House of Eratosthenes

People frown upon it and they often disallow it, but they don’t understand it. “Arguing about politics” is pondering the effects of decisions made. It is evaluating consequences. It is examining the situation.

It is a mere extension of voting…which, if that were to be suddenly taken away from them, would make people scream and whine about it, including the people who grouse away about arguing about politics. It is reading a room before making a speech. Finding out if the wedding is Jewish before you bring ham. It is figuring out how shallow a lagoon or cove is before you pilot your boat into it. It is looking up from your cell phone and out the windshield when you’re driving a car. Very fast.

We haven’t been doing too much of this.

Indeed, as people look around and notice how ludicrous things have become, with the homelessness and the statues being torn down and the arrows on grocery store floors telling you which way to point your cart, the ruination of Indiana Jones, James Bond, Justice League, Marvel and X-Men superheroes, the shaming of men in gyms in the TikTok videos, protests over this, that, and some other thing, kids in universities learning less and paying way more than they used to pay…all these households with months or years worth of unsecured debt, no emergency funds, so little security, so much instability, the feeling of apprehension all around…

That’s all the result of not “arguing” enough.

Too much sounds-like-a-swell-idea, full-speed-head. Not enough inspection. Too much go. Not enough look/think. That’s what has brought us here.

And you’ll notice no one is happy about it. We have all these “leaders” grabbing power they didn’t used to have, forcing us to do this, making us pay for this, stopping us from doing that. And nobody, even the people who voted for them, has any real confidence in them.

It comes after decades, generations even, of “No discussion of politics allowed at this table / in this bar.”

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Carlin Henry Freeberg: August 13, 1931 — November 24, 2023
Wednesday, November 29th, 2023

Dad pointed out to me one time where he was born, now ninety-two years ago. If the house still existed, it would be at a spot under the entrance ramp to I-5, 48°44’36.5″N 122°28’03.5″W. This past Friday evening, he closed out that existence. The spot where he took his final breath wasn’t quite there, but close, half a mile away as the crow flies. That house, of course, still stands. Grandpa paid cash for it in the later Depression years, and that’s where my brother and I spent our formative years, like our father before us. The U.S. Census records that he was living there by age eight, in 1940.

So. Born down there by the neighborhood park; moved up onto the hill a few years later, where he would eventually kick the bucket. Just two or three thousand feet. A little bit of globetrotting, state-line crossing, family-making in the middle of it. Eight years shy of a full century.

You can achieve greater stability than that, in your life. It’s conceivably possible. But you won’t beat this by much.

This was the fulfillment of my brother’s life-chapter, which he began a handful of years ago. “Going to make sure Dad leaves here feet first, and not have to go to some crummy rest home. It would kill him.” Well, mission accomplished. They are both to be commended.

Dad was the middle of five children, final survivor of the clan. He enjoyed the simple pleasures of life. He loved salmon, for Grandpa Freeberg was an avid fisherman; lamb, on occasion; and “pot roast” — beef chuck, especially the way Mom cooked it on Sundays. For special occasions when I visited the family homestead, like for birthdays, this would occasionally cause disappointment as I tried in vain to embiggen his horizons. “It’s wasted on me,” he explained. Eventually I would figure this out and stop trying, but he did appreciate the better wines now and then. His other passions were cars. He achieved considerable expertise working on cars, and honing his craft as the years went by and the cars became more sophisticated. There are, and have always been, huge stacks of Motor Trend and Car & Driver magazines at the Freeberg homestead.

For the yawning gap between his cultural preferences and mine, I always liked to sum it up thusly: The Great Depression ruined him for good, and Europe ruined him some more. The date of his marriage to Mom was August 15, 1954, two days past his twenty-third birthday. Within just a handful of years about that time he achieved maturity, a teacher’s certificate, became a married man and off they went to Europe. They bounced around there for a handful of years. France, Germany, Italy and some others. He called Mom the string to his balloon, and this was a metaphor that worked well with his impulsive, pie-in-the-sky ideas, and her beneficial grounding effect. Dad and Boys The kids — me and him, not in that order — were her idea. She had to work him over for just short of a decade.

Mom was the afterthought in a family that was hit hard by the Depression. There was a cultural gap there, too. You might say they were more into material success than my Dad was, and his economic class was a disappointment to them. His sense of priorities caused further conflict. But we kids came along so late in the game, that everyone had started to behave with grace and maturity, to bury the conflict and act like adults. And so our immediate family remained financially strapped, and uniquely so, but we didn’t know. Like the “Alabama” song says: We didn’t know the times were lean, ’round our house the grass was green.

Dad’s greatest sacrifice for the good of the family, came when he earned his degree at Arizona State University. It was quite the ordeal. The move from Washington State down to Tempe took place before my earliest memory, around the time I was 2-3 years old. So my earliest memories are of palm trees, flat suburbs, lots of desert. This was when life was simple, and in its own way, desirable. Men were men. Working on your car, in the driveway, stripping it down to the frame and pulling the engine out with a cherry-picker — these were the norm. Birthdays were celebrated on kiddie tables in the back yard. That tiny house didn’t have a swimming pool; today it does. We made liberal use of the neighbor’s pool when it got intolerably hot, which was often. Star Trek had just been cancelled but was in syndication. Dad “hated” the show, but was always in a hurry to get home from work before six, the opening credits for the “stupid” show. Yes those famous, famous opening credits, all the Star Trek fans have seen ’em. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, to boldly go where no man has gone before…

Life events intruded on the degree. We had to move to that boyhood home in Washington State, in 1972, and then Dad went back by himself to finish things. It must have been like a slug crawling on salt. By this time, he was a family man through and through, but he toiled away hundreds of miles from us in his crappy little apartment, in the Phoenix summer heat toiling over the typewriter, in his underwear under a half-ass swamp cooler. But, he stuck it out and earned his Ph.D., thus becoming “Dr. Dad.” How much of a career did he manage to build on this? More than nothing, but less than what he’d hoped, I think.

It was forty years following these events, spring of 2014, I took my son back to where it all happened. I was impressed with how much the house…shrunk. No, we didn’t impose on the family living there, we just looked at it from the outside. I was 47 that spring and the last I’d seen of it, I was just 6. Everything was shorter, the driveway was narrower, and the cement walls separating backyards from alleyways, which seemed to pierce the very sky before, were practically mere decorations.

The walk to my old Kindergarten school was a different story. We retraced it, just for fun. Quite a hike for a five-year-old. And in the 1970’s we were on the dawning of the age of serial killings and kidnappings. It just goes to show what a risk-averse, foam-rubber-cushioned crash-helmet society we’ve become. Back then, kids went wherever. When the street lights come on, get your butt home for supper or it’ll get beat. That’s how we did it.

A helmet was for when you pretended to be a pro football player. Nobody had knee pads. If you jumped off the wrong thing and landed the wrong way, you took your road rash to go in and see your Mom and she’d apply a disinfectant that stung like hell. Then, back outside you went.

Terrace St., Tempe The move from Arizona back to Washington State, that is the first one with the whole family — that was a herculean effort that sapped the energy of all involved, until there was nothing left. Mom found it unforgettable, and in all the wrong ways. She drove the moving truck and Dad followed along in the family sedan. They/we must have bisected the trip making it two days and one night. There are no details that survive the stretch of time, verbal or written. My parents were beat. My brother and I…weren’t quite. It was quite the adventure for us, watching teevee shows in a Motel 6, in what could have been Southern Oregon, but more likely was Yreka or Weed. Listening to the druggies outside, what sounded to our young ears like a witch’s cackle followed by a huge explosion. Mom and Dad slept right through it, their bodies draped on top of the covers, face-up, snoring. So my brother made sure to wake them up and tell them all about it, or try to anyway. Heh. Kids are adorable.

Our consideration or lack thereof made very little difference to Mom. At the end of the move she announced she was done moving, anywhere, and for good. She was going to leave that house feet-first. And that’s exactly what she did. The same house Dad left, the same way, thirty years apart, with her time coming February 27, 1993. Same time of day, or within an hour of it, interestingly enough. Mom on a Saturday, Dad on a Friday.

Anyway, forgive the bouncing-around in the timeline; back to the fall of 1972. Thus ensconced in Dad’s boyhood home for the remainder of childhood, my brother and I picked up new routines fitting our tender age and rotated in new routines as we advanced. Dad had a fetish for farm life which was at odds with our suburban location, but the spread is half an acre and there are “chores” aplenty. He parceled them out to make sure we were busy, which caused some rancor as we approached teenage years and could start to see the priority was questionable. To us, at times, it looked a bit like “Dig a hole, dig another hole, take the dirt from that hole and put it in the first hole, now dig the first hole again and put the dirt in the second hole…” So we learned something that could be called a work ethic. The household income continued to dwindle, and when things didn’t go well for Dad, Mom helped. We kids helped too. We delivered for the local newspaper, yes kids could do that back then. I started a lawncare “business,” with Dad’s “encouragement.” My parents were both genuinely thrilled with my customer list, which secretly worried me. Really? This changes our financial prospects? Like for the whole household? A snot-nosed kid mowing lawns?

These were all team/family efforts, of a sort. Dad and I spent much summertime time together cutting those lawns. It must have been a humbling experience for him: Closing in on fifty, when most men should be prospering, cutting lawns with his son to make ends meet. But Dad went at it, as cheerful as ever, like it was just another chore to be done in our own backyard and he got his batteries recharged doing chores. In fact the only time I saw his disposition change was when I followed him as we cut a double-swath, a lawnmower under the command of each of us, and in a moment’s inattention nearly ran over his foot.

To his credit, he played the extrovert, always. I say “played”; I slowly caught on to the reality that he was an introvert, conquering a fear. He was always a shy man deep down inside. But I remember the dinner parties with our neighbors on the street. The dining room still exists and offers an impressive view of Mt. Baker and all the vast acreage between mountain and house, so you can see why this would be the choice meeting spot for the neighborhood. This is something I’ve tried to emulate in my role as head of household, the informal congregation, meeting-of-minds, re-enacting the birth of civilization. Back then we could talk politics without attacking each other’s character. We vote for Ford, you vote for Carter, but we’re still friends. Funny, huh? And they’d talk over what causes what, the values that lead to decisions and preferences, and it would drag on until one in the morning. Nobody got bored.

But Dad didn’t turn activist until a developer showed up in town to build a shopping mall. This ignited his passions. He was on the Luddite side, the “But this is where I grew up” side. It was a losing battle. From that point onward, purchase-planning was consistently done with a footnote, express or implied: “Not at Bellis Fair.” Soon after the battle was lost and the permits were approved and the cement poured, this was easy. But lately, you go visit Bellingham and you just try it. The mall is right there, in your face, sprawling across acre after acre and it’s where the business is done. Can’t stop progress.

My brother joined the Marine Corps. Mom was furious. It was among the first, if not the first, of his signatures applied to paper that carried legal force as he’d reached majority age. She made sure to point this out to him. She went full Sonny Corleone on his decision, but it was too late, and his decision. It was after he completed boot camp that the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon were struck by two truck bombs, October 23, 1983, with a death toll of over 300. Naturally, my parents’ faith was shaken. But, my brother was a champion drummer, world-class, and wound up in the Commandant’s Own band. Mom’s relief was palpable. “At this point, my son is probably safer than yours,” she would say to the churchgoers expressing their concern and interest. These were turbulent times. She might have been finding a tactful way of saying, I’m more concerned about my other son than that one.

With me a virtual only-child, my brother missing all the local drama, Dad “ruined” Thanksgiving repeatedly. His brother, my Uncle Albin, was a functional schizophrenic. Capable of living independently, but handicapped, on assistance, occupying public housing. Dad showed his Christian good feelings by shuffling off to the other side of town, in Fairhaven, to the subsidized apartments, with me in tow and sometimes doing the driving. It was an ordeal. You approached the locked doors, looked up the apartment occupied by the person you wanted to see, and you “buzzed” them so they’d press a button granting you access. Albin didn’t have a phone. So…we’d stand there like jackasses pounding on the door hoping a kindly denizen would get curious enough to bend the rules. Once in the lobby, we’d express our profound thanks and head up to see Albin.

Albin had a memory for this ritual, much like a house cat’s: None. “Oh, there you are interrupting my nap again” the cat might say. Whaddya want? And Dad would explain, and re-explain, every year, that it was Thanksgiving and we were there to see to it he didn’t spend it alone. Albin’s interest piqued with the description of the food. Oh, well that sounds good. And then back we’d go. After the meal, he’d slump in front of the teevee while we’d clear off the dishes…then he’d slip quietly out the door and walk home.

Dad never gave up on Albin. He might chuckle good-naturedly at some of this quirky behavior. But he never complained. I complained, occasionally, until I was well acquainted with the futility of it. It looked like just a way to torture me. But I came to realize it wasn’t about torturing me, and it wasn’t really even about educating me, although there was some faint hope there. He was being a true, good-hearted, decent Christian. Maybe making up for some other behavior not so desirable. But I came to realize in the ensuing years that whatever the motivation, it was not to gussy up his community image or preen. It was just good old-fashioned kindness, to a recipient who could not do anything to repay. Now, as then, the world could certainly use more of that.

Opportunity came in the direction of my Mom, who managed to fill out her half of a partnership offering word processing and secretarial services in downtown Bellingham. After a little while in that situation she bought out the business and grew it into a charming retail establishment, The Paper Crunch. This soon became an all-consuming family affair, and I could write an entire tome about just that. But, it hasn’t got a lot to do with Dad. As I was getting my adult life started and leaving home, that made my parents empty-nesters and the business was giving Mom a renewed sense of purpose. It was nice to see her thriving and making use of this new income to support our/her family. But it must have been crushing to Dad, having this final verdict delivered that his Psychology degree wasn’t, after all, paying the bills. And I got the impression after awhile that one of the business’ key reasons for existing was to keep me from leaving town.

So, of course, I left town. Seattle beckoned.

After a few years of this new configuration, with both sons going through bumps in the road getting our respective lives started and having our parallel madcap misadventures with women and marriages and divorces; in the fall of 1991 I was living in Everett, working for a software startup down in Sea Tac. I was summoned back to Bellingham by can’t-remember-what, phone call or something. Mom and Dad had established a new routine, felling their empty-nester lives with participation in clubs to stimulate the mind and make new friends, potentially establish business contacts. One of these was Toastmasters. Mom was honing her skills at delivering speeches to audiences, an activity at which she’d always been a little skittish. There was nervousness and there was stuttering. Well, one day the stuttering was worse than usual and she realized she was having difficulty getting the words to her mouth. It felt to her like a physical problem so she had decided to go in and get scanned.

They found something.

The tumor was cancerous. And, as the months went by and she started to outlive the various diagnoses, it emerged that she wasn’t going to outlive all of them. This was entirely inoperable. There was, I recall, a brief flirtation with chemo and some resulting hair loss, but there never was too much optimism about this. A year into it, it was time to send her home for good and make her comfortable. By this time I’d accepted a job offer in Detroit, and I could write another lengthy tome about the conflict that arose around that, and Mom’s stalwart way of dealing with it. Dad just didn’t want me to go. It was a weird thing our parents had happening; Mom was the Dad, and Dad was the Mom. String, balloon.

From Detroit, I was transferred to California, partly as a mercy act because of this family situation and partly in response to my performance which was distracted and ultimately disappointing. I’ve lived here ever since. At this point Mom was months away from death, perhaps just a few weeks, so I did what I could to visit more frequently. Her powers of speech continued to elude her as the tumor grew. The last time I was ever to see her conscious, we all knew it. It was that final Christmas visit. I remember Dad was trying to distract, and trying to keep me from leaving, asking some meaningless question about the television and how it worked. Trying to make me feel needed, trying to keep me from leaving, ever. And then this weird pall fell over the room, like someone had swung a perfume censer. Nobody said anything for a few moments, and then Mom wordlessly motioned for me to come over and say goodbye. We embraced. She couldn’t say anything. She didn’t need to say. Her message was clear. Get out of here, go kick ass. Don’t look back.

Mom at the Grand Canyon, when life was simple

The next time I came up from California, it was mid-February. She was in her coma. I remember my flight arrangements had been screwed up, and it took me around 24 hours to fly the 700 miles or so. I was disgusted with the whole process. For the funeral, I drove. At the graveside service, Dad’s hands visibly trembled as he lowered the container of Mom’s ashes into the ground. We the sons were 29 and 26, and we were both cringing, imagining the carton tumbling out of his enfeebled hands and spewing ashes and bone fragments. It didn’t quite happen. Dad was trying to keep a brave front, a cheerful one, but we all knew his whole life had been up-ended.

Even in times as dark as these, he could be funny. I remember him nudging me as we were sitting at the service. He must have seen I was lost in thought, and maybe could use a chuckle. He whispered, “Mom always called this my funeral suit.” And from the various dusty pockets he started to pick out…the program for Grandpa’s funeral back in ’75, Grandma’s funeral ten years afterward, Aunt Thyra’s funeral, his friend T.J. Pirung’s funeral…etc. Dark humor for dark times. No, Dad was not a “suit” person. He just had the one.

But the rest of the time, after that, he was morose. Without a woman around, the family started to disintegrate. Dad wasn’t up to living on his own. He married Mom’s hospice caretaker, Sharon, which caused some rifts with us, his sons. But, at least the old man wasn’t completely miserable. On the other hand, Sharon was disabled, and some of her problems were mental. So he was taking care of her. Over time though, he lost his cognitive abilities and it began to emerge that her job was to take care of him. It was a bit unclear. Throughout the years, this turned into yet more drama as the reality set in to everyone, the two of them combined could barely clear the bar in the capacity to live independently.

When I married Simone just after Christmas in 2012, we flew Dad and Sharon down and put them up in a hotel downtown. Dad declined the offer at first, then went off by himself to do some thinking and realized the narrative was setting in that I wasn’t part of the family anymore. And so he reconsidered, and they arrived for the wedding. This was rather awkward. We spent much of the time we were supposed to be spending preparing for the ceremony, chasing after things. So-and-so left such-and-such at the whatever. Laptops, gloves, power cords. Dad apologized when it was all over and he arrived back home, conceding “we’re out of practice with traveling.” And, thanks for sending along the laptop that he’d forgotten at the security station boarding his return flight.

In 2014 after we bought the house, they visited again. This time driving down by car. This caused great consternation all-around, since he’d already had some episodes driving on long distance trips. He was 83 by now. He had visited us once before, in our palatial apartments, losing track of time and showing up well after dark. Lots of families have to go through this; you wonder when it’s time to take Grandpa’s keys away, and you don’t want to do it because once that edifice of independence is removed, you know the subsequent decline is going to be devastating, quick and tragic. But he’d already fallen asleep at the wheel one time, and with my kid in the car. That provoked an intense confrontation, and one could tell acute embarrassment on his part. We never permitted that again, which caused him anguish, but he knew the reason why. Old age can be cruel.

But I have to credit Dad with balls. He did visit us. Few other family members have.

Thankfully, the round-trip proceeded without incident. He was going to roll through and continue onward to repeat my visit to the old family homestead in Tempe, but ultimately recognized his limitations and headed home again.

Those who protested that his life was plenty complicated enough without travel, were correct. This childhood home of his has a linear driveway, which can store maybe up to eight cars depending on the models and styles, but only one can exit without disrupting the others. While Dad struggled to recover his auto-mechanic acumen in his advanced age, the other cars languished as projects. According to the letter of the law in Bellingham, that’s illegal. This created a confrontation with the local police department. Someone tattled on him, and he got cited. But then there was someone else, at City Hall, who felt sorry for him. And it seems a compromise was reached where he’d satisfy the letter, albeit not the spirit, of the ordinance by covering the derelicts with ugly tarps.

The hearing aids became — there’s no other word to adequately describe it — a shitstorm. We always thirsted for more information about this, suspecting he wasn’t receiving the best care because his equipment kept falling out of his ears when he chewed his food. That’s not supposed to happen. The equipment prescribed racked up higher and higher price tags, reaching into the thousands. And then they’d fall out of his head, and he’d find them later in the gravel of the driveway.

My brother, at some point, had enough. He was between business engagements and between marriages, and made the decree that “The Marines Have Landed” and proceeded to move in and put everything in order. Dad found some weird ways to protest this. The Platoon Of One would clean up the basement stairs so it wouldn’t be so easy to trip on them. Then he would, in exasperation, e-mail me some pictures of the steps “fucked up again” when the Old Man dumped some more debris on them, very much like a dog piddling on a tree to mark his territory. Dad tripped, in the middle of the night, probably on a stack of magazines, and broke his hip. We were about to visit and take everyone to the new Star Wars movie. Dad’s enthusiasm for that part of the agenda was always lukewarm at best. But he chuckled when I told him “If you really didn’t want to go see it, all you had to do was say so.”

Equipped with a cane for his daily wanderings about the family property, he misjudged a landing, slipped, and rolled down a hill breaking some ribs. This was a year or two after the broken-hip debacle. He received a stern talking-to and resolved to mend his ways, which apparently he did.

This is how it was for the last, approximately, twenty years or so of his life. I shouldn’t assemble a complete chronology, even at a high summary level, because although it’s loaded with some good suspense and some things that make the reader go “OMG WTF”…you could describe most nonagenarians, and their experiences living independently, much the same way. Always the family is wondering what to do. The family is eyebrows-deep in passionate arguments about “Do something” and “No don’t do that”…with solid points to be made on both sides.

I’m going through the litany, here, to illustrate the challenge of proper remembrance. It’s tempting to think of Dad as this headache, and it’s especially tempting for the people who bore the brunt. But that’s wrong. He lived seven decades before all that happened. This is the man who sweated away in his underwear, in sparse, lonely Phoenix, probably in the most miserable summer of his entire life, and for us. I choose to remember that.

Dad had a lifelong fascination with the British sedan, the Rover, but unfortunately he waited until the winter of his life to figure out what was the deal with those rubber motor mounts. The Rover is powered by a longitudinally mounted inline-four liquid cooled engine, usually 2000cc displacement.

This part is sad: He put it on his bucket list to figure out why the inline-four needed the flexible motor mounts, and then when running proceeded to buckle and jostle back and forth, whereas a V-8 or flat-opposed six just sat there even if you red-lined it. And his youngest son had the answer. So, let the prying begin.

Patience, patience, patience.

I quickly learned this was a matter of what you might call “linkage.” Like many an old person, Dad would come up against a concept that eluded him, try to conquer it, and failing that become lost. This is, I think, why there’s such a durable connection between hearing loss and dementia, it’s an issue of isolation. I found I could restore the linkage by retreating back a few steps, into complex technical details he had already managed to conquer back in his youth.

Two cylinders are up when the other two are down. Why is this not balanced? Why the shaky-shaky? That’s the question.

They’re not secondarily-balanced because the piston doesn’t approach top dead center at the same speed as bottom dead center.

What? Why?

The inline four is primary-balanced because two are up when two are down. Remember how the crankshaft looks. Piston one, toward the front, is up when piston four is up; two and three are down. This drives a four-stroke pattern, there are 720 degrees in four strokes, 720 divided by four is 180 so that’s why the crankshaft looks that way. The firing order is one, three, four, two.

Yes! And with that, his eyes had a new light behind them, and he’d come alive. He’d re-engage.

Okay. We’ve restored. Deep breath…

Now, imagine the crankshaft turning another 90 degrees. One and four have retreated from the top, two and three have progressed from the bottom. All four pistons are at exactly the same height, but that falls short of the true halfway point. They’re slightly below that.

Uh…

Means the pistons are moving faster, up and down, when they’re in the upper half of a cycle than they are in the lower half of the cycle. All four.

Huh?

And we’d go around and around about this. He had the brain cells to understand the concepts. But he didn’t have the cells that were needed to grasp the new ideas and put it all together. One cocktail napkin sketch after another emerged from under my pen. I tried the Pythagorean Theorem, which Dad understood well. Putting it all together should have been a snap. But somehow he couldn’t quite manage.

We often caught him selectively failing to understand things he didn’t want to understand. This was not one of those things. He had racked up perhaps hundreds of hours working on Rovers, watching the inline-four rock back and forth in those rubber motor mounts like a galloping pony. He really wanted to know. He was able to almost grasp it, to comprehend that pistons were counterbalancing other pistons that were moving at slightly different speeds. But he could progress no further from that point, and he forgot that much within minutes.

For his 90th birthday, August of 2021, we journeyed on what today I consider to be the “Can’t Go Home Again” trip. We stayed in a hotel down in Fairhaven for five or six days, and without going into details, I’ll just summarize that it wasn’t a good idea. It started out fine. I got Dad a Ka-Bar. I went to our local sportsman’s warehouse, found the one that would allow for engraving, and managed to get hold of the grumpiest guy in the store to unlock it for me. But the clerk came alive when I told him it was for Dad’s 90th.

Ninety Years Young Shopping for this stuff is fun. People love this stuff. We don’t all live to ninety, and not everybody wants to do so, but if someone manages to get it done it’s a real blessing. All these old duffers have a story to tell about drinking exactly so-much of this kind of beverage every night for the last zillion years; with Dad it was Burgundy. One glass of the cheap stuff in the gallon jug, and a swimming ritual at the local YMCA, that carried him to ninety years and — cognitive issues aside — looking in fine shape to crack a hundred.

For an engraver open on a Saturday, we had to drive to Stockton. “Not A Kid Anymore,” I put on one side.

When it came time for Dad to open it, it took him four minutes. You always save the wrapping paper for next year, you know. We have the whole thing on video. He got the humor, and resolved to display the knife on its platform over the fireplace. But he was also impressed with its destructive potential. “Nobody better mess with me,” he said.

Things weren’t going terribly well with the rest of the visit, though. There was conflict. I shouldn’t go into details because there’s always a possibility for reconciliation, but I could see our family was lacking in the harmony that prevailed when Mom was alive. Although Dad wanted me there, a little of me went a long way with everybody else. Or, vice-versa. Bellingham required a much longer break from me, and the feeling was mutual. Dad’s sense of time was, mercifully, shot. At this point he didn’t know what month it was, and when he took naps and woke up in the evening, it was impossible to convince him it wasn’t morning. He also didn’t know how to conduct himself around people; didn’t know how to make the most of a rare visit. He tended to treat people like furniture, as my brother put it. He liked having the people there. But didn’t interact with them very much or at all.

It all pointed to one conclusion: This was a replay of that bittersweet Christmas, the last time I saw Mom alive. Except Mom at the time knew it. Dad had no idea. But I knew I would never see him again.

Exactly six months following that awful trip, I realized there was going to be an obituary, a remembrance, a funeral, or some occasion on which I would require a list. And so I picked up my notebook and enumerated the most important things, out of all the years, my Dad taught me.

Now the time has come to transcribe and put it where others can see it.

Enthusiasm Counts

Children require cheerleaders. This often seems not to be the case. We all know those artistic types who prefer to spend their time alone, honing their craft to fill the hours lacking any human interaction. I’m certainly in that crowd.

“Daddy look what I did.” It starts with that. I’m not saying success is impossible without that. But to have that audience is definitely an advantage, and to go without it is a disadvantage. Dad may understand what the child is doing. Or, he may be faking it. It doesn’t really matter. Later on, much later, the child will provide his own impetus and won’t need outside encouragement quite so keenly. In the tender years, it makes a difference, and no sorry but for a male child, the Mom can’t provide it as well. This is Dad Territory. Why we have ’em. And mine was far above the average at it.

My Dad, when I was just barely figuring out the essentials of things that might possibly interest me later, was my cheerleader. It wasn’t until many more years passed by, that I realized he made a difference.

Eat Slow, Eat Lots

An old Scandinavian custom. There’s something to this. The dinner, like the libation, should be a sort of celebration that the hustle and bustle of the day is in the past. Hopefully, what went unachieved doesn’t really matter, or can wait until tomorrow. The meal should therefore not be rushed. That’s healthy. Of course, when we were growing up television was a big part of the evening, probably much bigger than it should have been. “No television from the dinner table” conflicted with this. But that’s a good argument against television, not against a proper, leisurely-paced meal.

I mentioned that Dad had a routine built around the evening Burgundy. He also had one built around the morning oranges. One fruit, cut up into fourths, then he’d suck out the juices, pulp and all, out of each one. Every. Single. Morning.

You can’t argue with success. The man’s mind deteriorated, but his body lived out nicely throughout the nine decades plus, his alimentary canal intact and avoiding colds & flu more effectively than many of his contemporaries.

Arguing

Dad taught me to argue. He made the mistake of doing this when I was about 10 or 11, and it didn’t take too much of that before he and Mom tried to put things back into the realm of “Because I said so.” But, that’s like transplanting a tree from the backyard back into a small pot. I’m sure the world would work better if more people were taught how to do this, and I think Dad might disagree with that. Or, having it to do over again, would’ve done it when I was 15 to 17. Probably, the place where we’d find common ground is: Dependents shouldn’t argue. Beggars can’t be choosers. Argue to your heart’s content about how & why you should get the things you want, after you secure a source of income and pay for your own stuff. Not before then.

But on the other extreme: There’s this idea out there that if nobody is arguing, nobody is disagreeing. That’s not how it works at all. Social media has made that clear. Spend a few hours on it, and you’ll come away with the same impression others have had countless times: I’m being called an idiot, not quite so much because I am one or because I act like one, but because the other fellow can’t, or won’t, attack my position logically or defend his own. And that sucks.

More people should argue. I mean, properly. More people should learn how.

I see way too many people trying to intimidate others, by asserting such-and-such a thing is “a basic, human right.” Super duper emphatically. Well, sayin’ so don’t make it so. Food, housing, college education, a “living wage.”

Dad had something to say about that. Yes, there are rights. Of course there is such a thing. But what is it? There are those who say, if nobody has to pay for it, then maybe that’s a right but otherwise it isn’t. And then there are those who respond to this with: What about jury trials? They do have a point. Our Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial, which compels others to drop what they’re doing and pay attention. And so the government compensates those people. But it also conscripts them. You can plead hardship to kick yourself off the jury. The judge might buy it. He might not. In that situation you don’t have a right to attend to your own business. It gives way to the defendant’s right to a speedy trial. That’s guaranteed. Your own freedom from the ugly business is not. You might very well have to “pay” for this other person’s “right,” and under our system of justice that’s just fine.

Dad had a slightly more sophisticated way of reconciling all this, although it doesn’t address all of the inconsistencies. But it’s as good a litmus test as any.

A right, he said, is something that applies to things you would unquestionably have and be able to keep, if nobody else was around.

Life? Yes. You would have that, in solitude, so that is yours.

Liberty? Absolutely yes.

Happiness? If, under such circumstances you can find it, then you’ve a right to it. So right to the pursuit of. Not quite so much to the happiness itself.

Living wage? College education? Three hots and a cot? Health care?

If those things are provided, or guaranteed, to this person over here…then, that person over there is enslaved. What one person receives without having to earn it, another person has to work for without getting it.

This all seems so elementary. But it’s amazing how many people can’t seem to grasp it.

Did You Learn Anything?

Oh my goodness. This is dark. It made me want to wrap my fingers around his throat and squeeze until…

Because I was a teenager. Teenagers don’t want to admit to their mistakes. And they certainly don’t want to be reminded of them right after they made them. It’s not tactful to ask Wiley Coyote “What did you do wrong?” right after the boulder lands on top of him, right?

After I became a grown-up, my mistakes began to have deeper meaning and more long-lasting consequences. Then I gradually started to understand: Not a one among us is sufficiently fortunate or skilled to get it right all the time. The important thing is, Can you learn?

Since then, more than one person has called me arrogant. I can understand the feeling. They try to get me to admit I was wrong here, there, that other place over there…and I don’t. Seems arrogant. Well, here’s the thing: My everyday life is rather boring and repetitive. I do have my intellect. It doesn’t matter if it’s impressive intellect or not, it’s just there. I have some. I’d have to be quite the daffy idiot to do the same things over and over again as long as I have, and continuing to make mistakes, right?

Talk to me about it when I’m trying something new. Better than even odds, you’ll find the humility that was missing.

And that’s a good thing. Because someone taught me to self-assess, to admit as early as possible that I’d done it wrong, so I can get it right the next go-round. Not meaning to brag, but this is something rather close to a superpower. It makes me rather sorry for people who never get anything wrong.

Life is Like a Roll of Toilet Paper

This is like the opposite. Pure funny. I’m positive he stole it from somewhere, but it nails the truth shut so thoroughly that I have to give Dad +1 for it.

Life is like a roll of toilet paper. When you’ve just barely started on it, it doesn’t seem to be losing anything as you go along. But the closer you get to the end, the faster that sucker spins.

He was closing in on seventy when he said it. Now it’s years later and I’m closing in on sixty.

He bulls-eyed this. Or somebody did.

Good Friends vs. Many Friends

There are variations on this. A lot of people say: Be yourself, don’t change to try to attract more friends.

Dad’s way of putting it was that having good friends is much better than having many friends. When he told me that, I was in school and very far away from being one of the popular kids. It was easy advice to follow. A little while later I had some hard lessons about assessing people’s character, and it cost me. Looking back on it, I could have avoided such unpleasantness if I kept this in mind.

That’s on me. Can’t blame him.

You see? I told you I’m capable of admitting mistakes.

The Purpose of Life Is Not to Be Happy

This sounds cruel. It isn’t. It’s just plain true, and it continues to amaze me how many people don’t get this.

Can you imagine if we successfully purged our existence of everything that caused unhappiness? Disease, famine, war…and then what? Explore the stars? There are a lot of people who lust after this pipe dream of no-war no-starvation no-sickness, but don’t want to take on any heavy lifting with inventing or exploring. Just dangle like a grape, sucking up sunshine and nourishment.

People need to put more thought into this. There’s such a thing as purpose in life, which means there’s such a thing as altogether missing it. No problems and no obligations, would not be a dream. It would be a nightmare.

Identity would go first. And then after that, our sense of community. No one would need anybody, so no one would be needed by anybody.

So don’t despair that we’re not reaching this happiness-plateau, aren’t heading toward it, or that you won’t live to see it. That’s cause for celebration. You put some thought into it, you quickly realize you don’t want that.

When Anything Goes, Ultimately Everything Does

I’m sure he stole this one too, but I’ve tried to Google it and have yet to find success.

But it really doesn’t matter. This is just common sense. We have to have laws, taboos, standards. If we get rid of all of them across the board, and for everybody, then nobody flunks anything. Which sounds great. But that would cut both ways.

You wouldn’t be able to complain about anybody else failing to deliver or to perform. So…they wouldn’t have to deliver or perform. We’d all be left with nothing, save for the donations people make because it tickles their fancy. So there’d be some occasional dancing, singing, and playing musical instruments. But the sewage pipes wouldn’t be cleaned, the cars wouldn’t run, and there’d be no torts or laws.

Again, it continues to surprise me how much energy people put into toiling away for a perfect new world they think would be a dream come true, when it would really be a nightmare.

Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

This is the question Cain asked God, when the latter queried him about the whereabouts of his brother Abel. You’ll recall Cain had murdered Abel in a fit of pique when God accepted the victim’s sacrifice of meat cuts, and refused Cain’s offering of pottage. The blood of Abel cried out to God from the ground, and when God asked Cain where his brother was Cain asked if he was his brother’s keeper.

Cain was marked by God, and doomed to wander, for having committed this first murder. A lot of people think that’s the point of the story.

My Dad always read a great deal of meaning into this question, though. You’ll notice, he said, it was never answered one way or the other.

You see how this all ties together. The late night parties where we broke bread and drank Frangelico with the other families on the block, for no reason, just because we were all capable of making the time; the purpose of life is not to be happy, we have to help each other; and we may not have to account minute to minute where the other person is, but yes we are our brother’s keeper. It all points to the same direction. We may work in silos and we may spend time in silos. But we’re not supposed to live womb-to-tomb that way. We exist alongside each other. We’re supposed to support each other. We’re all brothers.

Delayed Gratification

Of all the things my parents taught me, this is probably the most important out of all of them. Because the other things I might have ultimately figured out for myself — but not this.

A lot of times in life, you have no choice but to take the long view. There are a lot of smart people who go their whole lives never understanding this. Don’t go assuming every little effort you make is a sprint. There are marathons.

Losing the battle to win the war — if you play it right — can be extremely effective. It is a strategic talent. You’re very far ahead in life if you can achieve command of this.

Also, learning the value of delayed gratification can make you much less of a pain in the ass to others.

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I Don’t Want to Save This Planet Anymore
Tuesday, November 28th, 2023

For thousands of years, humankind fixated on some near-future date, at which point the deity of your choice was supposed to have scheduled the end of everything. Such dates kept passing and the end times kept not-happening.

And then…I think, for I wasn’t there…this all changed. I think it was The War To End All Wars. So, beginning of last century, we were to misbehave in some way and deprive the earth of its natural capacity to sustain us. This was a change in bearing; before, it was the gods who predestined our closure, and afterward it was to be our own bad behavior bringing about an entirely preventable event. It was the Age of Urgent Warnings, which still has yet to close. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb came out a good fifty years after this, so he didn’t start the fetish although he made a good deal of fame and fortune from it. Oppenheimer’s device made the dire prognostication much more convincing. The brink! The brink! We have to retreat from the brink!

When the communists switched from hot wars to propaganda as their tools of trade, Americans, who thought they’d defeated the scourge for good, were swamped with TogetherWeCanDoThis agitprop. Being a proud people with good hearts, they generally took this as benign advice on how to be good stewards of the earth. There arose a common theme: If you change your household management and consumer behavior, it may seem like a negligible effect, but imagine the cumulative result of all of us doing it. We can save the planet! So recycle!

And…get you some new light bulbs with mercury powder on the inside, that create a hazardous spill site if they ever shatter. Multi-use heavy plastic grocery bags. Paper straws. Electric cars. If you want to keep your gas-powered car, all sorts of new gizmos and doodads under the hood for “environmental regulations” that wear out & kick on your check-engine light…just when you thought you were about to have all your bills paid.

TogetherWeCanDoThis!! Toad tunnels under the freeway so the frogs don’t get run over by the cars when they cross. Little tiny trampolines under the trees so the squirrels don’t hurt themselves when they fall. It’s the only planet we have!

Surcharges built into everything. Sweet, sweet surcharges. Upon your power bill, your gas bill, your water bill, your sewage bill, your cable television bill…America has become the perfect mixing pot for communism and capitalism. We promote the communism, being very careful to never use the actual word, and then we use it to rake in the moolah making just a few people fabulously wealthy, at the expense of everyone else. Interesting. It’s exactly the opposite result from what communism is supposed to achieve. With capitalism as the tool. But it isn’t really capitalism if we didn’t order it; we’re just repeatedly falling for it.

I don’t want to save this planet anymore.

I’ve already done my bit. I’ve monitored the situation. Behind every battle-cry of TogetherWeCanDoThis, someone’s after my wallet. And it’s not escaped my notice, that while they’re in the process of draining the fruits of my labors and my savings…they’re not being any kinder to the planet than I am.

I’m afraid to tabulate the total that I’ve spent, voluntarily and otherwise, to save the planet. I wouldn’t even know how to start. But I’m done. Shouldn’t we be thinking about other planets, if we’re so forward-thinking? If this one requires any more saving, seems to me that’s like the sopping-wet fire log that requires just a bit more lighting. But did it ever need any saving in the first place? We’re still here. It isn’t because we’re using heavier grocery bags. Those are disposable now, so with that effort alone, we’re clogging up the landfills five times faster than we did before. There’s no defending that boondoggle, and yet, no one’s stepping up to apologize or to chart a 180 degree change in course.

I don’t want to save this planet. I want to save my billfold.

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The Tagline
Sunday, November 19th, 2023

I’m seeing this pattern…

There is a tagline for committed “conspiracy theorists” and “nutcases.” In the case of January 6, it would be something along the lines of “We have a ‘Deep State‘ and they arranged this spectacle.” For the 2020 election, it was “democrat activists coordinated within & across state lines to fraudulently bump up Joe Biden’s vote count in the key battleground states.” For COVID, it’s “The virus is a bioweapon that was grown in a Chinese lab.” And in general for all things related to Donald Trump, it’s “Hollywood is opposed to him because they’re full of perverts, pedophiles and pederasts who belong in jail and they don’t want him putting them there.”

For a year or two, everybody is watching, and everybody’s watching everybody else watching. Passing judgment on who’s a nutcase and who isn’t. And you gutterball yourself if you say anything approaching even a watered-down version of the tagline…

“Fact checkers” emerge to “debunk” the tagline. Once and for all! But also, repeatedly, like a lab rat hooked on amphetamine.

And then after a little bit of time, when 90% or so have stopped watching…the tagline that clearly called out the most obvious nutcases…migrates. It becomes not quite so nutty. Then it becomes more probable. Then it becomes a likelihood. And then, one by one, all the alternative explanations are logically ruled out and this one is the only one left standing.

I just keep seeing this over and over again. We have to wait for solid evidence to trickle in at a glacial pace, and that includes evidence supporting the “anointed” opinion as well as the opposing, kook-burger opinion. But the narrative anointing that anointed version, has all the wind in its sails it’s ever going to have, from the get-go. Hmmm. Gee. Nothing suspicious about that.

Throughout it all, beginning to end, the rebuttal against anything resembling the nutcase-tagline is something approximating “But if you go around saying that, people will think you’re a nut.” People do it right to your face — name-call you, as a rebuttal, when they have none other. We know the 2020 election was accurate honest and true, because if you believe otherwise you’re a nut.

Eventually we get down to the end-game situation, where if you don’t ignore the issue like the 90%, you’re left choosing between where the logic and the evidence clearly point, versus social acceptance.

This is not good. At that point, everyone’s a nut.

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Check That Manifest
Saturday, November 4th, 2023

Arguments are like freight, with the people hearing them & passing them on to the next, like weigh stations.

Some unpack the freight and cross-check the manifest. They make a stink if something’s missing, or if something is riding along that shouldn’t be there. They go through it line by line with a marker. Double and triple-check the scales. Evaluate. Subtract. Compare. Confront.

That’s what you’re supposed to do. Confront. It isn’t necessary to be rude, but this is why we associate “argument” with “arguing.” There’s supposed to be some of that happening. A little bit of a back-and-forth, with some I-don’t-think-so mixed in there. A little friction is okay. Shows people are using their noodles, applying the concepts, seeing where things go. Unpacking the freight.

Others just let the whole truck, or boxcar, pass on through, padlocks left dangling, seals intact…

Now, some of these arguments are weak. They will survive someone passing them on through, without inspecting, but they will not survive a breakage of the seals followed by a proper inspection. If an argument is weak, and someone opens it to inspection, analysis and critique, it will be stopped.

What we have lately is a state of affairs in which the weigh stations, in large number, are closed. Far too many miles coming & going without anybody stopping and properly inspecting. Nobody’s being pressed to set the brake, dismount, open the bay, or account for the cargo or the manifest. The boxcars just roll on through from one weigh station to another weigh station. Getting replicated, and then picking up speed.

It’s a consequence of our silos. People live in their silos, consuming “news” from their silos, listening to speeches formulated for their silos. The biases of the speechwriters and of the consumers all lean in the same direction, so there’s no incentive to unpack. And so people don’t. The trucks and boxcars just keep rolling, padlocks dangling and seals intact, and the quality of the arguments continues to degrade.

Fallacious thinking abounds. Oh, we have our apple-polishing college kids with their lists of fallacies. They use those to yell “Strawman!” anytime they hear something they don’t like, and that’s pretty much all they do with it. That’s very far from running any sort of quality check, accepting strong arguments or rejecting weaker ones. The weak arguments are all over the place, because people are only pretending to know what they look like, but they’re not actually checking. Haven’t opened a padlock in months or years. Just letting things roll through from station to station…only stopping things on occasion, not based on quality issues, but rather when they’ve figured out they don’t like where it goes.

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What’s “Extreme Right Wing”?
Wednesday, November 1st, 2023

Throughout the high drama involved in the elevation of a Speaker of the House of Representatives this month, and in the aftermath, I’ve been hearing about “extreme right wing” people and their positions. I’m unsure of what these positions are supposed to be.

I see “extreme left wing” ideas, but very seldom do I hear them called that. I have to make up my own mind that’s what they are.

When I look further into this, I see so many “extreme right wing” positions are left wing distortions. It makes me wonder if they all are. I’m wondering what’s the most extreme right wing position, that’s genuine.

No, “right wingers” are not opposed to climate change remediation because of a desire that the Earth should burn out and shrivel into a dried lifeless husk. Right wingers live on this planet too.

No, they don’t think inequality of net worth or income are good things, or are even better things when the inequality is exacerbated. That’s not the right wing view.

No, they don’t want black people back in chains.

They don’t want all the women barefoot, in the kitchen, pregnant.

There’s no serious movement to take away the woman’s right to vote.

If your electric car can operate in the heat and the cold, towing cargo like a gas powered truck, up hills, for a suitable range, economically, then what the Hell. Right wingers would generally say go ahead and buy the thing. Just wait until it can actually do this.

I could be wrong. But I don’t believe in “extreme right wing” positions. I hear about them. But I don’t see them specified in a way that holds up, when you take the trouble to ask people what they actually believe.

We don’t need a moderate position between “drink poison” and “don’t drink poison.”

It looks to me like people just don’t have the balls to admit one side makes more sense than the other. They have to play games. “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.”

But the jokers aren’t on the right.

It’s the left that’s made itself into both clowns and jokers. These are the people who want you punished if you say “all lives matter.” The right is just saying no.

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Priorities, Not Luck
Saturday, October 14th, 2023

I emerged from the womb thinking, if something bad happens to me, it’s got to be luck.

Well I suppose it’s a bit more complicated than that. Let’s say, as I approached adulthood, I had a budding sense that it might be something else. That stupid decisions do exist. But by the time I was living on my own, that idea was still in natal development. Like a lot of people, I came into the world of adults thinking if things weren’t going the way I wanted, it was just how things went. I’d had this idea reinforced by others. “The important thing is to get up off your ass and try again.” There is truth in this. But it comes across like life is a slot machine, and each effort is just another pull on the lever. Maybe we should be clearer in our meaning when we tell young people things like this.

One day, I was able to look back and point to something…a decision I made…a blunder. And I realized, with all the good luck in the world, given what I did there was zero chance that could have come out alright. Zero. And once I realized that, it was like the sky lighting up with all sorts of regrettable decisions I had made, like stars in the sky. That was humbling. Not the realizing the one. It was the realizing of many that was a humbling experience. I had come to realize I needed to work on making good decisions.

I could point to some good ones I’d made, and fruit that had come from those.

But, it turned out…*those* were the product of luck. The good stuff. The misfortune was a natural consequence of simply not knowing what I was doing.

Some of this came before “the woman done dun me wrong.” Some of it came after. With the passage of a little more time, I came to realize relationships are special. They’re not “decisions”; not really. The other person gets to decide too. And I had a humbling moment when I realized I was a magnet for broken people. I was a young dumb person making lots of money, and I was attracting scam artists like a porch light drawing insects. I did some filtering. Thought I was diligent about it. But all that did was filter the scam artists, down to scam artists who didn’t realize they were scam artists.

People thought I was a diligent worker. They said so. I came to realize, they thought I was diligent because I did work. They were measuring me against a control group that didn’t do work. The measurement was flawed because the yardstick was flawed, and I came to realize diligent work had a lot to do with “luck,” and I wasn’t doing it as diligently as I thought I had.

Then, I began to work the hundred hour weeks.

That’s what software weenies do, right?

That’s when I learned about time management. I had another humbling experience when I worked several all-nighters in a row, and at the end of it thought…okay, it works…given that it works, how long would I expect a competent engineer to labor away at this, producing these results? And the answer was not 90 hours. It was more like 2, maybe 3 at the very, very high end.

Oh and by the way, here’s a bug. Bugs are to be expected with a first draft. But not like this one. I simply hadn’t done a very good job because my time management didn’t work. Like many 25-year-olds, I thought myself immortal and I ended up making an ass of myself.

Throughout all this, I gradually became aware of my conduct around others. I was occasionally professional. Sometimes, I wasn’t. My maturity progressed; the memories remained, and stayed the same, and so my embarrassment became acute. Interaction with people around you is a huge factor, so it’s not just a matter of dressing properly. Good manners, being on time.

People do things for you, and you can reward competence. You can tolerate incompetence and stupidity. That’s the big challenge; how not to tolerate incompetence, but keep your professionalism.

Empathy. Kindness. These matter, although they’re not the sole criteria for enjoying success in life. Jesus Christ had these, right? How’d that work out for Him.

I’d like to think that by the time I tumbled into middle age, I had a lock on this stuff. Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll accept the judgment of those who were around me. I’m sure there were gaps. But I still had much to learn about how to enjoy success in life, what more there is to things besides luck. There is attention to detail. Humans being imperfect, a lot of that relies on empathy. You’d be surprised how many people think they explained something, with zero ambiguity involved in it, when they’ve actually left quite a lot. You can’t turn all of these into instruction-opportunities for the other, all of the time. People do this stuff when they’re in a hurry. They don’t like to realize “Let’s eat, Paul” has a different meaning when the comma’s missing and they left it missing. Things like this aggravate them.

You might say, if you’re in the engineering profession, it’s your job to sweat out these details and part of the reason you’re there to do that, is so the other person doesn’t have to do it. So empathize. Figure out what they mean. And your ass is not covered if you guess wrong, so do a good job of it. That’s just how it works.

Remember things for later. Take good notes! If they’re ass-covering notes, then they have to be real notes. Write them down somewhere, the mental-notes aren’t good enough for ass-covering.

Learn as you go. After awhile, you can foresee how things are going to happen. It doesn’t take much to do this. Once you progress on this axis a little while, you’ll start to see. There isn’t much mystery about it. It’s kind of obvious.

And then there’s priority. How come your friends have accumulated [blank] in life, and they’re your age or younger, and you haven’t got it?

Priority. That’s the last one. The big one. You can do everything else right, and if your priorities are screwed up, then so are you.

In fact, when you think about it, priority is more than just the heaviest factor; it’s the bottom-line. This is ALL priority.

“Luck” hasn’t got anything to do with it at all. If you believe in God, as I do, I suppose you could chalk it up to His plan. Some people might call that “luck.” I don’t.

Anyway…that’s how I square the circles in what we call life. There’s just a long, long list of things you have to learn. There are people who think we need to drill little kids in all of it, before they cross the Rubicon and enter adulthood. If they’re right, I was woefully unprepared. Maybe they’re right. I’m not so sure though. Looking back on it, and looking at what a child-becoming-man-or-woman really does know about things, I have trouble seeing it.

And then there are our friends, the liberals.

They think it’s all luck.

Oh, I’m sure they’d argue about that. But when one of the members of their cherished designated-victim-groups has a sad story to tell, it’s their misfortune, or “society.” They won’t allow me to look into anything else, because they’ll argue about that too. So from where I sit, in their worldview, it seems to me like it’s all luck. It seems to me that that’s what they think; they’re not ready to allow for anything else. Like, the day they start to consider anything outside of that, they’re going to get kicked out of the good-liberal club.

I’m much closer now to the end of my time on this planet, than the beginning. And I’ve spent all that time learning how wrong this is. They’d have me engage in just a bit more deep-thinking, and come around to their way of looking at it, realizing belatedly that they were right all along?

If you can’t understand the impossibility of such a thing, then there’s really no way for me to explain it to you.

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Performance Floors
Saturday, September 30th, 2023

I’m thinking about them pretty much all the time now. I got started on it in the aftermath of Nancy Pelosi’s weird interview with Anderson Cooper:

He asks her (8:36) if Kamala Harris is really the best running mate for President Biden. Her first answer is full of schmegegge. People don’t give Kamala enough credit; Pelosi’s opinion about that, and about a zillion other things, is relevant but with regard to the actual question she has been asked her opinion is so insignificant that it has to remain unmentioned. So he has to ask (9:22) again…

Imagine if Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi were Republicans. Just think about that. Think about, oh, just anything Chris Christie has had to say at any hour of the day or night, for the last three months. Politically, former Gov. Christie exists right now because of the supposed shortcomings of Donald “Duck” Trump. Pressed on this, I’m sure the average Christie supporter — if you can find one — would point to Trump’s “baggage” and insist that those who put some importance on it, and see the only path to success for Republicans in the dismissal of Trump, deserve representation. And he’d be right.

That’s rather silly as the sole reason for a challenger to exist. But it’s an adequate reason.

More to my point, it is a purely Republican reason. The democrats don’t do that. Pelosi is a married woman, is commenting on another woman whose political career started because she was Willie Brown’s girlfriend. Married women, by and large, don’t like that sort of thing. So if you’re under the impression there’s something negative here that’s being stripped out of the purified, filtered syllables that make it past the former Speaker’s judicious tongue, you can take it to the bank you’re not imagining it.

It’s not like democrats are too smart to attack their own. They are; smarter than Republicans, at least this way. But there’s something else.

There’s no performance floor. None.

With anything.

And I mean anywhere. A noun is a person, place or thing? Out of all persons, places or things, if you listen to all the complaining going on about any & all person places or things, Donald Trump is the only one out of any of them falling short of what he should be, to be where he is. Nothing else is falling short of any standard, because there’s no standards anywhere for anything to fall short. Except perhaps for the direction of the country right now; people aren’t happy with that.

Well. You know what? I see a connection.

I don’t see performance floors anywhere, except when it’s time for Republicans to beat up on other Republicans for failing to live up to one. They don’t apply anywhere else. I mean, by that a real “floor”: Performance descends, and descends some more, until it reaches a threshold that changes the situation and sinks beneath that. There’s an event. Something changes, or at least, someone somewhere with an opinion that matters, realizes something has to change. Then some things happen. I miss this. The entire scenario seems to have gone extinct…except when it comes to bitching about Trump.

Or…some of the things that have soured for us, since Trump “lost” the last election.

But that last one doesn’t seem to put any events in motion. Just bitch about the price of eggs, then go back to whatever. There’s no necessity to do anything about any of it, except for the complaining about Trump.

Without performance floors, no standard actually applies. Without standards, there’s no definition, and without definition, everything else comes undone. We’re wondering why so many people think the country is on the wrong track. Well, hmmmm.

It would be absurd to think it isn’t. The dollar is losing value so rapidly, that as Congressman Matt Gaetz cheekily pointed out, you have to use gold bars to do your bribing of democrat politicians. Heh heh. This month a lot of people started complaining because they’d come to realize men think a lot about ancient Rome. What’s wrong with men? After a whole summer of fantasizing about doll-universes in which men are to be properly stripped of any influence, people are ready to find yet more problems with the male sex. The question should be: Why is it so hard for someone knowledgeable of history, to think of anything besides Rome? The inflation is killing us. Just like Rome.

If my complaint were that there isn’t enough complaining, the complaint would be short-lived. There is complaining everywhere you look now. I’m looking for something more than that. Is the complaining about actual performance? Is it relevant? Did we really need someone to show up and bring their A-game, and instead, they just kind of dialed it in & called it good? Did the performance slip beneath some watermark that demarcates a change in the situation when the performance falls short?

Is this tolerated by someone whose opinion matters…like, whatever unmentioned shortcomings apply to the Vice President, as so blandly critiqued by the Former House Speaker, above? Is the deficiency in performance even detected? Is there a process for improving the performance? If the process fails, is there a process for dislodging the component or person falling short? Can the replacement complete with a minimum of disruption and drama? Without damaging agendas of revenge by the replaced person, or his/her sympathizers? Is there a plan to bring the replacement up to speed?

If yes to all of the above, then maybe you have a system that accommodates changes in demand and environment, across time. It’s got a shot at remaining useful over the long haul. Just a shot.

If no to any of the above, then you don’t have that.

And therein lies my observation. We are, indeed, like Rome; the gentlemen have it right. We don’t have many of those things. We are arguably lacking in all of them.

Again: We do have complaining. But even when the complaining is entirely valid, there arises immediately a wave of counter-complaining, typically involving name calling against the criticis as racist, sexist or transphobe. See, this is why there are no performance floors. For performance to fall beneath a floor, the performance effort itself has to exist. And we’ve taken on an unseemly habit of crystallizing these narratives about how wonderful and glorious some effort is, before anybody has put together the effort. Any valid observations about how the effort fell short, therefore, will run afoul of these crystallized narratives and so once they’re made, a shouting match immediately begins and we find ourselves awash and eyeballs deep in the latest round of “You’re a sexist” and “No I’m not.” We don’t have time to evaluate the critique itself. Might as well not even bother making it.

Congress keeps spending money. We wonder why there’s inflation. When our current President was just a Vice-President, he counter-complained against the complainers who were calling out the waste. He didn’t bother to contradict them. “We know some of this money is going to be wasted,” he said. “There are going to be mistakes made…Some people are being scammed already.” He then launched into entirely opinion-based summations of the benefits of the stimulus spending. “We�re seeing solid hints of stabilization in many markets, including housing.” The Press dutifully fell in line.

So they spend money after taxing it away from you…for a little while, they didn’t even have to put on pants to do it. The money gets wasted, and that’s okay. Inflation is the result, you’re just supposed to live with it. No floor. Nothing changes. Thankfully, the dress code did get reinstated after the great hue & cry. But how did things get that far? I guess there’s a floor after all…but it’s way down there. You have to put on pants to earn the money, but Congress doesn’t have to bother when it taxes it away, to raise the price of things you have to buy with what little money is left over?

It’s not just money things. The President’s dog has bitten a Secret Service agent — yet again. The eleventh known biting incident. Oh well! We’re continuing to work through it…but, as the article notes, it’s devolved into a workplace safety issue. Well no kidding. How many times can your dog bite people before something has to be done about it? “…[T]he improper removal of classified documents from Biden�s office when he left the White House in 2017 was [seemingly] more likely a mistake than a criminal act.” The performance floor is missing there too. How do you distinguish between a mistake vs. a criminal act? They’re not mutually exclusive. Is it a matter of intent? Does intent matter with regard to the issue of Trump’s classified documents? Why here, and not there?

No floor. People just do, like, whatever. You’re supposed to accept it. There’s no expectation placed on anybody anywhere, except on people who are doing the expecting. And of course, Trump.

Seattle is a mess. A shithole. Why is that? Seattle was beautiful. It was always run by smarmy jackass liberals, and I resented that when I lived there. Thought I had little-to-no affection for the city. Well now, my heart is breaking. What the Hell are you people doing to my old stomping grounds? No floor.

The statistics demand performance floors. They prove something is wrong, somewhere. It could be with our formation of the statistics themselves. The homeless people living in Seattle: Used to be, here & there, now and then, you run into or hear about a homeless person. Now, all throughout the West Coast, homelessness is merely an alternative lifestyle, adhered to by a huge and swelling portion of the citizenry. Is that all economic? That seems to be the implication…but…no performance floor. More homeless, and the answer is to spend money “to solve the problem of homelessness once and for all.” No one whose opinion means anything, takes it as a warning sign that we’re doing something wrong. Queer kids in the public schools: Another one-percenter phenomenon, one-percenter no longer. The skyrocketing is impossible to measure with any precision, but we know it’s there. So Why? We’re left to discuss it in a shouting match, between people who point out the recent efforts to indoctrinate, and those who deny the indoctrination affects the numbers in any way, some of whom assert the increase is a good thing. Learning disabilities are pretty much the same way: It used to be one or two percent. Now it’s double digits. Just like with the others, here we could benefit from a reasoned discussion about whether we’re doing something to increase the numbers, either in reality or in the way we’re doing the measurements and formulating the numbers. But we just get shouting matches.

There’s a difference between the two. Discussion is fact finding, and deliberation about what the facts mean (along with whether or not you really found them). Shouting matches are just conflicts between two or more factions, each of which is seeking to win. With homelessness, queer kids and spectrum disorders, we have these Career People who have established careers tied to the statistics; and they’re understandably eager to participate in these shouting matches, and devolve any reasoned discussion that might take place, into the shouting matches. They all insist that the swelling statistics are accurate and true, and their dramatic increase doesn’t signal any need for reform in how they’re gathered, but rather a need for…something else. Something that has to do with giving them more business, and money.

The problem with shouting matches is that they involve a common narrative of: I am right, and so is everyone who agrees with me. Those other guys are wrong. And this is in all things, across the board. We’re smart, they’re stupid. It doesn’t allow for any exceptions, any nuance. It’s a jackhammer used where a surgical scalpel is needed.

We are losing our ability to discuss things. As a result of our loss of these performance floors.

Or: We are losing the performance floors, as a consequence of losing our ability to discuss things.

Which one is cause, and which one is effect, is an intriguing question. Both may apply; we could be living in a self-perpetuating whirlpool of despair. But we know both these things are happening, and they’re both happening in spades. This swelling consensus that the country is on the “wrong track,” is effect that is caused by the vanishing performance floors. I mean, how can you feel anything but despair, when everywhere you turn, every direction you look, you see shit where there’s supposed to be some decent performance, and a near total absence of any incentive or reason to make anything better?

Who are these people who think the country’s on the right track?

That is yet another intriguing question.

1 Comment »

The Pink Billion
Sunday, August 20th, 2023

Okay, so there’s just no getting around it at this point. I’m going to have to blog the Barbie movie.

People are asking for it on multiple fronts, in the e-mail and on the Hello Kitty of Blogging too…which I find to be flattering and a little weird. Here was me thinking, well you know…nobody reads this blog. And many more talented people than me, have commented on Barbie already. But the demand for Barbie commentary seems to outstrip the supply, which I suppose is understandable in a way. “Barbie Fever” is everywhere and it’s affecting everything.

Which is not a good thing.

This is a bit like the bridge crew of the Titanic wanting to know a little bit more about where the icebergs are. It’s not for entertainment value. We’re in a situation here, and it isn’t good. Responsible and knowledgeable people want to know more, not because it titillates them, but because they know we’re heading into hazardous waters.

The movie has widespread and strong appeal, and the appeal is particularly strong when it’s felt by angry people. One wonders if any non-angry people like the movie. It’s supposed to be a nostalgia trip for people who played with Barbie dolls, so I’m sure there are some. But most-to-all of the positive feedback I’ve heard, comes from non-positive, angry people like Mark Maron. Who’s that? I don’t know. He talks like he’s just naturally vile and nasty, when extolling the virtues of something he likes. I can only imagine how he sounds if asked to comment on something he doesn’t like. Barbie

So perhaps non-angry people like the movie, but it doesn’t matter. This is an angry movie. It’s fueled by resentment, and if you don’t share the resentment you can still like it, but you’d be missing out on a big part of the experience. The core audience is people who are resentful, upset, and cruising for some chance to get even with someone about something.

There’s a lot of buzz about this Rachel Zeglar interview, which is only loosely connected to Barbie in that she’s so clearly sharing in this resentment. It’s looking like this is the summer of resentful, woke women venting all their frustrations with men for…I dunno. Being. The interview has a lot of people talking because whether Zeglar has made a winning move promoting her Snow White movie or not — and it’s looking like not — she’s providing definition for this new fad of “strong” women and princesses. And she’s accurate about it, the way people always are accurate when they’re sharing in an emotion-driven fad. These new, trendy, strong women are not quite so much strong, as woke. And this is an important aspect of woke, which I neglected to cover when I did my best to come up with a definition for the word: Women are not supposed to love or be loved. They are to be estranged, and to do the estranging, particularly when it comes to males. Male-and-female romance, if it’s not dead already, is to be murdered. And it doesn’t have to look like an accident.

Also, girls and women are to be leaders. Resentful both before and after. Resentful leaders.

This has been going on for a bit. It predates “woke.” When I emerged into adulthood, something that happened quite awhile ago by now, I quickly learned that pairing yourself up with a female wasn’t at all like casual dating in high school. It was a rite of passage back in these olden days. Wounded, incomplete, damaged and/or spoiled and anti-social females would sprout and then grow their trails of wreckage of failed & dysfunctional relationships with both men and women, romantic & otherwise, with this leitmotif of “I don’t take any crap and they can’t handle a strong woman.”

A particularly keen and disciplined observer might have noticed that whether these women thought of themselves as leaders or not, they weren’t running very much of anything, and were leading no one. Truth was, they just never learned to share an endeavor, or life itself, with another person. Or share nothing and just enjoy spending time with another. They were too broken and too damaged.

We quickly learned to run in the opposite direction when we heard the words “strong woman,” or “men are intimidated by me.” It’s a little disconcerting to see the negative energy from all those years ago, radiated yet again by someone who was so far away from even being conceived. It means something is sustaining this rot, keeping it infected and putrid. Something that packs a lot of influence.

That Barbie — this latest instrument for channeling this resentment — has managed to achieve billion-dollar status, and so quickly, just reinforces this.

Treacherous waters. Iceberg, right ahead.

Shoe0nHead, one of my favorite YouTube subscriptions, hit the nail on the head when she called the movie a Rorschach Test — after launching into this weird thesis about how it’s “actually pro-man” or something. I think that part was parody. Not sure. But it’s true there are some five or ten different ways of looking at it, and what we have here with all this buzz is lots of people each coming away with their own interpretation. I’m adding to that, of course. In fact I find it interesting that as people come away with their own Rorschach interpretations, each one of those interpretations, in & of itself, becomes another Rorschach test.

My favorite is the idea that it’s pro-man, because it takes pity on the men. Poor, poor men. Poor Ken. Let’s all feel sorry for Ken.

In this particular place, if in none other, Barbie functions effectively as a commentary on what we’re going through in real life. Feminism and pop-psych, for years now, have been peddling this idea that the social reforms they have in mind are actually pro-men, a soothing medicinal balm to be applied against the wounding done to our psyches by centuries of patriarchy. We’ve been victimized by our emotionally distant fathers who yelled at us too much when we were playing baseball. The chain of toxic masculinity has to be broken so we can get in touch with our feelings and enjoy Cats, something like that.

According to this, merely going about our business, acting like the men we are, is an act of self-injury. I’ve seen that in this article exploring male suicides. The male suicides are certainly there, but to me this looks like encouraging more of what made them happen, as opposed to curing the problem.

Or, maybe the movie isn’t commenting on that fad. Maybe it’s just participating in it. Again: Rorschach test. No right or wrong answers. You be the judge.

But as far as that fad itself, it’s clear a lot of militant feminists believe in it, either straight-up or they have faith in it as a recruiting tool, to bring some self-pitying males onto their movement. Is anybody going to explain to them what should be obvious? Here I go again…bravely, I step into the breach.

This “Actually the patriarchy hurts men too” buzz isn’t pro-man and it doesn’t make you look like you’re pro-man. If you hide behind that, you reveal that you don’t live in the world of men, and you don’t live in the world of grown-ups, either.

If you are “pro” someone, that would mean you know what they’re trying to do and you’re helping them get it done. It doesn’t mean to feel sorry for them or to start whining to others about their feelings in addition to yours. It’s a big world out there and there are lots of things for people to do besides whine about their feelings.

Men don’t cry as easily as women do. You know what? That’s just fine. Some men don’t talk about their feelings as much. That’s fine too. It doesn’t mean anybody is adhering to excess to some “social construct.” It’s just how some people tick. You’ve heard of “Ain’t got time to bleed”? Some people don’t have time to whine. They’re too busy doing things. Like…growing the corn that will be popped so you have something to snack on in the theater while you’re watching Barbie. Or, driving the trucks filled with groceries, including the box-wine you’ll be drinking with your girlfriends while you talk about Barbie. We don’t need a world in which everyone obsesses over their feelings and whines about how they’re treated, all of the time. You wouldn’t be able to survive in such a world. You’d run out of cat food.

Real men don’t want to be victims. Neither do real women.

Also, if your sympathy toward us has been exhausted or never existed, because we dared to have a different opinion about your doll movie or some other thing, it doesn’t bring us around to your side when you challenge or ridicule this male toughness. It’s not just plumage; it’s something that’s real, that we use to do the things we do, that you don’t do. So billboards like this aren’t likely to have the desired effect, because you know…we’re not in middle school anymore.

But I know, I know. If anybody needs to have this explained to them, they’re never gonna get it anyway.

This applies in a lot of situations, to a lot of people. The effort is out there to shame men into liking this movie that, one might reasonably infer, was never made for them in the first place. And that’s quite the silly thing; trying to shame someone who can’t be shamed, into liking something that doesn’t like them back, to bring happiness to yet other people like Mr. Maron, who’ve resolved to remain everlastingly unhappy. What sort of people engage in such silly things?

Do they find it as challenging to find the time to do so, as I find it to write up the more scrutinizing and loquacious blog posts, like this one? It would not seem so. Is anyone counting on them to do anything that really makes a difference in some way? It all reinforces this idea that none of this is really very deep at all, and it doesn’t rely too much on deep thinking or any thinking, that it’s all driven by emotion. Barbie has made a billion dollars triggering people, piquing their emotions, and starting a lot of talk about the deep thoughts that actually don’t exist. Which in turn persuades people to see the movie yet again and fork over some more money.

I tried, like an iced coffee customer struggling to access the last few ounces of liquid by probing the ice cube remnants with his paper straw, to glom onto and glean these deep thoughts. I really tried. There are a couple of monologues toward the end, one by America Ferrera and one by Ruth Handler herself, the inventor of Barbie, that are supposed to be deep. Maybe they went over my head. I was left sucking air. Something about…it’s tough being a woman because you’re subjected to criticism all the time?

As a man, my reaction was stifled laughter. Stifled, because other people were clearly getting more out of the movie than I was, and I didn’t want to disturb them. But if I didn’t stifle it would’ve been a horse laugh, a true guffaw. Tough being a woman because you’re criticized no matter what you do. Gee! I wonder what that’s like!

Handler’s speech was even more vapid. It didn’t miss the mark, because from what I could tell, she didn’t say anything. Just something about: Here, hold my hands. Now, feel. Barbie starts crying. Uh, hate to spoil the party but that’s not deep. Queen Victoria speaks for me: “That’s what I call twaddle.”

My sympathy is just not there. These are girls who played with dolls, in the comfort of their pinkified bedrooms. While, at the same age, I was out doing nonsense-chores, sanding down fascia boards and painting them, not quite so much because they needed painting but because Dad wanted to instill a work ethic. Now they’re grown up, watching Barbie, whining about how tough they have it. My heart bleeds.

This is the ugly side of Barbie. There are few things in human affairs more off-putting, than someone who’s been aided comforted and sheltered by some exclusive set of privileges denied to others — and then feeling sorry for themselves. It’s ugly when the reasons for their self-pity are well defined. And here, although I realize this may come as a shock to the movie’s makers and viewers, those reasons are not very well defined at all.

Nevertheless, some measure of respect is owed. The movie did make a billion dollars. Ben Shapiro, in his now-famous forty-three minutes of savagery, predicted the opposite. I might have made a similar error if I were called upon to do so, just because the public seems to be tiring of summer blockbuster movies. We really haven’t had one, post-pandemic, until now. I would not have expected this.

Why does it resonate?

There are those who credit the marketing, in several ways. The marketing was thorough. The marketing was brilliant. The marketing was…deceitful and sneaky. Those all contributed to the success, and they’re all true. This is a Trojan Horse of movies. It looks like a harmless nostalgia trip, a pleasant joy ride you can take your six-year-old daughter to go enjoy, while leaving Dad to…whatever. Girls Afternoon Out or something. But it’s loaded with a political agenda, and also, it’s PG-13 for a reason. Dissenters shout in unison: Please don’t take your six-to-ten-year-old to see this movie! And they’re right. It looks like it would be appropriate. It’s not.

I tend to gravitate toward the simpler explanations. I think of movie-watching as something that can be deep, but by default, is not. The most successful movies are the ones that brought the honest and effective effort, where things are shallow. Sound effects. Music. Visuals. Oh, the visuals in Barbie; even the trailer is a visual treat for the eyes.

Margot Robbie has a rockin’ bod and a pretty face.

The women are all gorgeous. And they smile.

Here I am writing about what the Barbie movie did well…and by the standards imposed by our present times, I’m full-blown sexist.

Tatiana Maslany is a good looking woman too, but in She-Hulk she didn’t smile that much. She frowned. She whined and carped and complained and scolded and whined some more.

Ladies, you have to have a nice body and mix in some smiles with your whining. Even better, maybe think about skipping the whining because compared to men, women actually have it pretty good. But be pretty and do more smiling.

It’s timeless wisdom. It works.

My favorite part of the movie: When the Barbie dolls, conspiring to retake Barbieland after the Kens have taken it over and made it into Ken-land, knock the Ken dolls off their game by pretending to be interested in Ken things. “Explain Godfather to me,” one of them says, setting off an avalanche of male wisdom about the complexities in the film classic. That was hilarious. Made me wonder about the beautiful, intelligent women who have said exactly the same thing to me, in exactly the same words, initiating the same avalanche. Hmmmm…

My least favorite part of the movie was right after that one. The mature, capable Barbie dolls who are now bringing beer and chicken wings to the Ken dolls and saying nice things to them, who have obviously learned how to coexist with them, get abducted by the wounded, incomplete Barbie dolls who never learned how to do this. And then the wounded, incomplete, immature Barbies brainwash the mature, capable, complete Barbies who know how to share their lives with men. Inside a truck! They interrogate them and browbeat them into not getting along with men. Yes this really happens. It’s the exact opposite of the way things should work. We don’t want wounded incomplete people to have an influence on mature, whole, capable people. We want it to go the other way.

I’ve long said this is the true division between conservatives and liberals. So if you really want to think of this movie as deep, maybe you could come away thinking it’s saying what I’ve been saying. But it seems to be advocating for things to go in the wrong direction, with the blind leading the not-blind.

This is not an isolated occurrence. Now that “superhero movies” have morphed into just a billions-of-dollars way of growing whole crops of these B.I.T.s (Bitches In Training) among the very-young female set…I am not optimistic about the near future. Looks to me like doubling and tripling down on what didn’t work before back in my day. Identifying the pollution and manufacturing a whole lot more of it.

How bad is it getting? Feminists fear and loathe their own sons.

So [HuffPost writer/contributor Wendy Besel] Hahn was �thrilled� that the smash summer movie Barbie, which has drawn widespread criticism among many conservatives for its heavy-handed feminist messaging, gave her the opportunity to educate her son about �the patriarchal American society we live in today.� As a former English teacher, she wishes �all teachers would assign their students to watch �Barbie� in place of summer reading selections like �The Grapes of Wrath.�� She need not worry about that �there are plenty of activist educators who would eagerly swap out great literature from our cultural heritage for feminist propaganda. Hahn unwittingly makes a great case for homeschooling.

Of all the pieces you can take away from the movie, the most important one, in my mind, is the one it seems no one is discussing: The primary arc of drama. Barbie-Land versus out here, the “real world.” Frankly, I found the “real world” in this movie, to be less representative of the real world I know, than Barbie-Land was. “Men run things” in this “real world.” You can tell because when Ken is in the real world, he sees a lobby conversation among men, and when this lady-intern barges in with her prattling nonsense expecting to interrupt them, the one speaking offers her a polite reprimand because there’s a conversation already taking place and she needs to wait her turn. That’s “patriarchy” and, supposedly, our “real world” is filled with it.

Not from what I’ve seen. Like many polite men, I’ve become accustomed to letting women talk whenever they want. Chicks like to talk. They get to interrupt. Guys interrupting girls, something I’m told is happening all the time, is generally regarded in polite circles about on par with guys hitting girls in the face. You get to do that to another guy. You’re not supposed to do that with females.

But in the real-world-within-the-movie, chicks need to wait their turn like everybody else who has something of a non-emergency nature to say. That’s “patriarchy.”

What confounds me, almost to the point of agitation, is this drama about “running things.” The movie is halfway over and at a low point, when men “run things” in Barbie-land. It has a happy ending when the women are restored to “running things.” More Rorschach test outcomes here. It seems fairly straightforward, to some, that this makes it an anti-man movie; things are bad when men “run things” and things are good when women “run things.” Solid case, right?

Here’s what I notice.

In my world, running things is not about status. It is not uplifting. It is a burden. When you run things, you depend on a sort of a dashboard of living, changing factors, and on a premise that your dashboard includes everything you need to know to make good decisions. That premise is wrong a whole lot more often than it’s right. In my world, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Running things comes with something we call responsibility, and it’s not pink or plastic or fun.

It is, at times, a raging pain in the ass.

If you really do want to take an eight-year-old in to see a movie about “running things,” of either gender, it would be good to get that across to them. It wouldn’t necessarily discourage them from seeking out responsibility in their later years, in fact it might clue them in on the fact that we’re suffering a shortage of people who really know what they’re doing. It would also offer them a reason to show better and greater respect to the authority figures in their lives right now.

And that’s the biggest bee in my bonnet about Barbie. You bring up “running things,” I immediately think about accountability. In my “real world” that’s what makes everything go, how it all works. In this movie that’s so obsessed with who’s “running things,” accountability is like the water coming out of Barbie’s shower head; it’s not there, and you’re not supposed to expect it to be there, because it’s a doll’s world that has no running water and no accountability. That’s a punchline.

The jokes are intended for, or are more appropriate for, adults. The life-lessons aren’t really good for anybody. They’re aimed at mental children. Female Peter Pans, trapped in virtual childhood, who aren’t interested in growing up, now or at any later time. They’re still stuck, for whatever reason, in that innocent and halcyon phase of a lost childhood, back when “being the boss” was pure prestige, and had yet to carry any potential for failure or any real responsibility. Yeah, Age Eight is about right for that, if not right for the homoerotic jokes.

So…they’re dumping their boyfriends over this? Good on you, lads. That’s a bullet you dodged.

2 Comments »

Lies
Monday, July 31st, 2023

Seventy-one charges against Donald Trump. That’s a lot. This is a reflection of…what?

His criminal behavior? His lack of manners? His hair? The so-called “January 6 insurrection”?

As always, if we’re going to argue about something then let’s do it honestly. An agenda exists, which some people support — and they can give convincing reasons why they support it — to make sure Trump never, ever, ever occupies public office ever again. This is not within the realm of dispute. It’s been announced by more than one public figure. So yes, of course there are 70+ charges. That’s twice as much assurance as 35.

But, is that how the law works?

Wouldn’t those who support this be willing to concede, this being the case, that if Trump is guilty of being dishonest about something then he certainly doesn’t corner the market on dishonesty?

There are those who offer a somewhat different argument: Right or wrong, this is surely surpassing the tonnage limit on acceptable baggage in a presidential candidate. The prosecution may be dishonest, but it’s a game the bad guys have won already, so let them have it. Throw Trump overboard, feed those monsters, maybe they eat us last then. After all, he’s not innocent. And then…as I understand the plan…we can get a Republican nominated who has a chance of coming out on top. And we’ll have a Republican President. After playing the game of “be nice to the monsters they eat us last.” Which, of course, has a long and venerable history of working out great.

Uh…no it doesn’t.

There’s something deeply flawed going on here. Deep within the layers that never see the light of day. A crack in the building’s foundation. We have people calling Trump an always-loser when they know darn good and well, if that were true, we wouldn’t be talking about him at all. So they’re saying something that isn’t true, and after they say it, they advance some alternative candidate who consistently fails to net anything within forty points of Trump. So their point is that everyone else can win and Trump’s a loser, but before, during and after they make this point, they see Trump winning and their guy losing. By a lot. Then they keep saying it some more.

It’s like truth has taken a vacation. It just doesn’t matter.

And this affects everything. The more you look, the more you see it.

People voting for Biden, not willing to admit it was the wrong decision. Not willing to admit Kamala Harris has serious problems, is an inarticulate idiot, and is reflecting poorly on women.

It affects things that don’t have anything to do with politics. We’re eyebrows deep in the muck. Truth. Falsehood. Consequences. Somehow, somewhere, these have fallen off the table.

People walking their dogs, watering their lawns and riding their bikes, all alone, on sunny days, with cloth masks on their faces.

“Woke” movies losing money. Ninety-nine box-office bomb money losers for every 1 money-making Barbie movie. Like a lottery, they just keep making them. Except lottery tickets are a buck, not $200 million and up.

Jussie Smollett.

Heavy plastic grocery bags built for “multi use” and we can’t use them for that.

Paper straws. In plastic packaging.

Intelligence has all but ruled out that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine, settling on that device being planted Russian disinformation. Eh, no. That was b.s.

The virus couldn’t have escaped from that local lab, we’ve ruled that out too. Eh, no you didn’t.

A zillion and one failed climate-disaster predictions.

Entirely preventable “supply chain” disasters.

Crime wave, California water droughts, inflation. Manufactured crises. These were very real, what’s fake is the “oopsie” part of it. The spontaneity, the unpredictability. “Unexpectedly!” No. These were avoidable problems.

We are told things that plainly thwart common sense. The “climate” is about to lower some kind of cataclysm on us, so we’re going to change some rules. Move power around. Give up sovereignty, raise taxes, have conferences. And all this involves lots of important people flying long distances in private jets…often.

Being born with genitals doesn’t define your “gender.” But surgically altering those genitals “affirms” a gender. Someone should be explaining how that works, squaring the circle. Such an answer has yet to find its way to me.

Florida’s new education curriculum says slavery was a good thing. Eh, no it doesn’t.

They passed a “don’t say gay” law. No they didn’t.

Lie after lie after lie after lie…they get thoroughly debunked, and people see it happen with their own eyes. They know the lies are lies. But they maintain a belief in the lie, and continue to act out this belief, that they consciously know holds no merit.

Hanlon’s Razor says you should never attribute to malice that which can be ascribed to incompetence. I have a third alternative explanation to offer:

Our leaders, just like the hoi polloi they represent, are simply unidirectional. They have encapsulated their beliefs and their behavior, separating these from the evolving base of knowledge that’s supposed to drive them. They don’t change bearing, don’t learn. They don’t say: This isn’t working. Or, that didn’t work. Something’s wrong. We made a mistake. Stop doing this. Do something different.

Think about it: When’s the last time you heard of anybody with any meaningful profile and visibility, even come close to that? They all just keep-on keeping-on. If something went wrong, that must be the fault of the other guy.

Politicians have always blamed the predecessor when something goes wrong on their watch. But this is different. In the world we’re living in now, no one admits to a bad call in anything anywhere. They won’t even hide behind the old excuse of “My decision was good based on the incomplete information I had at the time.” You haven’t heard that lately, either.

There’s been a sea change. We are all to blame. One thing we’re going to have to conclude, or acknowledge on our way to concluding something else, is that the social calculus has shifted. The penalty for admitting you were wrong, about anything, ever, must have spiked. Or, the penalty for acting out a belief you must know is incorrect, must have been removed, or flatlined. We trust someone who makes bad decisions, as long as he does it consistently, above someone who has had a learning experience and is willing to admit it, share it and talk about it.

This change has affected relationships, associations, circles-of-trust. Someone tells a lie and gets caught at it — they just puff out their chests and spout more stuff, acting like it never happened. You’d think it wouldn’t work. It works almost all the time, and perfectly. If there’s any enmity in the aftermath of a lie being exposed, seems it’s become popular to reserve that for the person who exposed the lie, not for the liar.

I’m guessing maybe the China Virus did this to us. The paradox of these post-COVID times is that the labor participation has cratered. You could go so far as to say that working for a living has become the exception, and coasting along on social safety nets and the kindness of others has become the norm.

And yet at the same time, we’ve crested out in the willingness and drive people show to reject what they know to be true, and embrace what they know to be false, out of fear of being unemployed or unemployable. They’re acting like the monkeys in the firehose experiment, attacking any among their peers who show signs of intention to call out the lies.

I don’t know how to reconcile that. Except maybe, if people have been taking advantage of the COVID potato-chips-and-video-games lifestyle, their ability to get a job again if they choose has become an unknown and thus a source of apprehension. That would mean they’ve been creating their own problem. It wouldn’t be the first time people have done something like that.

You can see a noticeable difference in the quality of “leaders,” be they merely figureheads, or genuinely influential people. Even among their fan base, seems no one would be willing to go on record saying these are anything close to our best. In families, organizations, state governments, all around the world; the most influential out of any gathering, are carnival barkers. The decision has been formed before they ever stepped into the ring, or the decision is a continuation of something they said before. It’s been thrust upon them. In their capacity, they sell the decision, they don’t actually make it. They sell options everyone knows are not the right ones. And they do it convincingly. Those are the leaders we have now. They’re not leading us to good places.

I used to see people make amends from bad decisions, or heed warnings that came from the bad decisions of others. Time was, you’d have to wait a little bit, then you’d see it. I haven’t seen it in a very long time now. Anywhere. Where there were people saying “That worked out well for him, let’s try doing the same thing” or “He fell on hard times after doing the thing we were about to do, so let’s not do it” — instead, you just see people gloming on to brainless mantras, memorizing the lyrics, melody and rhythm, and repeating it without accepting any culpability for the ultimate outcome if someone else does what they say.

And we wonder why things in general continue to suck. No one’s learning. People are doing, driving, encouraging, discouraging, and a whole lot of arguing and talking. But there’s no course change even when there’s a clear and demonstrable need to bear hard to port or starboard. Everything’s just cruising in a straight line, top speed, like an asteroid that hasn’t hit anything yet. So processes do not, and cannot, improve. If we fix anything else, but don’t fix that, we haven’t fixed anything.

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Creativity, Resourcefulness and Jobs
Saturday, July 15th, 2023

In the final stretch before my birthday, I was thinking about jobs. Bringing creativity to a job. Bringing resourcefulness to a job. The difference between those two things. Knowing when not to bring them. Bringing them at the wrong time. Watching someone else bring them when they’re not needed. How annoying that guy is.

It occurs to me; now that I’m 57, I have screwed that pooch every possible way. And I should say something about it because screwing up has a way of educating you, that getting it right does not. And my experience is somewhat unique because all this time, at least in theory, the resourcefulness and creativity are how I’m supposed to have been paying the bills. That’s not true of everybody.

Also, the kids starting out in that situation, now, are going to have it much tougher than I did. Things are not getting better-defined. The newer technology is putting us in need of new definitions we never needed before, and no one is coming up with them. Worse still, activists are undoing the definitions we had in place already. And so, to those kids who are like me 35, 40 years ago, being hired for their “youth, enthusiasm, energy and creativity” I say…

I got nothin’.

Well okay, maybe I’ve got just a couple things.

You might notice I’m discussing creativity and/or resourcefulness in a job. It’s a big topic. I’m not talking about just coding. I’m talking about anything where you’re called upon to “think outside the box,” which for many decades now has been, at least in one situation or another, just about everything.

I’ve had jobs where I was specifically hired for exactly that. And I kept them because I figured out, that’s not it at all, my performance is being assessed purely on whether I’m doing it exactly the way someone else would do it. And I quit that. Another job, it worked that way but I didn’t see it coming, and I lost that. Most jobs, you’re hired to bring your creativity and resourcefulness if they’re needed, but if you read up you’ll find there’s already an established way to do it. And you’d better do that, because if someone else knows of that established way and they’re waiting for you to do it, and you’re goofing around re-inventing the wheel, that’s pretty aggravating for them. You’ll probably get your ass fired.

So do lots of reading.

Stay away from the following people:

The ones who want you to come up with a novel new idea that actually works, so they can steal it.

The ones who want your creativity to be challenged so that you come up with a novel new idea…and they can take credit for making you do it.

Salesmen who need this one particular new feature “so they can close the sale.” And then that becomes your requirement(s). You know, they’re really not the problem; they’re just doing their jobs. But if that’s how it works for you, you’re missing a layer of management and your life is going to become progressively worse as long as you’re missing it. It’s not important to explore how I learned this.

The ones who already have the script written out in their heads, that they’re the only ones who come up with any novel ideas; they just don’t know what they are yet. And when they see you doing it first, get into a rivalry with you because you did it first.

The ones who already have the script written out in their heads about what your novel new idea is supposed to be. And get upset with you because you didn’t follow that script, instead you came up with something else. They’re the worst. They don’t know they’re doing harm.

Of course — the ones who don’t want any creativity coming out anywhere at all ever. Everything worth inventing has been invented already.

And, the ones who don’t understand what exactly it is that you do. And decide, on that basis, that it must not be very important. Hehe that’s totally right Sprocket, the whole world revolves around just the things you understand, and everything else is just goo. If such a person is making decisions or recommendations when it’s time for a layoff, you might as well just go ahead and quit now.

Creativity is the impulse. It is the effervescence. When the cow is blocked by the bale of hay and she can’t figure out how to walk around it, that’s what she’s missing. Resourcefulness is the practical application of that creativity. It is the use of a limited set of resources you have, but did not choose, to achieve a particular goal, that you did not choose. Yes, you can still use these to build for yourself a whole career, hopefully amassing a retirement fund more steadily than I did. It’s a blessing, although it won’t always feel like it.

If that’s you, buckle up bitches. Get ready for a ride.

But you’ll still have to read people, to manage your career. Read them thoroughly and well. Admit you haven’t figured out yet, that which you don’t know. People are multi-layered. They can’t be completely honest with you about their motives if they’re not honest with themselves about those.

Keep your resourcefulness sharp, since you’re using it to pay your bills. But know when to put it away. Think of it like a knife; keep it in good working order, hide it when it’s not needed. And don’t forget about that reading. Do the reading. Get ready to do lots of it. After all, people are paying you to be something resembling an expert. So know your stuff. After that, if you choose your friends wisely and treat them with honesty and respect, you should do okay.

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Affirmative Action in College Admissions is Dead
Saturday, July 1st, 2023

Link to decision here.

As expected…the democrats are not acknowledging their little con-job has ended. The Supremes ruled against them, so the Supremes are wrong. This time. How do they keep selling that unequal treatment is equal, when the judicial branch is no longer buying it?

Progress!

My Governor Gavin Newsom made an ass-and-a-half out of himself over this. And in his usual style, he did it enthusiastically and quickly.

The Supreme Court�s conservative majority has yet again upended longstanding precedent, changing the law just because they now have the votes to do so, without any care for the costs to society and students around the country. Right-wing activists � including those donning robes � are trying to take us back to the era of book bans and segregated campuses. As Justices Sotomayor and Jackson put it powerfully, no one benefits from ignorance: diverse schools are an essential component of the fabric of our democratic society…

While the path to equal opportunity has now been narrowed for millions of students, no court case will ever shatter the California Dream. Our campus doors remain open for all who want to work hard � and our commitment to diversity, equity, and equal opportunity has never been stronger…

They can’t fool him. They’re trying to take us back to the era of book bans and segregated campuses.

But California voters must be trying to take us back to that too…

California voters in 1996 voted 54%-45% to pass Proposition 209, which stated that “the state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

The ban on affirmative action by the Golden State was later affirmed by voters in 2020 when Proposition 16 was rejected by voters 57%-42%. Proposition 16 would have repealed Proposition 209, and would allow affirmative action in California.

Still, for those wondering what democrats have to say about this, Newsom has laid down the template. Going back. Going forward. Trying to take us back to the era. Progress. C.A.L.W.W.N.T.Y. (Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet.) For which, I have a bothersome, pain-in-the-ass question: Can we see the omelet? Where is this progress the Supreme Court has interrupted, or reversed, in its plain acknowledgment that equal treatment is equal treatment and unequal treatment is unequal treatment? Where? Have we evil white people been properly knocked from our precipices of unearned privilege, or have we been well on the way? Have the poor poor put-upon ethnic groups been properly but fractionally empowered? Is inter-racial animus sharply but only partly declined? Resentments on one side, or the other, mostly but not quite completely soothed?

Not a trivial question, since you guys want to invoke C.A.L.W.W.N.T.Y. For it to work, the persuaders and those persuaded have to accept 1) we’re on a correct bearing of travel but also 2) the distance has not been fully traversed. How do you support that, with observed evidence, logic and reason? You don’t. It’s a pitch to feelings. Well even here in California, a majority doesn’t have those feelings and that means we’re not gonna get ’em.

If I were a consultant to democrats and I earnestly wanted them to win, I’d tell them to drop this toot-sweet. It’s a losing issue now. The support of the courts, alone, made it something other than that; nothing else ever did. It was always nonsense.

Links to some other great coverage:

Whatever happened to the affirmative action concept of “critical mass”?

Sotomayor�s Fake America

Affirmative Action’s Demise and Higher Education

Winsome Sears Nukes Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent: �Chosen Because She�s Black�

Clarence Thomas Reading His Epic Takedown Of KBJ�s Affirmative Action Dissent Left Her �Visibly Angry�

The Morning Briefing: Clarence Thomas Flexes All Over SCOTUS Diversity Hire Ketanji Brown Jackson in Affirmative Action Opinion

‘Ted Talk’ Given After Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Disputed Claim About Black Babies in AA Case

But you know what? All of this stuff is fake and phony. The foundational premise is faulty. If the first floor of a building is faulty, you can’t rely on the second floor, right? If we’re going to argue then let’s do it honestly.

The Supreme Court did not belatedly realize “Hey…that doesn’t square with the Constitution after all.”

It isn’t a matter of “conservative Supreme Court justices” having one vision of the Constitution & what it’s supposed to do, and the liberals having a different one.

The dissenting justices are justices according to their appointments and the law, but they don’t function that way. They don’t sit on the court to impartially adjudicate. They’re there to make sure certain demographics win out over certain other demographics. They’re there to enforce a totem-pole stacking and sequencing; a caste system.

Just like union representatives going into a meeting to represent the interests of union members. Yes, things changed because they got outnumbered. But that’s not how the Supreme Court is supposed to work. It’s supposed to be nine judicial officers, acting as judicial officers. No one is guaranteed a win except the U.S. Constitution itself.

The quota-system bean counting was alive, and now it is dead. Something has changed. What changed?

The Constitution didn’t change.

Priorities didn’t change.

Logic and reason didn’t change.

Feelings didn’t change.

See, Gov. Newsom is right. It’s purely a question of votes. What changed was that before, there were enough of these “union reps” play-pretending as judicial officers, under thin flimsy disguises, to outnumber the real judicial officers and bury the Constitution’s plain text and spirit under bushels of nonsense. And then the makeup of the court changed so that the votes were there to peel back the nonsense.

Now the liberals are popping up on the news, and on Twitter, and Reddit, Facebook, and in the comment threads under various articles, to defend the nonsense. And all they can come up with is more layers of nonsense. They’re just posing and grandstanding, acting like they’ve read or in some other way come into contact with some game-changing nugget of information that has eluded anyone who disagrees. But if you dig into their arguments you see they have no arguments at all.

It’s how they work. This is why “liberal” is such a dirty word. It should be. Their executives and legislators have these constituencies, and they run for re-election promising the constituents they’ll nominate judges and justices who “preserve your rights” — guaranteeing wins under any & all scenarios that they have no business guaranteeing, acting like union reps piling on the nonsense. These judges and justices, along with the executives and legislators who nominate and confirm them, swear oaths to defend the United States Constitution. And then they break those oaths.

It’s unsavory, tactless and futile to mention it which is why people so seldom bother to do so. Sophisticated people on both sides of the argument, will maintain silence about this part of it. You have to wait for a rough-around-the-edges rogue like me. Nevertheless, this is what’s true. Half of our electorate is like a child, who’s playing Monopoly but is too immature to handle the prospect of losing, therefore has to win all the time. With an actual Monopoly game, that ends with a temper tantrum, foot-stomping, fist-balling, shouting, tears, throwing, kicking and plastic houses & hotels flung around the room. What passes for American jurisprudence, amounts to the real-life version of that. Because in our governmental system you’re not allowed to say “Hey you can’t participate, you lack the required maturity.” And so people do participate, when they lack the maturity. And then the Presidents, Governors and legislators they elect, pander to them and their need to win.

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The Seesaw
Saturday, June 17th, 2023

We’ve had this lingering disagreement about voting; half of us say it’s too easy to vote, the other half tremble in fear over these “schemes” of “voter suppression,” thickly suggesting such schemes are race-based. But whether they are or not, the narrative says they’re always awful because everyone should be allowed to vote, in fact encouraged to vote. So half of us say there are too many voters and the other half say there aren’t enough and there are never enough.

We’re also divided on the ideas in circulation. Roughly half of us say there are too many and we need some restrictions. “Misinformation” shouldn’t find an outlet anywhere, CNN did the wrong thing giving Trump such an “outlet,” the First Amendment does not and should not protect “hate speech.” The other half of us say there cannot be an idea so dangerous that we have to keep it from being at least discussed; if it’s reckless, toxic or stupid, that should come out in the discussions. We should fear the censorship more than we fear the ideas.

Now I haven’t conducted a poll, but it seems to me like there’s a near perfect “seesaw” arrangement here. The people who say there are too many ideas being discussed are the ones who say there aren’t enough people voting. And the people who say there are too many people voting, point to some ideas we should be able to at least discuss, and we’re not allowed to discuss them. So those who say there is a deficiency of voters and a need to “harvest” some more, say there is a glut of questionable ideas and a need to restrict them. Those who say there is a glut of questionable voters and a need to restrict those voters, say there is a deficiency of ideas being discussed and we need to look at relaxing the restrictions we’ve placed on those.

To me, it makes a lot of sense that voters should be qualified. On what critical matters are we voting? How to spend money…and many of these ways are new and innovative, unheard-of just a few years ago. And on raising the “debt ceiling” so the country can become more insolvent. It’s lunacy to insist people should have a say in such things when they’re not paying into the system.

On the other hand, if the ideas to be discussed have to be filtered and conditionally declared off-limits, with posts flagged and removed, accounts suspended and closed…there has to be a decider. And I notice these deciders are not elected. I’ve seen them in action, learned of their decisions and the restrictions they impose, occasionally been affected directly by them. They don’t have my faith. I join ranks with those who say, if the idea really is all that bad, it should come out in the wash. We ought to be able to at least explore it and compare notes on it. We ought to be able to at least talk about it.

People who oppose me on both positions, and there’s no shortage of the ones who do, paint themselves into the awkward corner of insisting we need to hear from every last person in the country who can fog a mirror with their breath, to make sure no one’s left with their voice unheard. But when we’re done hearing from all these voices, there’s only a limited range of ideas they should be allowed to consider, or speak of, or hear of, let alone support…

The one thing that can possibly explain this: Vanity.

It’s like a wife, so vain that she wants the entire zip code polled on whether or not these pants make her butt look big. And make sure everyone capable of writing their own name can participate in the vote, leaving no one unheard. So that all can cast their vote…no honey, it looks just fine.

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Ask the Questions
Saturday, June 3rd, 2023

The older people get, the more they see conservatism is the right way to go. Liberals protest that’s because old people find comfort in old things and are afraid to try anything new. The truth is, when something new works, that’s an exception and it’s rare. As a general rule, if it worked we’d already be doing it. And it’s the older people who can see it because this is a pattern of averages, and it takes time to see it. You have to watch a few plans put into practice, notice across the years what succeeds and what doesn’t.

Now obviously, if we accepted “new things are no good” as policy to be implemented and enforced across the board, in all contexts, without any exceptions asked for or granted, it would be counterproductive. But guess what? We don’t. Nobody advocates for such a thing. A conservative is not an unreasoning, strident extremist lobbying for the patent office to be shut down because everything worth inventing has been invented. Rather, a conservative asks questions. He refuses to grant the new thing the benefit of the doubt.

It is the liberal who is the strident, unreasoning extremist. “A new thing! Let’s get behind it!”

Anyone who says no, is their enemy.

Anyone who asks inconvenient questions about it, is the enemy.

Anyone who notices the wrong thing about it, is the enemy.

Anyone who politely inquires about the prospect of a sandbox test, a limited scope of implementation, contingency plans in case it doesn’t work, rollbacks…in fact, anyone who merely hesitates to say yes. Is the enemy. Because liberalism is not an ideology at all. It’s a cult.

The conservative merely asks the questions everyone should be asking: If this is such a great idea, how did we get to this point where we haven’t already been doing it? There may very well be a good answer. Like any responsible adult, the conservative wants to know what it is. Maybe the idea is so good we should have been doing it a long time ago, and we need to look at our traditions and our processes. But someone should be asking the question.

And then there are Prof. Sowell’s: Compared to what? At what cost? What hard evidence do you have?

Liberals have successfully sold the idea to the public that they have a lock on “nuanced” thinking and “open-mindedness.” It isn’t so. They’re the ones who refuse to ask the questions above, along with any other. They don’t question the direction of their travel, just like a bullet doesn’t question its trajectory — they just keep on going until something makes it impossible to go any further. And then, like the bullet, they deliver a high magnitude of kinetic energy that destroys things. But they don’t critically think or question, that’s a myth, one of the most successful and stealthy myths ever plied upon the American people.

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Work Requirements Offend Poor People
Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

So much bad, weird stuff in the month of May. Which one single thing would be the worst?

It’s a given that the champion must emerge from matters pertaining to the “debt ceiling talks” or whatever you wanna call ’em. At this point, my affection for the mainstream media is not running terribly high. In fact, it’s bottomed out into a low nadir. “White hot rage” would be the most accurate description that comes to mind.

All across the board they’re selling the idea that brash, irresponsible recklessness would be best represented by cutting spending and/or refusing to “raise the ceiling,” and responsibility means raising said ceiling without conditions, the more the better. The exact opposite of what’s true.

I don’t know how successful this sales pitch is. But that’s what they’re selling. Stem to stern.

In a way, we’re outgrowing the ancient conflict between conservatism and liberalism. Throughout May, it’s bee more like: One school of thought says once you’ve given people the vote, and given them entitlements, you’ll never succeed in taking those things away again so you’d better just figure out how the republic can endure with criminals and other destructive individuals voting, spending out of control, interest on the debt out of control…find a way to make it work.

The other school of thought says it can’t work like that, so if you really want the republic to remain you’d better take the vote away from the criminals and the grifters, and withdraw the previous entitlements…find a way to make that work.

The first of those two is more popular. But there’s no way it can win. Math backs the other, and math won’t negotiate.

This doesn’t foretell happy times ahead.

There’s no kind way to ask the question. What the hell is the matter with these people? Do they not believe in math? I’m not going to sit here and type in words to the effect that I know exactly where the tipping point is, the hard limit only represented by these various legislative limits, where the center of gravity topples over the brink and the solvency of the republic is gone forever. But I can promise there is such a point somewhere. It’s in the laws of the universe. It’s Stein’s Law: Whatever can’t last forever, will not. It will stop.

If they knowingly concede to that most-fundamental of all rules, they must be fifth-column fighters destroying the union from within. If they don’t, then, how do I phrase it delicately. Any fair summary comes off sounding like a playground taunt. Their opinions would be relevant only because we have a negotiation process that makes them that way, and any negotiation process that makes them that way is poison.

They are children. Put their kind in charge of a household, and eventually the mortgage goes unpaid, the electricity is disconnected and there’s a panic because the freezer and fridge are full of ice cream and nothing else.

The worst out of all of it is the notion that work requirements are offensive to poor people.

After the “debt ceiling crisis” has abated — when we’ve secured, on credit, our latest two-gallon tub of I Dough, I Dough to stash in the freezer — we’re going to be ears-deep in stories about various efforts to “disenfranchise voters.” Nuh huh, folks. Negatori. we do not have a problem with making it too hard to vote in this country. We have a problem with making it too easy, with too many people doing the voting.

Because if they’re not fifth-column types trying to drive us over a cliff, the only other explanation is they’re half-blind hedonists who, as distinguished from not-believing in the tipping point, simply refuse to think about it. Or, simpler than that, are just never incentivized to start thinking about it in the first place. They’re not on the hook for the debt. It’s someone else’s problem.

This is a great nation, but it isn’t greater than math. If we’re setting it up under a set of rules that say beneficiaries of all the borrowing & spending can vote, and therefore have a shot at prevailing over those who are on the hook for it, then that’s setting up a system to challenge math. We won’t win at that. It’s the pickup truck challenging the freight train. No point in even asking the question.

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Bend the Knee
Sunday, April 30th, 2023

Best I can do lately is a monthly recap. There are advantages involved in this. Sometimes, in fact a lot of the time, when you shut your mouth and watch & listen, things become just a little bit clearer.

Here’s what I have seen:

Elon Musk’s rocket blew up, and liberals cheered as if this proved something…like, Elon can’t build rockets? And they can, or something?

Also on the Elon subject: Liberals are throwing a hissy over the blue checkmarks. So far Elon’s having the last laugh.

Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon got fired. Lemon, because nobody watches him, and Tucker because too many people watch him.

President Biden officially announced he is running for re-election in 2024. Some prominent commentators, not all of them on the left, have tried to get this narrative rolling that Donald Trump is the only Republican Biden could defeat.

The Fox News network settled the Dominion lawsuit. I see a lot of people are commenting on this as if it proves an open hearing and full examination of the facts would be embarrassing to Fox, but I note that the suit was for an amount even bigger than the settlement. So perhaps Dominion, who had to agree to the settlement, would have been embarrassed as well.

Mike Lindell the MyPillow guy lost his arbitration and has to pay $5 million. This whole thing looks stupid to me, on both sides. The word “unequivocal” is being used strangely here, and I think, wrongfully. It’s clear to me that according to the terms of arbitration, Lindell was to enjoy the benefit of any doubts — plaintiff had to prove the data, and all of the data, were entirely disconnected from the 2020 election. Somewhere, halfway through the 22 or so pages, there’s a shift. In the end, nobody knows anything, everything’s left up in the air; and Lindell has to pay.

The know-it-all woke-woman who redirected Budweiser’s enormous marketing resources to “evolve” the customer base (??) is on administrative leave. Their failure is complete.

Chicago’s Mayor-Elect wouldn’t condemn looting.

In Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene got in trouble, in theory, not really, for telling the truth about her unseemly colleague Eric Swalwell.

We have a terrible problem, or something, some awful danger that has something to do with men who won’t date “woke” women. When I was single, I didn’t date them either. Well I did. Until I learned things and then I didn’t. There are stories there, but the upshot is, sorry, I can’t condemn single men who do things the same way I did them when I was single, for the same reason. When she’s bunny-in-the-stewpot crazy, you high-tail it out of there, period full stop.

The Supreme Court refuses to rule on President Biden’s abracadabra student loan disappearing magic. I wish, when SCOTUS engages in this degree of damage, it would come out and admit it. “Refuse to rule” or “let stand” makes it look like they’re doing nothing. But it’s their place to lead, and this is a good example of how toxic a lack of leadership can be if it comes at the worst time and in the worst context. I mean gee, what else can the President do now? “You’re not overweight anymore! Executive order!” There’s no limit.

The “bullhorn” lawmakers in Tennessee who were expelled, have been reinstated.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has apologized for one of his most ill-considered comments.

A boy in a Pokemon tournament was expelled for laughing when asked for his preferred pronouns.

What do all these have in common?

I’m seeing a mix of good decisions and poor decisions. The decision-making, on balance, is deteriorating because the good decisions are badly outnumbered. And they’re made under duress, when the consequences of prior poor decisions have had a cornering effect. With very few and very rare exceptions, people are putting off the good decision-making until it’s become absolutely necessary.

In fact the decision-making is so bad, and the bad decision-making so universal, it drives me to look for a common cause. There must be one. Something is present that was once absent, or is absent that was once present. After mulling it over awhile and thinking of what’s changed, I think it’s the latter. Bad decision-making is the default. In times past we enjoyed the benefits of a restraining device that keeps us from making bad decisions, and that device is now missing or dormant.

And everywhere. Note what a terrible official Joe Biden is. People say “Trump is the only guy who could lose to him,” but what they really mean to say is “You can’t say anything good about Biden other than he isn’t Donald Trump.” And they’re just terrified that America might say “Okay yeah he isn’t…so that’s why we’re going to elect Trump.” It could happen. One percent of the people who voted for Biden in six different states, or far less than that…stay home. That would do it.

But Biden, in 2020, did win at least in theory. All over the world, elected officials with balls lost their elections, and the weird clowns who destroy everything they touch, won theirs. Everybody who runs anything anywhere is a Justin Trudeau. Something weird is happening.

I think there’s a certain quality we have sometimes, that we don’t have anymore. A lot of people think they have it and are exercising it pretty much constantly. But they haven’t done it in years.

Disagreeing, and remaining friends.

I mean, think about it. I walk up to you and say “We’re friends, right? Okay then. Water is dry. The moon is cheese.” And other ridiculous falsehoods…like the United States was founded in 1619 to preserve the institution of slavery, stuff like that…the proper response would be “Yes Morgan, we’re friends alright! And you’re full of it. You go down that road without me. But see you at the Christmas party!”

We all know that’s the right answer. But when’s the last time you’ve heard of someone in any position of visibility and profile, giving it? It’s just not happening anymore.

People are too desperate to be included in the group. The fear is going the other way — they’re terrified of being kicked out of it. It’s just like middle school, except it’s adulthood. And lately it’s everywhere.

We are, regularly…frequently…predictably…and universally…making terrible decisions. This is the pattern we’re seeing. People are being approached with ridiculous proposals and they say “Yes! Because I need to keep this job!” Instead of “No! Because I need my brain to work right. So I can do this job.” You don’t let dumb things like truth, logic and common sense win out over these Never-Never-Land overtures. If you want to stay friends, you bend the knee. And you presume your eventual demise if you don’t stay friends.

How did we get here? Unclear. Maybe the pandemic had something to do with it. China poisoned us in mind as well as body. Oh dear. Am I going to get punished for writing that where people can see it?

Another thing I notice: You can labor away in this effort to be included in the group, or to avoid being kicked out of the group, like in eighth grade; you can insist on quality in your elected representatives. Pick one. You can have one, and only one. You can’t have both.

It’s like keeping your eyes open when you sneeze. Seems possible, in fact easy. But just try it.

People don’t want to be social pariahs. They’re terrified of being excluded. And so they don’t insist on standards. If no one insists on the standards, the standards are gone, and when standards are gone…well, it’s like the ladder being gone underneath a window washer or a sign painter. Crashy crashy boom.

That’s where we are.

These things do go in cycles though. How we enter the next arc of the cycle, I don’t know. How quickly, I don’t know that either.

I do have my hopes.

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Defining “Woke”
Friday, March 31st, 2023

Apart from the Trump indictment, and the awful event over in Nashville, perhaps the most significant event in the month of March was when Bethany Mandel was asked to define “woke.” She didn’t do very well, and a lot of leftists took to the Internet to make hay out of the “breaking of her brain” or some such thing…

LOL: Briahna Joy Gray BREAKS the brain of Rising guest Bethany Mandel by asking her to define "wokeness" pic.twitter.com/uwRSSH0LaM

— The Vanguard (@vanguard_pod) March 14, 2023

She handled it well, shying away from excuses, and admitting that her performance at this key moment fell short of what she might have wanted. Also, she conceded the same point I did, in subsequent discussions: This is a fair question. We shouldn’t leave it unanswered.

At the same time, though, it’s mendacious to argue that the problem extends beyond mere ambiguity. “We know it when we see it,” while leaving the job not fully done, is satisfactory in most cases. Sylvester Stallone says None of this woke crap in my movies and we know exactly what he means. People aren’t lost on this.

It’s not easy to define, which gives The Left room to cheat, and cheat they do.

Mandel offers:

A radical belief system suggesting that our institutions are built around discrimination, and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination. It seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint, enforced by an angry mob.

The lingering question, and the issue surrounding it, reveals something important about us. Every single high office that could be occupied by some woke piece of crap, is. I’m looking at the World Economic Forum, the Davos dipshits legislating away my carbon emissions, Justin Trudeau, etc. Sorry Catholics, but that includes His Holiness. Whose elevation to that position remains shrouded in secrecy, practically unprecedented, and bizarre. It also includes the President of the United States, whose elevation to that office also occurred under suspicious, weird circumstances.

Davos People Outside of occupations of high office, every chance the people have to show they’re done with wokeness and don’t want any more of it, without exception, they take. Look at the Oscars. Look at subscription bases for woke printed material. Ratings of woke teevee shows. Sales of woke products. Movies starring woke superheroes. If there’s any sort of staged show to go with it, resulting in few having power over many, woke wins, and all or nearly all of the time. If the people have some clean and unfiltered way of showing their priorities and concerns, woke is an albatross, a consistent loser.

It has something to do with racism, climate change, LGBTQI+, homelessness, and many other issues near and dear to The Left. It is distinctly leftist, and angry too. But the relationships it has with being angry, and leftist, are subset relationships; all “woke” people are leaning left, and they’re all angry, but all angry people aren’t necessarily woke and all leftists are not necessarily woke. All left-invested issues aren’t necessarily woke issues. To want to put more decision-points that go with everyday living under government control, in & of itself, is not a “woke” desire although it’s exactly what leftists want to do. Leftists want to increase spending and raise taxes but that’s not necessarily what the “woke” want to do. They just end up wanting the same things, once all the serious proposals are in and we’re deliberating what to do about them.

Woke, I see, has something to do with the word “equity”:

While the terms equity and equality may sound similar, the implementation of one versus the other can lead to dramatically different outcomes for marginalized people.

Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.

That’s what the word “equity” means after the wokesters and the social justice warriors have gotten done mangling it. They were flailing about looking for a word they could dress up as “equal, but not equal” and, like a predator pulling the least fortunate out of a herd of pack animals, set upon the poor slowest-of-the-bunch “equity.”

Well, this is what it meant before that happened:

The money value of a property or of an interest in a property in excess of claims or liens against it. Justice according to natural law or right; specifically, freedom from bias or favoritism.

You see what they did here?

Before they came along, equity meant “no bias or favoritism.” Then they start masticating the word, and when they’re done with their grinding and their salivating and their digesting it means: They see one contestant as advantaged and another one as disadvantaged, so they’re going to stack the deck in anticipation of equal outcome.

But of course, we know from observing social justice warriors that your membership in an oppressed class or oppressor class, is a brand. You carry it womb to tomb. They don’t anticipate equal outcomes, to the contrary they have it all figured out who needs help and who needs a hobbling. And there’s no precision in their deck-stacking because there’s no restraint. The more, the better.

They have screwed up the word “equity.” They’ve re-defined it to mean the exact opposite of what it really means. So getting back to the word “woke” — let’s not pretend we’re busting a sweat coming up with a workable and precise definition for the woke. They don’t need our help. We know them when we see them, and you can bet they know themselves when they see themselves.

An “Old Curmudgeon” came up with something good about this:

In short, woke ideas positively encourage paranoid habits of mind, which are analogous to those exhibited by people suffering from depression, anxiety, and other psychological disorders. Looking at the world through woke lenses leads one to see oppression and injustice even where they do not exist, to feel strongly aggrieved at this imagined oppression and injustice, and then to treat the narrative of grievance that results as if it were confirming evidence of the reality of the imagined oppression and injustice…

[snip]

The difference between wokeness and other forms of delusional paranoia is that the wokester�s delusions and paranoia reflect what I referred to above as a hyper-egalitarian view of the world…What I am calling hyper-egalitarian is the tendency to suspect all inequalities of being per se unjust � for example, to suppose that if 10% of the population of a country is of a certain race yet less than 10% of the stockbrokers in that country are of that race, this amounts to a �racist� inequity that cannot be given an innocent explanation and must somehow be eliminated by governmental policy.

What we call “woke” is a betrayal against the progressive promise of a better new world in which we get along together in a sense of harmony that’s been missing up until now. Whether any particular “woke” person understands this consciously, varies according to which one it is. But for people of many different viewpoints and backgrounds to get along with each other and co-exist with greater understanding and less conflict, there would have to be provisions made for imperfections, and other things that could be perceived as slights.

In one word: “Slack.” We would all have to cut each other some.

And “woke” doesn’t cut us any. This is a microaggression, that is a microaggression, microaggressions everywhere…everyone with some of the five senses working and a pulse to keep ’em going, is a proximity-detonated land mine. Because every possibility for offense is an opportunity. That’s what really distinguishes them.

If we’re looking for the perimeter, so that we can minimize ambiguity in declaring this thing to be woke and that other thing not to be woke, it might be best to form and then judge by a bullet-form definition.

With that in mind, I submit the following. However many bullets qualify for a “positive diagnosis,” I’ll leave to the reader, although it’s clearly more than one and it may fall short of all ten:

1. Preferring visible expressions of dissatisfaction over less visible observations of fixable things.
2. Placing greater weight on group memberships than on individual hopes, dreams, concerns and ambitions.
3. Preening.
4. Angry.
5. Unready for normal human interaction or relationships.
6. Pursuing a cause that involves revenge against a group for a perceived slight.
7. In search of such a cause.
8. Advocating one brand of discrimination as redress against another.
9. Pursuing esteem but unready to offer skills, talents or values that would legitimately earn it.
10. Annoying.

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Trump Indicted
Friday, March 31st, 2023

Story.

Thread.

Do things their way, because the democrats own the prosecutors. We’ll just have to cope with homeless-pee and poop in our streets, windmills chopping up birds, being forced to buy EVs that cost a dollar a mile to drive…because…indictments.

Evidently, that’s the vision. That’s the plan.

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T.W.A.T.S.
Friday, March 17th, 2023

“Brought to you by ‘The Women Against Tiredness Society’.”

It’s kind of funny because there’s some truth to it. Watching wives & girlfriends shuffle off to work, I’ve often thought this. There’s a tiredness there the men aren’t sharing, and this is after the workplace has been turned upside-down and inside-out to make it more comfortable and appealing to females.

“Supporting women in STEM” is particularly concerning. STEM is something I know to be a thing where persistence prevails. People succeed there with & without support, and they fail there too. But if you have to have support in order to succeed in it, do you belong in it? I suppose there’s a possibility. At the risk of being called a sexist, I say let’s call that “possible but not probable.”

Well. The proponents of the two-income household have won, and the dollar has shrunk. No one’s chasing the American Dream, going on vacation every year and sending the kids to college on one income anymore, so we’re going to have to keep doing it this way for awhile. Stay tired, girls.

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Death of the Mentor
Tuesday, February 28th, 2023

Well, now I get it. I thought I did before, but I didn’t. Since 1977, maybe before, watching Obi-Wan Kenobi get cut down in front of Luke Skywalker, like everyone else I was thinking: Gosh Luke, that’s a real gut punch even if you only got to know the old guy for a few hours or days. And it is. A popular trope has been built up around the mentor getting killed as part of the Hero’s Journey.

It occurs to me that until Gerard Van der Leun left us, I never really had reason to truly identify with this thing — after the loss of companionship, knowing I’ll never see a good friend again on this plane of existence, the confusion. Or I should say disorientation. Never had a mentor, at least not a real solid one, a mentor quite like him.

I said a few words at his service a few weeks ago, at Mrs. Freeberg’s urging. The officiator invited people to come up and share their stories, and such was the friend-making power of the deceased that this opened floodgates. One person would finish, and another hand would shoot up, and another and another. I wanted to let them all go first. This wasn’t about me, and all these people were from his church which he joined just a couple years ago. Over and over again I heard the wish expressed: Wish I knew him longer. Well, this is why I was taking these nudges from the person to my left. I’d known him longer than the two years, something like seventeen, eighteen or so, and I knew better than they did that this wish was a wise one.

But I’m not a church going guy. I’m a blogger guy. Different worlds. It’s a fitting send-off for our world-straddling giant of a friend, that each of these worlds should speak its piece. After waiting a respectful interval and waiting for the proper turn.

I did not mention the wisdom of wishing for more time with Gerard. It wasn’t necessary. I think everyone present got it. I did mention that we met when one of Gerard’s pieces made a nationally syndicated radio show, to which I was listening to a recording, and I had to drop what I was doing and mutter silently to myself “What’s that?” And “Where’s the rewind button?” I didn’t mention the radio show was Rush Limbaugh’s, nor did I delve too much into the subject of Gerard’s piece, because, again: World straddling. People who’s politics didn’t align with my own, or with Gerard’s, who nevertheless thought of him as a friend, were entitled to think the most positive of the available thoughts on this day.

I didn’t go into the routine that developed after I became gainfully employed again. I’d rise at three or so, read the headlines to figure out what was cheesing me off that day, or perhaps I’d fixated on what got to me the previous day. And I’d blog something. Then I’d get dressed and go to work, and at lunch I’d try to catch up on my personal e-mails. Every now and then, I would see: From VANDERLEUN. Subject: Psssssssssst… And I’d say to myself: Aw, shit. Misspelled this. Or that. Forgot to close a tag.

Nobody is infallible. Paying it back was fun and rewarding. But I knew I wasn’t infallible either, and if I paid one of those back, it was bound to come back my way full force when the time was right.

Having not gone into that, I didn’t get into the “Bubkes” debacle. That’s a real shame. I don’t know what Gerard anecdote is most amusing to others, but this one stands out to me. In my laziness and in my ignorance, I sidestepped the simpler expression — you should always use the simpler one, you know — when what I wanted to say was “nothing.” Couldn’t resist the temptation to spice it up, so I stepped outside the perimeter of my understanding and used “butkus.” Eight hours later, here it comes…Psssssssssst…

This time I pushed back. Butkus? Perfectly cromulent word. What’s your boggle?

I got back a dissertation about bubkes being right and butkus being wrong. This time, I thought, I had the master dead to rights. Urban Dictionary said so.

Well…

From VANDERLEUN. Subject: “Urban… schmurban”. You know how in poker a royal flush beats three-of-a-kind? It was like that. My “reference” link met up with two far more comprehensive definitions, out of dictionaries in the native Yiddish…definitions neatly overlapping with my original intent, “emphatically nothing”…etymologies…some cursory research into alternative spellings, and how & why those came to be…yet another definition straight out of Urban Dictionary substantiating his version and not mine. And, more. The words of 15 Jewish ex-in-laws of his who would back him up, and if all that failed to convince, an invitation to “just get two broadswords and settle this like men!”

Had to go back and edit this to add that; it’s vintage Gerard. Yes, the immovable object did yield to the irresistible force.

I didn’t mention how thankful I was that he found the church in the last two years of his life. I probably should have. I know it meant a lot to him.

I did include just a few highlights from our friendship. I tried not to make it about me. That’s a little bit of a fuzzy line and I hope I didn’t overstep it. I might have said something about my background, as a software weenie, a computer engineer. I could have made that relevant by explaining a bit more, but I chose not to: We are accustomed to a technical world, in which for the job to be done at any satisfactory level, you have to define everything. Stepping into the world of writing for humans, this has been a tough habit to shake. If you explain everything to humans, you create a situation in which there’s nothing more to be said. The human mind, naturally economizing, moves on to the next subject. And in the meantime, you’ve probably bored them with your bloviating.

Contrary to the impressions people pick up from my writing, I’m aware of the problem. What to do about it, is what eludes. What to cut? I haven’t got a clue.

To Gerard, it was second nature and I can prove it. You go to his impressive accumulation and pick one piece out of the thousands available to you. Pick any at random. He leaves out stuff that you don’t need, and he knows you don’t need it. It’s as if he knows you personally. As if he’s sitting right next to you. That’s how good writers write. It’s not how I write, although, not for lack of trying.

After I’ve coped with the loss of a friend, I have to cope with that. That’s the light that I’ve just seen extinguished. Some might say I’ve learned a bit here and there. They might say there’s been improvement over the last eighteen years, the benefits of shutting up and listening to him when I’d done wrong, reading his chicken-scratching over my manuscript. The constant drumbeat of mild criticism, the occasional harsher variety, up to and including “You should be shot for using this word.” And the praise which came at the end of an interval so long, that by the time there was any I’d all-but decided there wasn’t going to be any. I remember in particular, one long meandering piece I wrote when one of my older cars had finally blown its head gasket, which I thought was just stupid sentimental gibberish. His words are there now: “That�s good, Morgan. Very good.” I remember thinking: What? Why? But others agreed and I was decidedly outvoted.

Such is my conundrum. My high watermark is “I did good? Me no understand…well if you all say so…” A writer has to relate to his audience. And I do…here and there, now and then, by coincidence like the busted clock twice daily. It’s not good enough. Not for the big leagues, anyway.

Well you know — if the Lord grants me some more years and decades, I’ll keep working at it. Such is life. I’ll try and get better and better, hopefully succeeding on occasion. I can only hope to approach those who really know what they’re doing, never replace them. But cursing the darkness does us no good. The best we can do is what we can, when we can, and in the aftermath after such a great light has gone out, to show our gratitude for having had it by striving to do things we wouldn’t be able to do if we’d never had it.

And thanks to my friendship with him, that part, at least, is easy.

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Gerard Van der Leun: December 26, 1945 — January 27, 2023
Monday, January 30th, 2023

More on this later. Our dear friend of many years Gerard, whom we’ve thought of us Dumbledore to our Harry Potter almost from the very beginning, checked into the hospital at the beginning of the year. Through the updates he managed to arrange, we found that he made it back home again, then had to check back in as his condition worsened. Through the additional testing it emerged that he was (known to him or not, we’re not clear at this point and it doesn’t very much matter) a Cancer patient and the disease had metastasized. This was a week ago, and just a few days after that he left for the next world in the middle of the night.

It always rattled me just a little bit when he linked to me. I seldom thought myself worthy. Readers of this blog — which (he was always amused when I repeated this line) no one actually reads anyway — might have noticed over the last few years there’s been a worsening deficiency in someone actually writing for it. What can I say, the world around us has been losing stability and it’s become a more daunting task to summarize what it is, while my available time for doing so has been on a rapid decline. Many’s the time I thought he was linking to me, not necessarily to capture the best, but to encourage me to get back into it so that maybe I could do better. Struggling away, maybe, igniting and re-igniting the sopping wet fire log. But, I don’t want to make this about me. I’ll just say it was a humbling experience to see, after he left us, he did it one last time and on his birthday. It gave me reason to stop and think about priorities, what we do, how much time we spend doing it, and what people think about it all. People who say “You spend too much time blogging” demand lots of attention. I’m not so sure they’ve put as much thought into it, as the people who’d say “You should spend more.” After all, we can concede the point this is a noisy world full of chatter, and blogs add to the chatter. But they add to the understanding as well, and does our world suffer from a crushing abundance of that? That’s a different thing.

I was re-reading the piece that introduced us to each other, The Voice of the Neuter is Heard Throughout the Land, and down in the comment section I beheld a beautiful example of Pure Gerard: His response to some egotist who’d wandered along to impress him with knowledge of the phrase “ad hominem” whilst accusing him of engaging in the fallacy. Ah, come on, let’s admit it: When we read blogs, sometimes we read them to watch “bring a knife to a flamethrower fight” moments like this. There’s no shame. It’s like admitting your head yaws around a bit when you drive past a domestic disturbance.

You seem, in your reading of the article, to have glided past the statement:

“What is of interest to me here is not what Stein writes or says. His own words damn him more decisively than a thousand bloggers blathering blithely What interestest me is how he speaks”

I also note at the beginning: “Once a blogpile of such mountainous proportions starts, there’s little left to comment on in terms of the content of Stein’s small dry excretion after the first five hours”

I fail to see how annou[n]cing I’m not going to do the content and then not doing it fails the promise of the article.

If you have not been able to see articles critical of Mr. Stein’s “content” you have been failing to look in lebenty-leben of the right places.

A scroll of michellemalkin.com will quickly lead you to an entry thick with pointers to those writers who have. Reading just a few of them will, I am sure, satiate your lust for content.

Sincerely…[emphasis mine]

That’s our departed friend, with the sparkly flaming part at midpoint on the short, short fuse. There was a different version to be seen after the fuse was all burned away and he just didn’t give a crap about pleasantries anymore. That one was every bit as entertaining, if not more so, but to keep this G-rated the milder one will suffice.

His impressive works are like the mighty ocean; simple enough a task to catch a glimpse, but to survey the entirety of it would be something to challenge the imagination, let alone actual achievement. I’ve been compiling a list of the best that might emerge from such an effort. Every now and then I’ll think of something to add, and the gods of the search engines will smile upon my efforts, or not.

For the top spot out of all of them, the web site updater evidently agrees with me: The piece he put in place on Memorial Day weekends, at least most of them, The Name in the Stone.

Just shut up and read. Maybe grab yourself a bowl of creamed onions, begin at the top, and proceed downward until you reach the end. You’ll likely emerge a slightly better, more appreciative person for the effort, leading a slightly richer life.

A mighty torch that gave off a great light, has gone out in our midst. I cannot speculate with confidence on our prospects for seeing another like him. We were fortunate enough just to have the one. Godspeed, my friend.

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Definition of “Woman”
Thursday, December 29th, 2022

Must not yield to temptation…to explain the joke is to ruin the joke…

RedState adds:

The video was from June, but they were suspended from Twitter in March over calling Rachel Levine a man, so they posted the video again on Wednesday. But under Twitter 1.0, you weren�t have been allowed to see that kind of humor or that speech skewering the present problem with the left. Now you can again, and that�s positive movement. Indeed, it was the Babylon Bee suspension that got Musk interested in buying Twitter, to begin with, because of his belief in free speech.

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Mendacious
Sunday, December 25th, 2022

I’m quite done with 2022. I had a politics-goal, and a career-goal. No goals for family. I scored three-for-two, which isn’t doing badly at all. I saw the Republicans take the House of Representatives this year. But, like many, I’m weary of this exercise of lowering the threshold of victory down into the floorboards. It’s tiring and it’s befuddling. In politics, the question is whether we like businesses to continue operating and prospering, or do we want to see them swallowed up in huge city-blight tumbleweeds of homelessness, illiteracy, sprawl, decay, drug use and human waste. What’s up with these photo-finish races?

Even if the center of gravity lands on the good side of the brink and the precarious teetering eventually subsides, with disaster averted — which is usually not the case — the question remains outstanding. Why this precarious teetering? Should businesses be successful. It’s a no brainer. Someone out there wants them to fail? And is picking up votes. Silly.

There are those who would protest, and earnestly, that I should look deeper at the underlying intent. Maybe people vote that way because they can see something I can’t see. But I dunno. Does it matter? The policies promoted make it much more difficult to run a business and hire people. Once they’re enacted, that’s the effect they have. Look at the cities these people run. Decay decay decay, time after time. So can their supporters really see something that eludes me? If there is something there, it doesn’t seem to matter. The far more relevant thing taking place here, is that they’re being fooled. The very few people who profit in some way from this continued suffering, have mastered the technique of fooling the electorate and knocking that center of gravity outward, over the edge, so the disastrous tumbling becomes inevitable. And then we get more democrats, with all the wreckage they bring. Soaring rents, permanent underclasses, tent cities, druggies, bums, and an ever-swelling smorgasboard of weird new “rights” and re-definitions.

For 2023 I want: Less deception. Less treachery.

It’s not realistic for me to demand fewer attempts. The attempts made in this year past, have worked. If deception works, you have to expect more of it. I suppose my hopes would then have to depend on the incredulity of those who are to be deceived.

And this doesn’t seem, to me, to be asking for a whole lot. Just stop buying bullshit. The people who are lying to you are trying to hurt you; if they weren’t trying to hurt you, there’d be no reason for them to lie to you. People need to ask themselves, when they see a “package” of something presented to them, if the contents are the same as the labeling. They’re usually not. For example, feminists want to stop men from “mansplaining” and this looks like an appeal to good manners. Is that what it is? A woman wants to use a cigarette lighter to check her gas tank; I should just go ahead and let her? That doesn’t seem like kindness or good manners to me. Or she’s jumping one car from another, hooking the cables up to the wrong posts. She wouldn’t want me pointing out to her the right way to do it? Funny, that; if I were her, I’d want someone to go ahead and correct me. Mansplaining: The labeling on the package is good manners. The contents within are different, a two-tiered, caste society in which men keep their male mouths shut unless someone addressees them first. So say no, because we don’t have caste systems in America, or at least we’re not supposed to have them or want them. That’s my wish. Do that with everything. Ask if the contents match the labeling. Presume a mismatch until it’s proven otherwise. Presume deception.

Because that’s where we’re living now.

There are people who look at themselves, and see something different from what’s there. To expect them to match up their labeling with their content, and present themselves with honesty, is too much. You can’t be honest with others if you’re not honest with yourself. So in situations like this, we have three, not just two, different compositions: what’s presented; what the presenter sees when he looks in the mirror; what’s really there. All three can be different. And my example of this would be the Trump hating Republican who goes around saying “Stick a fork in Trump, he’s done, he’s dragging down the party.” These people see themselves as party loyalists, weary of defeat, seeing something others don’t see. They’ve figured out the albatross that’s been weighing down the Republican party forever, and it’s the orange man who came on the scene in 2015. Get rid of him, and we have a chance! But…that’s not what they are. If they were really weary of defeat, and looking forward to victories, they’d be asking about agendas. The Republican party, you’ll notice, has never won without one. Quite to the contrary, the party has a long history of “good mannered” people who think dressing sharp and saying “please” and “thank you” will get the job done. It never has.

So the Trump hater sees himself as a far-seeing savior of the party, dedicated to good feelings and good manners; unbeknownst to him, he presents himself as something quite different, a curmudgeon who hates a certain orange-colored real estate and casino mogul; and what he is, is a third thing quite different from the other two. A neurotic, fearful little sycophant, intent on assembling a social-media coterie of disembodied voices helping each other hate. Only the last of those three maintains any sort of goal that has a potential for success. They log onto Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and do their hating. They look like what they are.

For that, we should be thankful. There are other things that are quadrupably mendacious — they pass themselves off as something, they see themselves as a different thing, they’re perceived as something different from those two, and what they really are is something different from those three. That would be our U.S. election system. I keep hearing all sorts of bad things about me that apply if I question this system or the results it produces, which suggests there should be some solid evidence available that would make me feel better about all of it. But I’ve come across no such thing. When the rubber meets the road, the argument that our elections should earn my trust, is based on usurpation of the benefit of the doubt. Apologists for the status quo get it, because they want it. I’m to prove my skepticism, or shut up, for some reason. But how much of a status quo is this? We’re living in a post pandemic world. Our elections have been reformed, hastily, and not entirely very well, out of our frantic reaction to the virus that came from China. If I want to be fair about it, I should maintain confidence in the system that’s directly proportionate to the rigor of the challenges and questions that were posed to the new system while it was in its developmental stages. Well, we were never allowed to ask any, and we’re still not allowed.

I look around and see — you know what? Everything is like this. Everything.

It’s almost 2023 and I’m still seeing people running around out there wearing masks. Driving in their cars, wearing masks. Alone. They are not presenting themselves as what they truly are, and what they look like, to me, is something different entirely.

It’s a simple wish. I’m gathering I’m not the only one that has it. As we bid good-bye to 2022, which I will recall only slightly more fondly than 2021 and 2020 — I want less bullshit. Less deception.

Say what you mean. Be what you are. See yourself as I see you, and correct things accordingly before you pop up on my radar, so I don’t have to do it for you.

And don’t ever lie to me. It’s not because it upsets me. You’re not succeeding the way you think. You’re actually amusing, in an annoying way.

Best way to get started going down that road, is not to do it. Everyone should insist on it. Less nonsense, less excrement.

And get off my lawn.

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Perhaps It’s Just as Well
Tuesday, November 15th, 2022

Everyone’s claiming a mandate. The democrats, establishment Republicans, Trump, people who hate Trump, you name it. No one really has one. What’s the takeaway?

The democrats who’ve been running the country into the ground over the last two years, did not receive vindication. The Republicans did not earn confidence as any sort of replacement for them. I’m taking that to mean the populace is giving up, for the time being, on Washington solving our problems. Well that would be good. There are those who would insist, if Republicans decisively won this thing, they’d just spend money every bit as fast as the democrats ever did. I can’t call that wrong. Maybe the nation’s resolving to give up on big government and look within. Fire them all, get to work, and generate enough assets to maybe climb our way out of this debt spiral.

But, it’s a little worse than that. You’d have to admit the democrats did something right here, and the Republicans need to up their game at whatever that is. Besides the obvious cheating, there’s something else.

Suppose Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the premiere embarrassment of today’s democrat party, says something I don’t like and I confront a democrat about it. How do you think that would go? Let’s see…first there would be some denials that AOC is anything but a low-ranking, marginal player who doesn’t really represent anyone. If that doesn’t play, there’s going to be some “actually” stuff about how AOC is courageously calling it as she sees it, and there’s some meaningful nuance in there that’s escaped my notice. She’s the bright one here, I’m the ignoramus for not seeing what she actually meant. We know it would be something like that. Some sort of apologia. Something to soothe the tensions and soften the blows. Take it to the bank.

Now let’s say Donald Trump says something I don’t like and I confront a Republican about it. That will be like lighting a bottle rocket. Oh look! Someone (else) who doesn’t like Trump! Maybe we can make a wave out of that! There will be no apologia. There will be no “Maybe what he meant was…” There will be no “Actually that’s not so bad.” There will be plenty of “Yeah, and you know what else he did?”

A highly polarized, depressed and disenchanted electorate sees two political parties like these. A disengaged, distracted, weary electorate. Two sides jockeying for power, neither one worthy, both tried and both found wanting. But one side eats its own.

This is all twenty-twenty hindsight, which is gutless. But, gutless things are gutless because they enjoy advantages. We often frown on this kind of hindsight because it’s too easy to see things with clarity, looking in our rear view mirror. Right now though, clarity is a good thing. The democrats beat the Republicans here, and it happened that way because one party is united and the other one is being eaten alive by these Trump-hating parasites who have no vision for success and just want to hate.

So perhaps it’s just as well that we all learned this lesson.

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Defending the Status Quo
Monday, November 14th, 2022

So, my blog just turned eighteen, yay. As it does so, we’ve been waiting on key House and Senate races, three, four, five days past Election Day. It occurs to me that when I first started it, there had just been an election, the smoke had cleared and nobody was waiting on anything. Four years before that, of course, there was the Florida debacle of 2000, and there was shame. Shame led to fixing things and elections became much more passionate but still much more decisive. One and done. Now we’re back to “Oh, lookee, hold up, I found a dimpled chad, or a station wagon full of ballots…”

Some people crave the drama. They don’t see anything wrong with this.

Well, to be fair, let’s break it down. There are three reasons to defend the status quo.

1. Partisan advantage. There’s a certain party that consistently wins, or at least benefits, from mushy/nonexistent definitions and inefficient, unreliable counting with convoluted variables tossed in the mix that shouldn’t be there. When the goalposts move several days after the deadline, they consistently move in one direction…which isn’t suspicious at all.

2. Fear. It has often been said that “If the public is polarized, and both sides of the polarization think they’ve been cheated whenever they lose elections because they lack faith in the process, that puts us in a REALLY bad place!” That’s certainly true. What’s not true is that you have to maintain faith you don’t really have, to avoid going to this bad place.

3. By default. A lot of people will defend the status quo just because it’s the status quo. Given doubts, they will award it the benefit of all these doubts, when it doesn’t deserve such benefit. Perhaps they don’t want to integrity-check the reform proposals for ulterior motives, so they figure it’s less work to leave things the way they are — forgetting about potential ulterior motives in those who want to keep the status quo. So they harbor the serpent to their bosom, hoping it isn’t venomous.

After those you get into emotional stuff. It’s fun and exciting to play-act like you’re in possession of some nugget of information that completely changes the game; everyone who agrees with you gets it, and everyone who opposes you is some ignoramus who hasn’t managed to catch on to the fundamentals and it isn’t worth explaining it to ’em. Trouble is, nobody can define what that nugget is. There has been a “branding,” of sorts, that you’re a cool sophisticated and good American citizen if, and only if, you maintain a belief that our elections are sound — without any evidence to support it. And if you’re hounding “election deniers” for evidence to prove the opposite, especially if you’re adjudicating consistently, and arbitrarily, that what they can bring you is inadequate. If you join those deniers and maintain any doubts, or just ask inconvenient questions, then you’re a slope-foreheaded rube type, best-case. A buck-tooth. Maybe a terrorist. A pariah, in any case. So the fashion-verdict is clear.

These are all terrible reasons to defend anything.

All three rely on this tactic I’ve heard so much over the last two years: “There is no evidence of widespread fraud, so unless you have some, STFU.” It genuinely shocks them when I tell them that’s not how it works — when I remind them that if you have integrity, but you lack transparency so you’re left just hoping the integrity is there, and assuming it’s staying in place, you might as well not have the integrity at all. So prove to me the results are honest. They look at me in genuine horror. They don’t know what to make of it.

But that IS right.

You really think, when countries dump democracy, they stop holding elections? You think that’s how it works? Give me five examples. Heck, give me just one. That’s not what they do. When countries get rid of democracy, they hold sham elections that are pure theater to make it look like they’re still holding them. That’s not what our elections are, even today? Prove it.

Technology has done amazing things over the last forty years. It hasn’t done anything to make our elections transparent. Look around. Derp dee doo, waiting on the counting, waiting on the counting, day five, day ten, day thirty…derp derp derp. You’re really that easily manipulated? Or you think you’re living in the 1830’s?

Anyway, if there was cheating, it’s only cheating that can be done if the numbers, pre-cheat, are close. And of course if there wasn’t any cheating, the numbers were close. What makes them close? What happened to the Red Wave? There are many thoughts about this.

One of them is that we did have one, and this is what it looks like. We’re living in an age in which all waves are reduced to trickles. Interestingly, this coincides with the age in which it takes several days or weeks to noodle out the results. That’s certainly suggestive of engineered outcome. But then there is this “Dump Trump” idea that has bubbled to the surface. This time we really got him! The public is fed up with Trump, and the Republicans better cut him loose.

Okay. Let’s give that a fair hearing too.

I say often that if we should be arguing about something, it’s important to argue about it honestly. People think that it’s easy and comes naturally. No. What’s easy is to get people to lie to themselves about what a thing is, when they argue about it. Seeing things as what they truly are is hard. Remembering what they truly are, throughout an entire session of arguing, is even harder.

Trump’s rudeness: Good or bad? Okay, what is that. Is it…making fun of a disabled reporter? That was resoundingly debunked, even by left wing “fact checking” sites. It didn’t happen.

And yet, Donald Trump certainly is not a model of refined, polite behavior. There’s something there. We call it “mean tweets” on both sides…so what is that exactly?

If we’re going to argue about something, then as always, let’s do it honestly. Donald Trump is “rude” because he says things like “Hillary managed such-and-such a thing very, very badly.” That is an example of his rudeness. He points out coherent reasons to vote against his opponent, which is something everybody who runs for office is supposed to be doing.

Argue honestly. Someone, somewhere, at sometime over the last forty years, give or take, came up with an “etiquette” rule that only democrats can talk about mistakes or missteps of their opponents. Republicans, somehow, are obliged to portray democrats as competent in all things…but, uh, vote for me because, uh, I love my wife and I’m a nice guy or something.

Trump is “rude” because he colored outside the lines of that stencil.

Argue honestly. There’s this big push to make Trump go away since Tuesday…but it didn’t start then. It’s been around awhile. A lot of people want to return us back to the way it used to work, the status quo pre-Trump, because that worked out well for them. Not for the rest of us though.

Everybody’s wondering what happened and what it means. My answers are:

One, because of the factors up top, a lot of people are defending highly suspect, sluggish, sneaky, shady elections because the results are providing opportunities for them to push their ideas. Republicans better cut Trump loose, keep abortion around forever, etc. They’re frustrated because they haven’t been able to achieve instant-victory with these ideas until now, and they see these sneaky, suspect elections as a handy tool to potentially generate enough lift to overcome the drag. They’re not focusing on the problem where it actually exists: Right or wrong, they never learned how to argue. How to attack an idea. Or how to defend one. They want the sneaky, shifty election to do it for them.

Two, when you advance the Republican argument, that the party in charge has to be dislodged because things are miserable, you’re thinking like someone over thirty-five. That’s not to say you’re wrong. But, kids don’t think that way. To them, the two parties are like two old guys, and it’s a “Devil you know or devil you don’t” thing.

I am among the people who have to face facts, and admit to error. I was walking on clouds toward the end, looking forward to an end of this chapter in which democrat party tutelage leads to economic misery, and economic misery leads to more democrats winning as their party escapes accountability, and it becomes a vicious cycle. It’s been going on since the 1930’s. Somehow, I had been lulled into looking forward to a bookend. I would have done well to remind myself of the hundreds and hundreds of densely-packed, blue-state cities in which this whirlpool of despair persists. The chapter’s not closing. The democrats bring misery, and then they thrive on it, that’s just how it works.

People lose sight of any vision for a cure. They get depressed — that’s why we called it The Great Depression. Your public schoolteacher will tell you FDR got re-elected three times because he was so bravely standing up and fighting the economic blight. Evidently that’s not really what happened. We’re living in what really happened, which is: The public’s desire for things to get better, wanes. They lose hope. They start to defend those who have been tormenting them, and to attack anyone else who comes along offering the potential of relief.

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Control Communities
Monday, October 31st, 2022

On this “fake it ’til you make it” thing…

It occurs to me that we could think of this as how humans are built. We settle ourselves into communities, and at the community level a decision is made somehow about whether we’ll put up with fakery. This is why certain people don’t fit into certain communities. If you’ve watched people for a very long time like I have, you’ll notice certain people don’t fit into certain places: Alice invites Bob to live in Aliceville, and when Bob makes the move, things don’t click. Like much of nature, this is a simple thing until you take the time to study it, at which point you discover layers of complexity. “Bob couldn’t make it because Bob is a jerk” makes perfect sense, until Bob relocates to Bobtown, where he gets along just fine. Then: “Alice can live in Aliceville but Bob is relegated to Bobtown because Aliceville has a higher standard…and Bob’s a jerk” makes perfect sense. Until the day Alice visits Bobtown and can barely stand it. Then, you could keep things simple by saying: “Alice is a giver, and the people of Aliceville make it tolerable for her because they’re not a bunch of manic takers like the inhabitants of Bobtown who just take take take, until she has nothing left to give.” Which, again, makes perfect sense. Until you find the citizens of Bobtown are kindly counseling Alice, on her way out of town, not to let the doorknob hit her in the ass.

Deductive reasoning makes it clear, therefore, there’s something deeper and more complicated happening here. Neither side has a monopoly on civil behavior, or mutually rewarding associations. There must be flavors of communities; unwritten codes of conduct.

It’s got a lot to do with why you keep getting sent to jail on Facebook. Why Elon Musk is making such mighty waves as he takes over Twitter. Why we have red states and blue states during our elections.

It isn’t the people, it’s the “towns.” Certain people can’t co-exist with certain communities. The community might envision it as a flaw or shortcoming on the part of the person, but a lot of the time if you ask the person, you’ll find it’s a “principle” or some such thing. You can see that as a flaw. But not without being forced to admit that we all have flaws. The communities commit to prevailing narratives. It’s hard to see this when the narrative has something to do with recognizing what’s true and what’s not true. A lot of communities do this without realizing they’re doing it: “There’s no point to discussing climate change with someone who doesn’t admit to climate change.” “You shouldn’t be allowed out of your house without a mask.” “You shouldn’t be taking up precious medical resources if you won’t get vaccinated.”

All the people have the “but” in their “I’m a tolerant person, but.”

All the communities have the “but” in their “We’re an accepting and broad-minded community, but.”

Random Bullshit Go! The Book of Genesis, taking on the daunting subjects of what exactly we are, what are our spiritual problems and how did we get here, fulfills. It provides the hints. With the Expulsion, we came to realize we are corrupt, and we’ve become something different from what we were supposed to be when we were Created. With the Deluge, we found we can build communities that are corrupt, making spiritual recovery impossible, because you have to become a jerk to survive; a hard reset is the only fix. With the Tower of Babel, we found we can’t all live among each other, nor can we build communities that are truly welcoming to everyone, and any effort to do so is doomed.

Haven’t you noticed? To some among us, it’s ridiculous, risible and unworthy of discussion that Biden’s win was a cheat. To others among us, it’s ridiculous that it wasn’t. People assert Biden really did win, and they “win” the argument at this, by taking over the community in which the argument takes place, and regulating the information exchange. “Election deniers” must not be allowed to speak. If they are so allowed, “fact checkers” must have the last word. Those are the rules of the community. So there. They “won.” With their thumbs on the scale. Very impressive.

We’re to believe they have to exercise such iron fisted dictatorial control over arguments about the election…but the election itself was as free as…well. I guess that’s a whole different topic.

Observation: Where Biden didn’t win, there’s no squabbling. Even though information can flow freely there. Information Control is the one tool of cleanliness, order and refinement the human race has built, that works perfectly in reverse. It does nothing to retard or repel chaos; it draws the chaos in, where it sticks, like cockleburs to your wool socks. It does the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do.

In the states where we don’t do this — communities — people say what they think. They aren’t playing the “fake it ’til you make it” game. They worry about what does & doesn’t work, rather than about what does & doesn’t soothe passions, or ensure their long-term survival within the evolving culture. If information flows freely and some of it turns out to be nutty, the people hearing it make the final call as to whether or not they believe it. There is trust in the individual, who doesn’t need a “fact checker” to tell him what is and isn’t so. Like competent musicians, they can play solo. If they screw it up, they can learn, and get it right themselves. They can also make the final call as to whether they were fooled at all.

We squabble in these other locales, the ones in which the bad musicians, the fake-it-til-you-make-it people, the “Random Bullshit Go!” people, are struggling to achieve dictator status. Where they want to run everything, but don’t yet…or, their bid to run everything is in the process of failing. Arizona. New Mexico. Wisconsin. Michigan. Georgia. Pennsylvania.

The United States of America, as a whole.

And Twitter and Facebook.

The Control Communities. The places where people say “We know it’s like this, we’re one hundred percent sure, because if anyone doubts it we don’t allow them to say anything.” Everyone has to consent to that, and those communities are unstable because everyone doesn’t consent to it.

My observation is that in those other places, where the “Random Bullshit Go!” people don’t run everything, or have been pushed off to the gutter the way they’d like to push others, you don’t have this instability. You have genuine freedom of speech, which is supposed to bring all sorts of dysfunction, confusion and conflict in perpetuity. But you don’t have that in those places. That’s what you have in the places where the fakers run things, where information flow is restricted and regulated by the bad performers, the fake-it-til-you-make-it people. Everyone else pays the price while their little emperors struggle for concertmaster status, when they can’t even hit the notes. And then everyone else is forbidden from talking about it…while the Elephant in the Room that has such an influence over their daily lives, grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and the pressure builds.

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Their Endless Task
Friday, October 28th, 2022

In less than two weeks we’re having a contest with our friends, the liberals, to figure out who gets to have influence for the next two years. There are those who attach unusual importance to this election, and there are others who are tired of the biannual drumbeat-of-superlative and refuse to attach any. I’m in between the two. But, like many others, I’m struggling to figure out who these people are. More precisely, what exactly it is they want.

Their answer to rising prices is abortions. Who are these people? After spending a good chunk of a lifetime trying to figure it out, I’ve gained some better insight by looking within. Music. Music helps me to understand the liberals.

There is this passage in Romeo and Juliet by Tchaikovsky that fills me with shame when I hear it. It’s the part I should have practiced more when I was playing it, and I didn’t do the necessary practicing so I was one of those mediocre players who did the “Random Bullshit Go!!” thing when the time came, counting on others to cover for me. Tsk, tsk. It’s actually a common practice among musicians who are not great. It is here, time index 13:07. Yes, I can see the problem: Just two seconds earlier, and ten seconds later, I know exactly what to do and I sound okay. At least, back in the day. So this was just a few moments of muddled mess, and after that it was over. My sin seemed small, and so the necessary practicing was just something I never got around to doing. But you know what? That makes it all the more egregious. In fact, this right here is the difference between a musician who should stick with it, and one who should give up and move on to something else. The practicing I needed to do, to make things better, was very slight. My sense of commitment must have been beneath even that.

Other pieces, other passages, I might have been good enough to play solo but I didn’t ask because I knew what the answer would be: You’re good enough to play solo all of it, or else none of it. Do the practicing you know you should be doing or else don’t waste anybody else’s time. For this reason, I never asked. In fact, I stopped playing. Anything. I’m not right for music. The years that came after I had this realization, I have spent concentrating on things I’m good enough to do without hiding behind anyone. I’m still not perfect, not built to be; but I’ve enjoyed better satisfaction that way, better life-fulfillment, and I have no regrets. I don’t do what we call “fake it ’til you make it” anymore.

But a very long time ago, in other pursuits, I did. And so I can start to understand.

How does this correlate to liberals? It’s got to do with living location and population density. Some of us congregate in tightly packed cities, others of us spread out over the sparsely populated farmland. A high population density offers an option of hiding behind others, to those who need such a thing. To the substandard performers. The softies.

The blue-state fantasy is that wisdom should proliferate outward, from the tightly packed cities, invading the sparsely populated farmland. This isn’t evident to the casual observer, because there’s too much emphasis placed on what should be taught. The truth is that the liberals don’t care. They want to do the teaching, they want us rubes to do the learning. That’s their wish. It’s a wish that can never come to fruition, and that’s because of the way people are made. When the population density is high, and it becomes possible to play piss-poor because you didn’t practice enough, hiding behind others, pretending you know what you’re doing when you really don’t — that’s what people will do. You can’t do that out in the farmland. It’s not merely a matter of being happy alone, or being tough or big or strong. You have to know what you’re doing so you don’t need to hide behind anyone else. It’s a process of gestation. An organism that gestates in a tough environment, reaches maturity with a hardness that’s missing from things that grow up in kinder, more forgiving environments. Since this attribute of kindness to the growing organism and forgiveness of any missteps, is linked to pretending, there is a truth-fiction dichotomy linked to the hard-soft dichotomy.

Sisyphus They’re soft. They hide behind each other.

We’re hard. There are consequences involved in our mistakes, so if we don’t know what we’re doing, we go get help. And then we figure out what we’re doing before we do anymore.

They pretend. They recite talking points they don’t really understand, like “Sure there was fraud, but not enough to change the results,” or “No human is illegal” or “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it.”

We don’t pretend. We can’t. And we can’t compress the work we do into a slogan.

They don’t define…really, anything.

We have to define everything. If we don’t, someone gets hurt.

Big-city-center denizens who pretend to know what they’re doing when they really don’t, hiding behind others, can’t invade the prairie, orchard or farmland. They may want to, but they’re not suited. It’s not because they’re stupid and we’re smart, or because they quit too easily and we’re stubborn. It’s the hard-and-soft thing, period, full stop. It would be talcum penetrating diamond. The softer material is going to have to yield. It’s physics. How do you argue with physics?

That’s the inherent futility of liberalism, in America, in a nutshell. Soft people who don’t know what they’re doing, pretending to know everything, seeking to impose their way of doing things on others who know what they’re doing. Softness trying to invade hardness. Every time it doesn’t work, and it never will, they get more and more grumpy and upset. Then they try to use their anger as an ancillary tool, to do the invading they’ve already learned they can’t do. Now you understand American politics. This is why we’re being told, with some legitimacy, every two years that “This election is the most important one of our lifetime.” It’s the liberals trying, once again, to invade the hardness with their softness, just like Sisyphus in the afterlife struggling to push his boulder up the mountain, only to see it roll back down again. That’s their struggle, and ours. It lacks even the faintest prospect of success, but they lack the understanding to realize this, so around and around we go.

Their champion is a senile old man who doesn’t know where he is, who likes to eat ice cream.

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Liberals Wishing Hurricane Ian Destroys Mar a Lago
Friday, September 30th, 2022

It’s gross and disgusting, so we all like to move on from it after briefly taking note, if we pause to take note at all.

It’s an established pattern. After they’re embarrassed from seeing their “joke” reach the wrong audience, they excuse it by insisting that’s all it was, and there’s something wrong with anyone who noticed it at the time, or remembers noticing. The liberals who are above making such jokes, join in on this ritual of scolding anyone who notices/remembers. They may agree this is subhuman behavior and the joke isn’t funny, but after all, these are just edge cases that don’t signify anything meaningful about liberals in general. And hey! What about conservatives? Here’s an example or two of some of them who’ve said something equivalently nasty…judged by the liberals, of course. A little bit of “Only our side gets to do Whataboutism” with a side dish of “You have to see things my way but I don’t have to see anything anybody else’s way” washed down with a sip of “Stop watching what I tell you to stop watching and forget what I tell you to forget.”

Well…after seeing as many iterations as I’ve seen, having mulled it over awhile, I’m inclined to concede they have a point. Only one, and a small one at that. It’s not accurate to sweep these aside as exceptional cases; we keep seeing them after all. They’re predictable. But at the same time maybe it’s a mistake to assume we know what’s going on there, that the same thing happens when liberals wish death on people as when ordinary people do the same thing.

Liberals, I have noticed, have an unhealthy fixation on the Butterfly Effect. You see they launch into this special, years long white hot hatred against people who have altered the course of events in some way that they don’t like. Reagan, both Presidents Bush, Trump, Dick Cheney. As Ann Coulter pointed out ,”There’s no website called ‘Stop Lamar Alexander before it’s too late’!”

McCain-Palin They only hated John McCain for a little while. When he was a threat. For that reason they hated Sarah Palin much longer and with a much greater intensity.

I think they deny cause and effect with regard to appeasing tyrants and taxing the most effective and efficient capitalists, and they know that’s wrong. We say “If you tax honest and productive business, what effect does that have over time and what does that do to your tax base?” They pretend not to understand, but I think they get it on some level. If they want to tax tobacco and use the proceeds to fund school programs, again we say “What effect on behavior does your new tax have, and what happens to your revenue when people smoke less?” — again, they pretend not to understand, but I think they do in fact understand. But their ideology doesn’t permit them to understand it audibly, and this drives their frenzied fascination with serendipity. I remember one found out the older George Bush ditched an aircraft during WWII, years before conception of the younger Bush, and so made some “jokes” about going back in time and telling the Navy rescuers to put him back in the drink. Haw, haw.

It bears repeating, in finding legitimacy in their defenses, I’m finding diamonds in the rough. Most of the defense is all bullshit. “Jokes?” No. No joke worth telling has exactly the same punchline as a long menagerie of “jokes” that came before. Everyone over seven years old gets that.

Anyway, that’s my point. They’re not wishing ill fate to befall someone. They’re after the ultimate result. They’re signalling to their comrades, not that they lack compassion for their fellow man, but that they’re devoted to the cause.

I think the lack of compassion is already understood among them. But it’s just passive, not active. It’s a shared understanding that when they show the rest of us how compassionate they are, it’s fake. But that doesn’t mean they would go out of their way to hurt people, like the Terminator coming after Sarah Connor.

After all. That would be kind of like having a job.

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Memo For File CCXIX
Monday, September 26th, 2022

So I’m staying in hotels again a tiny bit. Which means I get to look at this special “news” outlet, spewing its stuff to the weary business traveler. This unique medium. The elephant being squeezed through a garden hose.

The alarm goes off at three and I’m showered & out the door by four. Rather typical timeline. Maybe some are getting their day started a bit later, but have the idiot box tuned into the “news” for the same number of minutes. Maybe a few more, if they go down to the hotel lobby to meet someone.

Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump…

You all are saying something about too much coverage of the dead queen? Not seeing it.

He incited unrest on January 6, 2021.

He took classified documents to his home.

He inflated the value of his real estate holdings.

There are reasons why Trump supporters, and non-Trump supporters as well, think all this is bullshit but let’s dispense with that because the arguments go back & forth and get quite involved. Trump-haters think they got ‘im. To get ‘im, they have to dispense with the concept of innocent until proven guilty, on all three, which is something I don’t see happening with any of the three.

But let’s just sidestep all that. You all realize he’s not President anymore?

There are those who think he’ll be back. I am among those. The Trump haters who think the walls really are closing in, best I can figure, don’t think he’s coming back again ever. And yet they’re the ones who act like he is. Without that indictment coming, which they think surely is coming, he’ll access those “levers of power” again and then we’ll have some kind of disaster.

As opposed to what we have now.

So there’s a logical wrinkle here. Trump, supposedly, has come and gone; it’s the MAGA voters who are crying in their beers, have yet to gel with reality and accept this. Everybody hates Trump. His defenders are few and far between and he hasn’t got the popularity to win an election again, not even close. Our elections — of COURSE — are beyond reproach, you can trust them to the moon and back. We have to do something extraordinary, like indict him, to make sure he never gets elected again.

Trump-phobes are a hundred percent sure of all three of those. But all three cannot be true. You can have two.

Let’s walk through it.

If everyone hates Trump and you can trust our elections, we don’t need to do anything to make sure he stays out of power. The voters will do what’s right.

If everyone hates Trump and we have to indict him to make sure he never is elected again, that would have to mean you can’t trust our elections.

If you can trust our elections, and it’s necessary to indict him to keep him from ever being elected again…that would have to mean not everyone hates Trump, and he’s a force with which to be reckoned. This would have to do with denying the “MAGA Republicans,” who still carry enough numbers and enthusiasm to elect a candidate of our choice, the opportunity to do that. All this Trump coverage has to do with distrusting the electorate. It, not Trump, is the affront to “democracy.”

I think it’s the last of those. Well I don’t trust our elections. I think the Trump phobes trust our elections as long as the elections give them a result they happen to like, and they’re not feeling that frisky or confident about the next two of ’em. They cheat, but they can only cheat up to a certain magnitude, and in 2020 they had to push it to the max to make sure Trump lost, so it got awkward. Now they’re memory-holing all the details and “fact checking” to keep us from remembering too much about it.

But for the weary business traveler consuming his or her twenty or so minutes of “news” before heading out the door, that’s not really necessary.

Suppose I’m wrong, though. Suppose they really got him. Trump-ism, or Trump at least, is genuinely over. What happens then?

Well…I guess that will really show us people out here in flyover country. Or Manhattan, for that matter, if we’re talking about a well connected celebrity who’s been “red pilled” and thinking of shaking things up in Washington. Don’t try it. Leave the “revolutionary” stuff to the fifty-year beltway blowhards. Or face jail.

But at least we, the citizens, will benefit from…

…a better foreign policy situation around the world? Hmmm.

…a stronger economy? Hmmm.

…a better, stronger, more robust, less laughable pandemic response? Hmmm.

…a more dignified, less vengeful, aura of cool, competent authority being given off by the occupant of the Oval Office? Hmmm.

…cheaper gas at least? Hmmm.

Here we come to the sobering conclusion: No matter how you feel about Trump, or about Biden for that matter, we have slowly but surely, bit by bit, sacrificed everything positive about what we used to call “news” for this mystery package, and when we inspect the contents of the box we see there’s really no upside to it. The booby prize at the end of it all is just a rush of euphoria, for just a few among us, those who don’t think things through all the way and just want to do some cheering. United by a common hatred focused on a common target, they’re cheering on something that isn’t good for them, or any of the rest of us. They’re piggies applauding the bacon factory. Meanwhile, we can’t have any real news because it’s all Trump, adorable pit bulls wearing Halloween costumes, hurricane advisories, and don’t forget to wear your mask.

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Trump Is Not Your Problem
Sunday, September 11th, 2022

Trump is a lightning rod. And not in a good way.

Those who seek to manipulate, say to everyone else “Look at Trump. Look how wrong that is.” And those who are easily manipulated — or have a desire to be manipulated — look at Trump…and look no further. Oh yes! How awful! He hasn’t got the temperament for the job…that…he doesn’t have anymore. He is unfit for the job that…according to our narrative…he will never, ever hold again, no matter what. And somehow this is a huge crisis.

The rest of us try to tell them: What about the guy who has that job now? And they accuse us of “Whataboutism.”

Meanwhile, there is something terribly broken, and it hasn’t got anything to do with Trump. It hasn’t even got anything to do with conservatives & liberals. Twenty-one years ago today, radicalized Muslims who hate the U.S., launched an attack against our country and killed three thousand people. Now, we elect them to Congress.

The guy who has Trump’s old job, is inept.

The Vice President who fills in for him if something happens to him, is inept.

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, who steps in if something happens to those two, is inept.

Parents are supposed to teach their kids to be dignified and respectable in all that they do, and whatever position or stature they earn in life, will depend on that. How are they supposed to make that stick? We’ve allowed crap to rise to the top three slots in our national bucket. The kids can see the crap floats. That’s three chances they have to see it, and we’re three-for-three.

Marriage is no longer between one man and one woman. That was supposed to be a harmless change. It was supposed to stop there. Well…now no one can define what a “woman” is. Marriage is a joke now. Everything that has anything to do with men and women, is a joke now. Even these pledges to “Put a woman on the Supreme Court,” are jokes. The job has to go to a woman, and that’s what…uh…er…ah…whatever someone says it is.

Fit and Fit A “beautiful woman” is even harder to define! Now someone has decided a fit, strong, healthy woman is out of fashion. Obese, gross, chubby women who sit on the couch, and it shows, they do nothing to get in shape or stay in shape…that’s our “new standard of beauty” and they’re all over the fashion magazines.

We’re going through a terrible mental health crisis now. It’s a little hard to miss, really. Crime is up. Violent crime is up. Murders are up. The border is out of control and illegal aliens are invading by the hundreds of thousands. Texas ships a few dozen of them off to “sanctuary cities” and the mayors of those cities have an apoplectic meltdown, so we know those mayors are strutting around acting like they have a solution, when they don’t. They just want other people to deal with the problems they’re making and growing.

All the service branches of our military are running into extreme problems with recruitment, and why shouldn’t they? Have you been paying attention to what the young people are being taught about their own country? You’re expecting a sizeable chunk of that generation should be enticed to sign up, and put their lives on the line to defend…what? A good country or a bad country? But they don’t see the United States the same way previous generations did. They haven’t been taught to see it that way, they’ve been taught to see it another way.

You’re in trouble if you refer to someone by something besides their “preferred pronouns.” But they can change their minds about what those are, day to day. It’s obvious now that’s just a way to screw with people, and we keep putting up with it.

Your problem is not Trump.

You don’t look smart or clever when you carry on as if he’s the problem. It takes just a little bit of critical thinking to realize there are other problems. You only have to watch things a little bit. Might be good to stay quiet if you’re not up to the task. Like the old saying goes, “Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to bitch about Donald Trump and remove all doubt.”

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Arguing About PoliticsTuesday, December 5th, 2023

Carlin Henry Freeberg: August 13, 1931 — November 24, 2023Wednesday, November 29th, 2023

I Don’t Want to Save This Planet AnymoreTuesday, November 28th, 2023

The TaglineSunday, November 19th, 2023

Check That ManifestSaturday, November 4th, 2023

What’s “Extreme Right Wing”?Wednesday, November 1st, 2023

Priorities, Not LuckSaturday, October 14th, 2023

Performance FloorsSaturday, September 30th, 2023

The Pink BillionSunday, August 20th, 2023

LiesMonday, July 31st, 2023

Creativity, Resourcefulness and JobsSaturday, July 15th, 2023

Affirmative Action in College Admissions is DeadSaturday, July 1st, 2023

The SeesawSaturday, June 17th, 2023

Ask the QuestionsSaturday, June 3rd, 2023

Work Requirements Offend Poor PeopleWednesday, May 31st, 2023

Bend the KneeSunday, April 30th, 2023

Defining “Woke”Friday, March 31st, 2023

Trump IndictedFriday, March 31st, 2023

T.W.A.T.S.Friday, March 17th, 2023

Death of the MentorTuesday, February 28th, 2023

Gerard Van der Leun: December 26, 1945 — January 27, 2023Monday, January 30th, 2023

Definition of “Woman”Thursday, December 29th, 2022

MendaciousSunday, December 25th, 2022

Perhaps It’s Just as WellTuesday, November 15th, 2022

Defending the Status QuoMonday, November 14th, 2022

Control CommunitiesMonday, October 31st, 2022

Their Endless TaskFriday, October 28th, 2022

Liberals Wishing Hurricane Ian Destroys Mar a LagoFriday, September 30th, 2022

Memo For File CCXIXMonday, September 26th, 2022

Trump Is Not Your ProblemSunday, September 11th, 2022

Arguing About Politics
Tuesday, December 5th, 2023

Carlin Henry Freeberg: August 13, 1931 — November 24, 2023
Wednesday, November 29th, 2023

I Don’t Want to Save This Planet Anymore
Tuesday, November 28th, 2023

The Tagline
Sunday, November 19th, 2023

Check That Manifest
Saturday, November 4th, 2023

What’s “Extreme Right Wing”?
Wednesday, November 1st, 2023

Priorities, Not Luck
Saturday, October 14th, 2023

Performance Floors
Saturday, September 30th, 2023

The Pink Billion
Sunday, August 20th, 2023

Lies
Monday, July 31st, 2023

Creativity, Resourcefulness and Jobs
Saturday, July 15th, 2023

Affirmative Action in College Admissions is Dead
Saturday, July 1st, 2023

The Seesaw
Saturday, June 17th, 2023

Ask the Questions
Saturday, June 3rd, 2023

Work Requirements Offend Poor People
Wednesday, May 31st, 2023

Bend the Knee
Sunday, April 30th, 2023

Defining “Woke”
Friday, March 31st, 2023

Trump Indicted
Friday, March 31st, 2023

T.W.A.T.S.
Friday, March 17th, 2023

Death of the Mentor
Tuesday, February 28th, 2023

Gerard Van der Leun: December 26, 1945 — January 27, 2023
Monday, January 30th, 2023

Definition of “Woman”
Thursday, December 29th, 2022

Mendacious
Sunday, December 25th, 2022

Perhaps It’s Just as Well
Tuesday, November 15th, 2022

Defending the Status Quo
Monday, November 14th, 2022

Control Communities
Monday, October 31st, 2022

Their Endless Task
Friday, October 28th, 2022

Liberals Wishing Hurricane Ian Destroys Mar a Lago
Friday, September 30th, 2022

Memo For File CCXIX
Monday, September 26th, 2022

Trump Is Not Your Problem
Sunday, September 11th, 2022