doing to combat the spread of misinformation about the Kung Flu.

When anyone uses this sort of verbiage…combat…fight…I notice they never really call it what it is. They don’t use the word “control.” I read it as a big fat “Nope…you can’t trust us either, they got to us.”

It doesn’t heighten my confidence. Quite the opposite. My confidence diminishes so far and so fast, in fact, I find it impossible to put into words. It tells me some people are in complete control of what other people write or say. Even worse, I have no idea who these controllers are. Even worse than that, it proves the controllers are sufficiently motivated to encourage me to think one thing and discourage me from thinking another, they picked up a phone or wrote an e-mail, and started making threats.

Which proves they couldn’t count on the truth just naturally and ultimately emerging. Someone, somewhere, requires greater and greater assurance — and is given it — that our societal Thunderdome of competing ideas will be safely defrocked of the competing ideas. They, whoever they are, have to be equipped with an ever growing arsenal of tools to ensure the dialogue remains a monologue. I suppose if everything was known that might be okay. But this issue with the Chinese Virus is full of unknowns.

This sort of phrasing erodes my confidence so much it has me believing in conspiracy theories when I’m not initially inclined to believe them. I don’t believe a true conspiracy is typically within the capabilities of the human genome. But I know it’s not appropriate to have a tightly controlled choreography, with some mid-course corrections against anyone who wanders outside the demarcated lines, when there’s still so much left to be learned and what little we have learned, we don’t really know for sure.

Shit like this is why Trump won in the first place.

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Doubts
Saturday, July 4th, 2020

A third of a century into arguing with them on the Internet, I’m still struggling to figure out what the true difference is between liberals vs. normal people who think competently.

A lot of it has to do with feelings. When we grown-ups make a decision feeling a certain way, we are troubled by the possibility that deciding it at another time, with the facts remaining the same, in a different mood we might make a different call. This inspires reflection: Would we be wrong then, or are we wrong now? To a liberal, that proclivity toward emotional reasoning is a feature and not a bug. It seems like they live in a world in which all feelings have to be expressed, and making decisions about things is just another way of expressing them.

Sympathy has a lot to do with it. If you listen to a liberal’s rationalizations, you’ll quickly discover there’s some villain in the storyboard — there’s always a villain — for whom they have no sympathy, for whom they don’t want anybody else developing any sympathy. This confuses people because the liberal’s goal is to try to build a “new world” or “new society” that is “fair to everybody” and the temptation is to take them seriously when they say this. But, no. Talk to a young Marxist sometime about being fair to businesses. Talk to a young feminist sometime about being fair to men. There are certain loathed-classes, and what the liberal tries to do is emerge as an autocrat who directs the sympathies of everybody else, rather like a lawn sprinkler…and there is to be no irrigation, ever, in that particular corner. It’s the exact opposite of building a new and just society that is fair to everyone.

Change is a factor. Liberals are never going to see the potential downside of change until such time as the change has been fully defined…like, for example, if it’s change being brought by President Trump. Or, if it’s a funding cut against one of their cherished programs. In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with change at all, it’s like a six-year-old deciding on more sugar on his cereal. Change change change!

There is a lack of consideration for consequences. It seems liberals simply don’t think in those terms. They run their liberal megalopolises for decades and decades and decades…not a Republican to be found anywhere in Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle. That doesn’t stop them from blaming Republicans when things turn to crap. The rest of us are left to wonder, at what level of consciousness do they fail to establish the linkage between what was done, and what ultimately happened? To a liberal, their noble intentions are what matter. How the souffle ultimately came out of the oven, is irrelevant.

There has to be one epicenter of chaos, some originating point where liberals start making dreadful decisions. A point where the trolley is yanked off the tracks — contributing to all these other hazards, which are really just effect flowing from this common cause. But which one? They overlap somewhat.

Doubt has much to do with it. The liberals with whom I have argued are untroubled by doubt. I suspect my experiences are far from unique. I saw it back when their guy was in charge for eight years, and I’m seeing it now. Those of us who find ourselves in conflict with the liberals, about even simple things, have doubts about things because we’re adults. We don’t like making decisions with our feelings; we try to really maintain fairness to all involved parties rather than just make a lot of noise about it; we recognize that all change is not necessarily good; and we grapple with consequences. We have doubts.

Example: Masks on the face will slow the spread of the Chinese Virus — true or false? I have come to understand that where disagreement exists about this, it isn’t argument about the “true” or the “false,” it’s about the doubt. Well, when in doubt let us win, the liberals say, and wear your mask! Grown-ups, for the most part, comply. We’re not complying because they made the demand. Let’s face it, liberals have been bumptiously demanding benefit of all residual doubts for…well, it’s difficult to say when exactly that all started. The Earl Warren Supreme Court had a lot to do with it. You didn’t tell him his rights. The evidence is fruit of the poisoned tree. It’s conceivably possible someone else might have a knife that looks just like that. Maybe he ran because a police dog was chasing him. Maybe maybe maybe, possible possible possible, you have to pretend you don’t know even though you do…my guilty-as-hell client gets to walk. Our side wins!

Once liberals figured out “We get the benefit of all residual doubt” can be used to spring bad guys everybody knows are guilty, so they can go out and hurt more people and the public will just have to accept this…seems they had a realization that anything was possible. The tactic never backfires on them because liberals don’t have doubts. But grown-ups, thinking about consequences, will wear masks when social distancing is not possible, because sooner or later we’ll come in contact with someone whose immune system is compromised and we don’t want to take chances.

When did we start having doubts about the masks, that they were being used as a political emblem, rather than as simple and reliable devices to slow the spread of the virus? From the very beginning. But in the beginning that was a fringe-kookburger idea to have, even in an election year. But now? As possibilities go, it’s unavoidable! Liberals have made it abundantly clear they want the visual of masks masks masks…it’s the only chance Biden has. And oh by the way, these “Biden buttons” worn on the face may also retard the spread of the virus…possibly. We wear our masks when they make sense, because the masks can be both. We recognize non-mutual-exclusivity; it doesn’t have to be all of one thing and none of another. We want our grandmothers to live and we comprehend functional overlap.

Choosy Virus We have doubts about the masks themselves. We see something is wrong when “a mask” is what’s being ordered upon us — no exceptions! Don’t even think about going out bare-faced or we’ll report you! And yet…a cloth mask is the same as N95 is the same as a surgical mask. Not how it works at all. But…we have our doubts. The rebuttal is going to be that something is better than nothing, and this makes sense.

There is the difference between how things work out here in the real world, rather than how things work in the idea-land where rules are made and unicorns cavort away in the rainbow-sunshine. Yesterday I did my laundry and I forgot to put in my cloth Chinese Virus mask. I’ll try to do another load today because the thing is filthy and it’s skipped a weekend washing already…but I want to get the spare too, and I’m having trouble finding it. It’s clear to me the proper solution is more cloth masks, nevermind that I’m having trouble maintaining the inventory I have already. So how are you doing? Have you got some apparatus in the jockey box or glove compartment of your car? Mine’s a disposable mask left over from when I had to wear it on Tuesday. You’re really not supposed to do that, you know. But — my village elders have handed down the rule, facial coverings required no exceptions, when I go into a store to buy food. Sometimes I find out we have to have something and I have to go. Have to be prepared. We’ve got to eat.

Am I the only one with that terrible, disgusting habit? Everyone is subject to the new rules and we all have to eat.

So I have doubts!

I think Trump is going to win the election. But I have doubts. Liberals are sure Biden is going to win, it’s just a matter of time…even as they seemingly concede that if Biden does win, no one knows who then becomes President. It’s an interesting question, but if they noodled it over for a time they’d have to entertain some doubts. So they don’t. If you back them into a corner about it, they just pick somebody. Then hurriedly change the subject, seemingly failing to grasp that they just named the person who’s going to be President a year from now…and this would be something worth inspecting, to every diligent thinker, no matter what their feelings of it would be.

I had doubts about Trump at the very beginning. Since 1992 I have shied away from this thing about “so-and-so would be perfect because he has his own money and can’t be bought.” So I had doubts about them with Donald Trump. But, he did make it work. Then the establishment DC types came down on him like a ton of bricks, including the establishment Republicans, and so the time came to admit there was such a thing as a Deep State. Couldn’t doubt it anymore.

Liberals say the Trump rally in Tulsa spread the virus, and now people are going to die. They don’t have doubts.

Conservatives respond wondering about the George Floyd protests, wouldn’t they be responsible for spreading the virus too? The rebuttal is that there is “little evidence” of this according to “experts”, but that isn’t an honest expression because that would entail doubt. Liberals, once again, have none. They know for sure that a Trump rally in a single day spread the virus, but sustained authority-sanctioned rioting and looting across hundreds of densely packed cities over a period of several weeks, did not. That must be one smart virus!

Being repeatedly wrong doesn’t faze them. Now that he’s President, Trump is finally done, oh yes he is, those walls are finally closing in on him. Haven’t we been here before a few times? We saw it even before the election back in 2016: This will be the end of Trump’s campaign. No doubts!

So after all these years, the appearance to me is that liberals are 100% sure of absolutely everything, not quite so much because they like certainty, although there is some of that. They share in common a phobia against doubt. It terrifies them. I mean let’s face it, doubt is received negatively by all of us. None of us like to admit we were wrong about things. But it’s part of mature thinking, of becoming a grown-up. Sooner or later, we all reach that fork in the road, choose the wrong path, and then a little while later have to admit it to ourselves and start backtracking. It sucks, but usually that’s the only way to get back on track. And for those doing it the first time, they emerge from the experience better and stronger thinkers than they were beforehand. Doubt is the parent of beneficial humility, and you have to have some of that if anyone’s going to trust you to make decisions about anything that matters.

Liberals want uncontested authority to decide these things. But they don’t have the requisite humility to earn it, because they can’t, or won’t, entertain serious doubts.

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That Lawyer Couple
Tuesday, June 30th, 2020

For those who have not been following this, the story is here.

The stills I’ve seen could be deceptive, and chosen to give a false impression, but it looks like both of them showed carelessness in aiming their weapons. The wife is clearly not ready to absorb a recoil and her trigger finger discipline is terrible. The optics are radioactively bad no matter what your vantage point is, and the Internet has begun making fun of them mercilessly which is unfair.

Lawyer Couple The protestors are terrorists. Yes they’re protesting. They’re also engaging in terrorism.

the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.

There were a number of different head-counts of these protestor terrorists. I have no way of knowing which ones are accurate and which ones are not. The lowest number I heard was 100 protestor terrorists, and the highest one was 300 protestor terrorists. It’s not a public street. It’s a gated community, and the protestor terrorists smashed through the gate. They had already destroyed property. So gee, I dunno…what would you do?

Half the Internet is saying “That lawyer couple looks ridiculous, I should make the time to practice with my weapon so that if I ever need to use it for that or a similar purpose, I can do a better job. Also, I’ve come around on defunding the police, it’s a terrible, awful, rancid idea and we should drop it like a hot rock.”

The other half is saying “Those two look ridiculous, I’d better never get a gun because if I do the Internet will make fun of me.”

I am deeply concerned about the priorities and the lack of wisdom in that 2nd half. I hope it’s far less than half, and that they don’t own anything worth trashing.

Some days, I am ashamed of the number of weeks, or even months, I allow to slip by without any range time. The way I see my gun, is as a machine I have purchased for an eventuality I hope never happens. It is only one part of an insurance policy and I have a responsibility to provide the other parts. Another part of this policy, just as important as the gun itself, is the practice time. I would not hold a pistol that way; I’ve at least practiced that much. That’s what she should have done. So I hope there are a lot of people in that first group who are going to buy a gun that actually works for them, make sure they have plenty of ammo, and start burning through some of it learning how to actually use the firearm. And everyone who touches a gun needs to learn the four rules of gun safety. There are lots of versions of this list, with the wording only slightly different among them.

1. All guns are always loaded
2. Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy
3. Keep your finger off the trigger till your sights are on the target
4. Identify your target, and what is behind it

ThatIsAll.

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The Toppling of the Statues
Wednesday, June 24th, 2020

Nobody actually reads this blog, but as long as it’s been in existence I have struggled to explore the real difference between liberals and normal people. It has not been an entirely fruitless exercise. I’ve noticed — although I am far from the first to do so — that liberals and normal people who seem to be taking different positions about a common thing, and arguing about it, are really arguing about two different things. This suggests that our modern, advanced society is burning off vast, untold reserves of energy essentially talking past each other. The two sides do not see the same things the same way; they don’t do their seeing the same way; they don’t even see the same things. They do not exist in the same world together.

The point of divergence is not where we envision it to be. There are fundamental rules that hold the universe together, stitching in the quilt of space-time, that the liberals do not see.

One of the fundamental concepts they fail to recognize, and perhaps the most important one, is time.

The liberals are no longer toppling just Confederate General statues or slaveholder statues, they’ve taken to toppling a statue of Ulysses Grant, who led the Union to victory over the Confederacy in 1865. I don’t think this has anything to do with slavery anymore.

Perhaps what truly offends them about statues, is time itself. Think about it: Why do we erect statues in the first place? It is so that we remember things throughout the generations; record for posterity. What is the one thing that terrifies liberals?

In their world, there is no time. There is the dark sinful past; there is the present which is no different from the past, since we’re all just so oppressed; there is the glorious revolution that’s always just around the corner. And then there is the bright shining future filled with puppies, unicorns and rainbows. The last of these frightens them more than anything. It would nullify their sense of purpose.

They live out their entire lives, as liberals, on a hairpin turn. The revolution is always tomorrow. If they happen to be doctrinaire liberals for seventy or eighty years, they spend all that time on the bend of the paper clip, constantly waiting for their chains to be unshackled, tomorrow. It must be a terrible existence.

To anyone who sees the whole world the way the Mayfly sees it, toppling a statue must seem natural. It is the ultimate flash-in-the-pan communications medium. A year from now, there won’t be anything there; will anyone remember the statue got toppled? Or that there was a statue there at all? There’s a better than 50/50 chance people will notice things are looking kind of bare in that corner, and start circulating a petition to put up a statue there. It might even be a statue very much like the one that was removed — and they might not even consciously know. Destroying a statue, unlike erecting one, earns zero points for recording for posterity. It’s a today-only thing. It’s not at all like tearing down the Berlin Wall. It simply removes an emblem, which could be restored at any time.

It also earns zero points, as far as communications mediums go, for clarity. Grant-statue destroyers insist they’re still anti-slavery, because Grant owned slaves. Or a slave, or something. We’re supposed to interpret their actions in that light. They think this because they think people observing their actions, are trapped in the same echo chamber they inhabit themselves…which is just a fancy way of noticing they’re not truly communicating. You know, I don’t think so. I think of Grant as a liberator, so I think I’ll look on the destruction of Grant’s statue as a pro-slavery act. It makes more sense to me that way, regardless of whether or not that’s what they intend. They’re doing a crappy job of communicating, why should I help them out by playing my part in the “Oh well, nudge nudge, you know what we mean” game? Uh, no. Grant won the Civil War for the Union Side. In so doing, he ended slavery…you’re destroying his statue…you’re pro-slavery, I think. You mayflies need to learn to communicate better.

I suppose we can quibble back and forth about what you think of slavery, and what I’m supposed to think you think about slavery, but we can draw some reliable inferences about what you think of clarity. You’re against it. You’ve got an agenda that wouldn’t be as popular if it were better understood, and you know this, because if it were not so then you would pick a different medium. The fact that you’re committing property crimes and getting away with it has a lot to do with that real message. I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.

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Duct Tape Them to ChairsFriday, September 11th, 2020

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The Rioting Has to StopThursday, August 27th, 2020

The Chinese Virus BoatSaturday, August 1st, 2020

Rules, Masks, and Rules About MasksThursday, July 30th, 2020

On Common GroundFriday, July 17th, 2020

What I SawSunday, July 12th, 2020

“Fighting Misinformation”Friday, July 10th, 2020

DoubtsSaturday, July 4th, 2020

That Lawyer CoupleTuesday, June 30th, 2020

The Toppling of the StatuesWednesday, June 24th, 2020

Home Stretch
Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

Our Passive-Voice Society
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Veteran’s Day 2020
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Memo For File CCXV
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Happy 245th Birthday Marines
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020

We’ll Be Fine
Sunday, November 8th, 2020

Insurmountable
Saturday, November 7th, 2020

Bobulinski
Wednesday, October 28th, 2020

Election Year Bananas
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

McConnell’s Speech
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

The Captain of the Ship or the Owner of the Ship
Saturday, October 24th, 2020

Old Economy Steve
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

Greatness Is Scary
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

I Couldn’t Possibly Care Less If “We’re All In This Together”
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Progressive Taxation
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

The Polls Have Problems
Friday, October 9th, 2020

My Unpopular Opinion
Saturday, September 26th, 2020

We Wouldn’t Even Be Having the Argument
Friday, September 11th, 2020

Duct Tape Them to Chairs
Friday, September 11th, 2020

Trust Issues
Sunday, August 30th, 2020

Quietly Revising Guidance
Thursday, August 27th, 2020

The Rioting Has to Stop
Thursday, August 27th, 2020

The Chinese Virus Boat
Saturday, August 1st, 2020

Rules, Masks, and Rules About Masks
Thursday, July 30th, 2020

On Common Ground
Friday, July 17th, 2020

What I Saw
Sunday, July 12th, 2020

“Fighting Misinformation”
Friday, July 10th, 2020

Doubts
Saturday, July 4th, 2020

That Lawyer Couple
Tuesday, June 30th, 2020

The Toppling of the Statues
Wednesday, June 24th, 2020