House of Eratosthenes

Obviously the times are changing. Thirteen years ago people were wondering “Is America ready for a black President?” Now we can see not only was she ready; it turns out, the election of our first black President didn’t change diddly squat. The implied accusation, that we weren’t ready and could never be ready because we’re just too bigoted, stood firm. In fact it has metastasized like a cancer. There’s a lesson here about caving in to people who say “I’m going to spread the slander about you unless you do such-and-such a thing.” It never seems to ever pay off to do the such-and-such a thing. The more years I see come and go, the more impressed I am by seemingly smart people who rush around doing the such-and-such in this futile effort to defend their reputations, against predators who lack the standing or dignity to do real damage. It seems they never learn this.

Two recent events dwarf this O-Election in significance, and by quite a big differential. There is the Voldemort Virus, of course, and all the lockdown fever and “we’re all in this together” nonsense that goes with it. And then there is the big problem from four years earlier that all this was exploited to address, and possibly engineered to address: The election of Donald Trump back in 2017, and with that, the demise of journalistic objectivity. One Lewis Wallace had the audacity to announce this in what I consider the most important column of the last ten years, give or take. He weirdly tied this in with his own status as a transgender, then got sacked for having written it. And then, arguably, was proven correct in the ensuing years, over and over again.

But is this really a change? This is one of those questions that arouses decent points to be made on both sides. It would be hard to live through the earlier Obama years and come out of them saying there was any neutrality left that needed killing. But, it’s just as hard to live through the Trump years, and into these first few months of the Biden administration, and deny some meaningful event has taken place.

There’s been one, and things are different.

How would I explain the news cycle and the zeitgeist of the now, after time-traveling to something that came before. Before Obama, before the September 11 attacks, Clinton’s impeachment, all of that. Modern times, but not weird-modern-times…like, early 1980’s, late 1970’s, thirty-five to forty-five years ago. They/we wouldn’t recognize this mess. In fact, they/we would require some cushioning of the blow. How would we even begin to explain the differences?

1. I’d say the one advantage we have now versus then is that the divisions are clear. Back then, people thought Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather were centrists. With the FCC Fairness Doctrine in place, we just swallowed what was spooned out to us by…well, the whatever. Passive voice is necessary here as the subject of the sentence is an afterthought. “They” would tell us what was going on in the world and what it meant. A few of us would suspect there was a slant to it, that the purveyors of this information were concealing meaningful details. But, unable to tell a complete story about it, and unable to assess the extent of the deception, would go about our business. We knew the news leaned left, but people “knew” this the way they knew Roosevelt was in a wheelchair or that John Kennedy was screwing around on his wife. Now, you can look at how Chris Wallace, et al, treated Donald Trump during those debates. Look at the fact checkers beclowning themselves. The partisans are out and proud.

2. Charles Krauthammer commented many years ago that conservatives think liberals are merely misguided, but liberals think conservatives are awful, terrible people. These feelings are essentially the same now but much more intense. Also, liberalism has been revealed as an ongoing effort to misguide easily misguided people, and this effort is conducted by liberals who are awful, terrible people. This is why, when conservatives find themselves “debating” liberals, there is this confusion arising especially when the conservative and liberal happen to like each other, or even are married to each other. What happens in the discussion is ever-changing, but the one constant is that the conservative is left wondering the same old thing, every time: What has happened to my co-worker, my old college buddy, my wife…etc.? Are they being earnestly snookered? Or have they turned evil? Do they really not care about these kids being “educated” in ramshackle substandard school districts, the aborted babies, the waiters and busboys who can’t find jobs with a higher minimum wage in place and the shelter-in-place orders…? This has been going on a long time. But nowadays, it’s much easier to see that when a liberal is the caboose and not the locomotive, that he’s among the deceived and not the deceiver — there’s a certain willingness. Al Gore’s house uses a lot more energy than the average — oh, I don’t care about that. The liberal may throw a “fact check” back at you about it, but it’s pure sophistry. He’s really saying he just doesn’t care about what should be a game changing revelation. Today we can see this. In times previous, we couldn’t.

3. Back then, there was a prevailing notion among those who supported the guy who lost the election, that the winner, hopefully, would remain unchallenged by subsequent events and his term in office, while not preferred, would be a successful one. In other words, the passengers who didn’t like the pilot, would hope the pilot wouldn’t crash the plane. That’s gone now, as the man-in-the-street has become a much more political creature. He’s not hoping the pilot crashes the plane necessarily, but he doesn’t envision a safe landing. This is perhaps the most meaningful change and it isn’t a good one. For this I suppose we can blame the changing nature of impeachment, from a truly exceptional emergency-case maneuver, to a standard political weapon. Congress merely lurching off in the direction of impeaching Richard Nixon, was the precedent-shattering transformation of the day. Looking back on it, it’s just adorable. Now we have real wisdom. You can tell it’s “wisdom” when there’s a tragedy involved in gaining it. And the tragedy here is that impeachment hurts the vision. “Step One: Got to get rid of that guy.” It’s tainted both sides.

4. Those who are elected, or appointed, enjoy many tools they didn’t have in the box before, to choose their own constituencies. There are people who’ve noticed this and they like the changes being made, sympathizing with these new-constituents being enfranchised. These people are morons. There’s no kind way to put it. Government picking and choosing the people who get to elect the government is like the killer robot being in possession of it’s own remote control. Who’s being enfranchised, and how this affects subsequent electoral outcomes, are less-important considerations. Government selecting the character and priorities of itself, is untenable and out of character with the intent of our founding. Anyway; this is somewhat new. Not completely new. But you know there’s been a change because these enfranchising maneuvers are more-or-less commonplace now. Illegal aliens, convicted felons, children. As far as I’m concerned, it’s okay to have these measures on the table and put up for referendum — people should be able to vote to give away their vote, to help that killer robot seize it’s own remote, if that’s really what they want to do. But they should understand this is what’s really being discussed. And where it happens, it should always be by referendum. Congress, and state legislatures, shouldn’t be able to sit down and decide “Yeah, totally, we want 16-year-olds to be able to re-elect us,” because enfranchising this guy means disenfranchising, to some degree, that other guy.

5. Laws that are supposed to stand for something, and include real penalties that can’t be dodged, are now up for debate. Compared to generations previous, we have a sprawling mess of “not-laws” that are supposed to declare some certain action illegal, and don’t, because they’re offset by cultural taboos that say you can’t enforce the law. There are also things we’re supposed to enjoy the right to “tweet” and to say out loud, but we can expect to be punished if we do, so we don’t really have the rights we’re supposed to have. Up above I mentioned the vaccines. Do we want to start requiring those? If we’re thinking about passing a law, we’ll have to discuss it first, and consider the constitutional ramifications. Layers of judicial oversight would have to hear the case. But if it’s a cultural demand, we bypass all that, and then we have to head into a dirty, mud-slinging melee between two factions competing with each other for the coveted position of “mainstream thought.” This is why people like me haven’t been too crazy about the civil disobedience remedy against the lockdown-mania. This isn’t supposed to be how we decide what’s allowed vs. not-allowed. We have written laws, and written protections against what could be penalized, for a reason. That’s all jeopardized with this business of “It’s illegal on paper but we’re gonna go ahead and do it” and “It can’t be punished on paper, but just try it and see what happens to your career.”

6. Some thirty years ago or so it was understood throughout all sorts of different cultures and walks of life, that people should be treated equally regardless of their sex, religious creed, or skin color. Now it seems to be universally understood that that’s not supposed to happen. I’m not sure who we could “credit” for having brought that change about, but it’s gotten a big helping hand from people who weren’t elected to anything anywhere, and there is no set of circumstances available under which this can lead to racial harmony or anything good for society overall.

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Engaging the Liberals
Saturday, July 3rd, 2021

There’s an old saw you might occasionally notice embroidered into wall hangings in trailer homes inhabited by little old ladies, something like “Grant me the serenity to accept what I can’t change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” These are good wise words and they suggest the little old ladies might be on to something. In fact, every year I see come and go, I become more convinced that true satisfaction in life is connected to that wisdom. But I would put a little bit of a twist on it:

Grant me the patience to allow the problems to solve themselves that will naturally solve themselves; the courage to solve the ones that won’t, and the wisdom to know the difference. This is where we have to reckon with our status in the universe, as aberrations. Let’s say your house is on fire. From the universe’s point of view, that’s a problem that will naturally resolve itself. The fire will exhaust it’s fuel, or else it will spread to where there is more fuel and then exhaust that. Either way, the conflagration will reach full entropy and a sort of order will be restored. But that’s not in your interest. From your point of view, this is an urgent matter that requires your attention and you’d better hop to it. That’s because, as an aberration, you rely on other aberrations. What’s a natural state of rest and order for you, is not that state to the universe as a whole, and vice-versa. The universe can chug along just fine with your home reduced to ashes, but if you smell smoke, you’d better locate the source and act on it as necessary.

How do liberals fit into that?

Whether or not they’re a problem we have to solve with urgency, is, in & of itself, a question we have to answer with urgency. I can’t help noticing it seems to resurface again and again and again. People who agree with me about politics continually chide me against engaging the liberals, wisely counseling that ignoring them is the far better alternative. I tried that in 2008 though. We all did. These assholes are a house fire.

The way I see it, they are a symptom of a larger problem. Cavemen lacked the technology we have, and with that they lacked the understanding of the basics we have. But they didn’t tolerate liberals. When they roasted the carcass over the fire and prepared to share it because it was far too much for any one family to eat, the hunters who brought down the kill got the choice cuts. The others had to contribute in some way. Nobody got to amble to the front of the line and say, “I contributed nothing but I think deep thoughts and do a lot of complaining, and I have visions of where society should go. So feed me and my non-productive friends first, and then you mighty hunters who brought down the kill, we might think about tossing you some bones.” That’s essentially what liberalism has become today. It would not, could not, have existed back then. Can you just imagine?

Ignore the liberals? Ignore the house fire?

Not only are there consequences. We’re living in them. And more are coming, if we continue to let the house cook away. There’s lots more fuel.

Liberalism hurts people.

I think we should go ahead and engage them, simply because the alternative is contrary to the assurance of our continued existence. Just like a house fire. This isn’t something on which we need to speculate; we’ve lived through a cycle or two of their destructive ways of thinking and their destructive deeds, and we know for sure. Socrates, who was known for derailing seemingly invincible propositions merely by asking “Socratic” questions, would have wondered what’s taking us so long. The philosophy of liberalism, such as it is, cannot even survive exposure to it’s own premises.

Retreating from liberalism is like retreating from a duel in which your opponent is constantly stabbing himself. Why? Seems like a waste of energy to me. It’s needlessly hasty, and it exposes innocent fellow universe-travelers to unnecessary pain.

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Don’t Trust the Narratives
Sunday, June 27th, 2021

Something got me hot and bothered about narratives thirteen years ago, which would be just after our election of America’s First Holy President…but it’s impossible to say what it was now because YouTube has yanked the video. And my memory is not filling in the gaps.

Narratives are important. They represent the broadest gulf within supposedly responsible thinking people — how they’d like to think they think, versus how they really think. Narratives are responsible for all the polarization in our society. Wherever the discourse deteriorates, and reasoned discussion melts down into shouting matches, bordering on a fist fight, there are narratives.

A narrative can be true, false, or partially true. Narratives can represent things that are known, unknown, or are probable based on other things that are known.

Narratives are convincing because they’re so often at least partially true, and at least partially known.

However — and this is key — there is no such thing as a narrative that is fully known and fully true. Such a thing then becomes a fact, and ceases to be a narrative. Truth can assert itself, and there’s no social appeal involved in repeatedly asserting something that is so plainly true that it’s obvious to mediocre people.

This is why narratives are not to be trusted. The loudest ones are the ones that are pretending to be something they aren’t; the falsehoods, and the uncertainties, marching around cloaked in the disguise of known, sure facts, which is something a narrative can never be.

You hear them most often, and expressed with the most bumptious confidence, when the speaker literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and is trying to convince himself.

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Father’s Day 2021
Sunday, June 20th, 2021

This year, just like any other year, celebrations of Father’s Day will be rather subdued. Now part of the reason for that is that we Dads are spoiled, in a way; the best way to celebrate FD is to “let” us grill food for everybody else to eat, outside, and that can be any day we have the necessary supplies available, and don’t have to work.

We can find any one of a number of ways to treat Mom right that are out of the ordinary. If your Mom is like most Moms, pretty much anything you can do that will involve her skipping a cooking or cleaning regimen, will be as good as anything else you can do. So Mother’s Day is a special one-off, by design, whereas Father’s Day means we stay home and use our grilling equipment, on a summer Sunday on which we’d be doing that anyway.

I’ll be doing that today. Me, the Dad.
I don’t look that good.

Unless you’re dealing with a situation in which the male space has been whittled down to nearly nothing, it isn’t set apart from the other weekends. So to fix that, you have to do something like invite friends over to help with the eating and such. Which we’re doing.

But there’s a darker reason we celebrate Father’s Day quietly. Here, as in many other places, we go the extra mile to avoid offense. A lot of people see a celebration of fatherhood as an attack on the moms, especially the single moms.

This is not a competition. Moms and Dads are both important. However, one thing that should be noted this Sunday is that humans are better than other animals, and anything that sets us apart from them, in a good way, is to be celebrated. And the thing no one ever wants to discuss is that fatherhood does that while motherhood does not. Following the momma in a Congo line is a trait that applies to many lower species. And it applies to humans, too. But eventually the kids have to mature and take on life.

There are some species that mate for life. The father sticks around, and raises the kids. With most species that is not the case. He does what has to be done for him to become a father, then he’s out of there and the momma raises the kid. Humans are unique, in that we can go either way.

But one way is better than the other way.

We’ve got a lot of people walking around among us who are laboring under the misunderstanding that if daddy goes and takes a hike — or is sent packing — not much is lost, and most-to-all of the recovery needed can be achieved by heading to the courthouse and extracting some money out of him. This flawed idea endures, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t make sufficient sense for anyone with a name or reputation worth defending, to string the words together in sequence. No one says it, but many act on it. Also, very few people who have actually lived under such an arrangement, would agree with it. Daddies are not billfolds.

On Father’s Day, that should be our motto: Dad’s not (just) a wallet. There’s more to it than that.

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What Are They Really Trying to Say?
Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

One of the many ways we’ve all helped to bring about this progressive whatever…”revolution” I guess is how they like to think of it…mess…anyway.

We have made it a rather reflexive habit to assume the best of their intentions. Others more articulate than me, have already commented on this. But we also make charitable assumptions about their inferences. “We have twelve years to save the planet” comes off sounding like: There is a line, or a curve, of exhaustion of some resource; someone has made an assessment of how much of that resource there is, done the necessarily math on it and come up with that amount of time.

Sure there was fraud in the 2020 elections, but not nearly enough to change the result.

The protests are/were mostly peaceful.

ALL non-binary kids are born that way.

Epstein hung himself.

Hillary Clinton is the smartest woman who ever lived.

Hydroxychloriquine will kill ya dead.

Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter and called Nazis “fine people.”

Being on time, is a western/white-person concept.

Russia is our enemy and they put Trump in the White House.

China, on the other hand, is not our enemy. The virus came from…well just don’t say it came from there.

I have many different copies of this sort of list floating around…other people have started their own lists. Listing all of them is not the point, this is not “Pokemon” and we don’t gotta catch ’em all. Some of this stuff has yet to be falsified and might very well be true. The interesting thing here is what we hear when liberals say this stuff. We presume the message is “I’ve gone out and checked it, or I’m speaking on behalf of someone else who has.” We say it’s raining outside. That must mean it is.

Well…no.

A lot of the time, this stuff is: You see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world, in which everyone believes…it’s raining.

Or…we want to do some stuff, and we’ve figured out we’re not going to get any of it done until such time as everyone thinks it’s raining. So spread the word.

Or…So-and-so said it’s raining outside, and you see, what we’re trying to do is build a new world in which everyone trusts that guy implicitly. So do your part to make sure everyone thinks it’s raining outside, because he said it is.

Or…I have already repeated that it’s raining outside, so I have an emotional investment in the idea that it’s raining outside.

Or…Give up on fighting us, we have the votes that it’s raining outside, right or wrong.

Or…We don’t give a crap what you think it’s doing outside, we have your kids trapped in our “education” system and we’ll teach them it’s raining outside.

This is the frustrating thing about arguing with liberals. Heard one of them the other day say “Joe Biden is obviously competent” and, when asked for evidence, he didn’t have anything. He just said something about the spending programs being extremely popular, which his opposition quickly showed wasn’t even true. When you have a friend or a relative offering up these chestnuts, you have to make these spot-decisions about whether you’re talking to someone who’s stupid, or evil, or a combination of both, or maybe just emotionally invested in something of which they can’t let go. But you also have to make an interpretation of what they’re really trying to say. No one anywhere is truly qualified to say “Man is screwing up the atmosphere.” No one’s pulling out a super long ladder, climbing up and looking. So on that one, we can rule out the idea that they checked to see if it’s raining and are reporting on what they say. They’re doing something else. A lot of the other things they say are like that too.

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We Aren’t Done With Trump
Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

That’s one thing I know for sure. It is a Northern Star of stasis and certainty in an enormous sky of constant movement. An oasis in a desert of hazardous predictions that, tempting as they may be, cannot be assured with any genuine confidence. That’s one we can take to the bank.

On whether or not he’ll be President again, or whether he’ll be abducted by aliens at midnight tonight, I haven’t a clue. None of that is relevant; no one really cares about it; it’s minutiae. When people talk about any of that what they’re really talking about is “Are we done with him for good?” That remains true whether they want this to be the case, or not. It is the operative question. And we’re not.

The opposite belief, “Thank God that’s over,” is an absolute impossibility. It is putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Further than that, it’s a just plain stupid supposition. How do you see such a world of tomorrow, emerging from the eddies and currents of today? There’s no path from this to that. None. The tube’s been squeezed, his constituency has tasted meaningful representation. The Morlocks have been out of the underworld.

It’s like the crown heads of Europe saying “Thank goodness they’re all done storming that stupid Bastille and got that guillotine stuff out of their systems.”

For the past several years I have occasionally read “psychological profiles” and the like, struggling to triage a borderline mental illness that is Trump support. It’s actually Trump hatred that is more mystifying and more baffling. I’m sure history will ultimately record it that way. It is the #NeverTrump types who more closely resemble the witch hunters in Salem. And those witch hunters are the ones on the wrong side of history, whose wounded consciences and mental enfeeblements continue to fascinate us. Isn’t that obvious? If we could time travel back to 1692 and put one faction, or the other, in straight-jackets and padded cells, it would be the hunters, not the witches or their defenders. We relate to the hunters, but we think the worse of ourselves when we do, and that’s what makes The Crucible a dark story. It makes us wonder what’s wrong with us. That correlates to the Trump-phobes, not the Trump-philes.

This is not empty, biased, rah rah “Hooray for Our Side” stuff. It is objective reality. When you “know” there’s water in the pool just because someone’s trying to warn you there isn’t any, and you hate that guy, but you don’t really know very much about the water level in the pool — it’s time to reassess. And that’s where they’ve been for awhile. They don’t really know anything about Hydroxychloroquine being particularly dangerous, or that the Voldemort Virus didn’t originate in the lab to which President Trump was directing his scrutiny. They just didn’t want to agree with Orange Man on anything. And look how certain they were.

What has been happening here is not new. It is the dynamic of “Forgotten Man” politics. History doesn’t offer us much by way of these events coming to a sudden stop. They don’t. They burn away like old tire fires, across years and decades, even centuries. America herself, arguably, is just one long “Forgotten Man” political saga. Well, Trump’s constituency was forgotten too, and for a good long time.

Now, the Trump haters are wallowing in their marinade of “Thank goodness that’s over” and doubling-down on the forgetting, turning it into a pillorying. A pity-party of “blame those guys for everything, and be loud about it.”

It is a tactical error of historic severity, and proportion. It is a screw-up worthy of documentation and preservation across the ages.

But, dividers can’t become uniters. It isn’t in their physiology. They’re doing what they do. They can’t stop.

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A Certain Amount of Pain
Saturday, May 29th, 2021

It continues to surprise me, how many people say “We need to come together and stop being so divided,” and then immediately turn around and support a political party dedicated to bringing pain.

We shouldn’t have such a party in the United States, let alone a major political party. No organized party should remain organized after making it their priority that it should hurt this much to make a quarter millions dollars a year. Or that it should cost this much to hire unskilled help, should the need arise. Or “No justice, no peace.” Or that every divorce that might possibly happen, has to happen. Or that it ought to hurt this much to buy a gun, or the ammunition for it. Get hired/promoted when you’re a white guy. Register your car. Buy a kilowatt-hour of energy. Buy groceries. Water your lawn.

They always have these excuses. You can’t raise a family of eight and pay for their college educations on $3.25 an hour, or we have to break storefront windows to show how upset we are over the latest police shooting, or she was in an abusive marriage and didn’t realize it. Or something to do with spotted owls, or snail darters, or shrimp in the vernal pools. Or, the public debt is out of control. That last one, by the way, justifies any & all initiatives to make things more expensive, which is over half of the pain deliberately brought. So it’s odd that I haven’t heard it for a very long time. When I was coming of age, federal spending was just about to cross the trillion-dollar-annual threshold. That really got people’s attention. People of all political stripes worried about the increasing debt. “Stagflation” was looming large in the rear-view mirror. Liberals said “We have to make the rich pay their fair share” and it sounded sincere.

Now no one gives a crap. But democrats still say “make the rich pay their fair share” which proves they’re really just all about hurting people who are trying to run their businesses. They never cared about anything else. And the casual consumers of news, who know little but claim not to be intransigently tethered to one side or the other, thinking themselves to be above it all, slobber like Pavlov’s dogs. Oh yes, make those rich so-and-sos pay! They have to endure a certain minimum of pain! Well, why?

These people are lying and don’t know they’re lying. They get away with it a lot, because they look sincere. Well that’s the thing about lying to yourself: You look sincere, because you are, and yet if you aren’t being truthful with yourself then you can’t deal truthfully with anyone else. And the truth is, an agenda of hurt is going to cause division. You can blame the division on the other guy, but there’s nothing divisive about “Please don’t make it painful for me to run a business when you aren’t helping anybody by doing so, just to make it painful to run a business.”

We are always going to have destructive people, because destroying things is easy. We’re also always going to have people like me, who think things through all the way, lack any desire to destroy or bring pain to anyone just-because, and say “When that guy pays more taxes, and the receipts get blown on nonsense, that doesn’t help anybody.” We’re always going to have both these types. So an agenda of “This perfectly legal thing that helps many and hurts nobody, ought to hurt a certain amount” will always drive a wedge between the two. That’s where the divisiveness is.

Also, it’s undignified. It’s proof that whoever thinks this, labors under skewed priorities. They’re looking for new problems, probably because they’re not dealing with enough already. Haven’t had to accept any real responsibilities in life. Have it too easy. And that’s probably because the businesses they want to tax more just to make it hurt more, have made it that way.

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What Fact Checking Is
Wednesday, May 26th, 2021

If I take the term “fact checker” literally, I’m not left thinking of it the way they want me to think of it, because they want me to think of them as a sort of filter. Someone makes a statement, the statement goes into the hopper, then the fact checkers check it to see if it IS a fact. If we really believed that was the process, and wanted to come up with a phrase to accurately describe it, they would be statement checkers.

They could be statistic validators. Maybe statistic checkers, statement validators or verity verifiers.

“Fact check” means a fact is what goes into this hopper. Logically, what happens within the innards of the mechanism, must be something besides making sure the fact is a fact, as that must have already been done.

And so I am to believe that these professionals and volunteers apply their talents and resources to something already known to be true, and check it for something. Like for example, whether the people for whom they work, have an interest in the rest of us knowing that fact, or whether they have an interest in that fact being suppressed. That’s what a tin-eared technically-precise reading of that term would mean. Reminds me of one of David Burge’s most famous tweets, about covering the stories. With a pillow until they stop moving.

Ironically…that’s a completely accurate way of looking at it.

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Victory Lap?
Monday, May 24th, 2021

Fourteen months ago, just a few days after our first “shelter in place” order, I predicted in a round-about way that for this debacle to come to a close, there would have to be some sort of civil disobedience. I didn’t like that idea then and I don’t like it now. We’re a nation of laws, laws require definition, and you can’t function according to “this law counts because we like it but that other law doesn’t count because we’re civilly disobeying it.”

But I do have to admit, even at the beginning of this I could see this is not absolute. Our nation got started, after all, with civil disobedience. Still & all, like everyone else, I’ve been learning.

Stay inside, don’t go anywhere, and watch teevee ALL of the time like a couple of liberals? No problem, we like each other. And we’ve got all the James Bond movies! We’ll watch one a night and after 24 nights, this thing is bound to be over!

Heh…heh…no really, that was our plan. Oh, the Governor might keep this going into June 2020? Shocker! We-ell…we have more movies…

Okay. So we’ve been met with a series of surprises. Our leaders/rulers/aristocrats, call ’em what you will, “public health officials,” etc…well, there’s no point arguing about it anymore. There is no doubt. They’ve exploited the crisis. It’s just so obvious that writing it down or saying it out loud is an exercise in redundancy. It’s like saying water is wet. No one arguing honestly is going to doubt it or question it, so if they’re doing that they’re just wasting your time.

Scott Morefield at Townhall says Never Again…Never, EVER again.

Like a snowball that’s turned into an avalanche, the restoration of the rights and liberties millions of Americans, particularly those in blue states, lost over the past 14 months seems to be unstoppable at this point. Indeed, the precipitous fall of Covidstan has happened quicker and in more places than any of us could have possibly predicted even three weeks ago. We’ve got a long way to go, particularly with schools, workplaces, and public transportation, but I never imagined that restrictions and mask mandates would end in places like New York, Connecticut, and Virginia anytime before 2022, but thankfully, here we are.

That’s good news we should all celebrate heartily, but if you think this sudden relinquishing of unconstitutional governmental power has anything to do with our overlords’ sudden, Damascus-road-like grasp of ‘science,’ I’ve got an autographed picture of Gretchen Whitmer at a mask burning to sell you. From the CDC’s constant mixed messaging to Dr. Anthony Fauci finally admitting that he was wearing a mask after being vaccinated only for show after indignantly denying it to Sen. Rand Paul just weeks earlier, any attempt to portray these blubbering fools as anything short of utterly incompetent or pure evil is going to fall on deaf ears with me.

No, they’ve loosened their iron grip on forced public masking, not because they ever “followed the science” (LOL), but because WE forced them to do so. And by “we,” I’m talking about a pretty big tent. If you at any point during this charade pushed back by refusing to comply, speaking out in some capacity against local or state authorities, or even engaging in the information war by telling the truth to those in your circle of influence, however small or large that might be, YOU had a role in winning this battle.

I dunno, it’s too soon to say. I do agree people like me deserve a high-five. And the people who are actually civilly disobeying, deserve a bigger one. See, I haven’t been doing that. I’ve refused to wear a mask when alone, and I’ve maintained that since Day One just because I know what’s stupid when I see it. But in the grocery store, when the sign says you have to wear a mask, I wear one. But does it matter? A year ago it wasn’t all about masks, it was about staying home. Masks were in there, to be sure. But the larger concern was that these assholes were shutting off our jobs, like flipping a giant light switch. And because they themselves had never had a real job, we could see they were laboring under the delusion that when you’re ready to restart the economy, you just flip the switch the other way. The quiet panic was over the fact that this all-important consideration wasn’t receiving the attention it deserved.

It’s difficult to see exactly where you are, when you’re actually right there. It’s much easier to make the observation in hindsight, so we’ll have to wait awhile on this. I do like that headline though, never ever again. Damn straight.

Because for the last year, our high advisers who hold themselves to be so superior to us, have outwardly identified public trust or lack of it, as the problem. And they’ve been right about that. We’ve watched as they peg this sense of trust, accurately, as a high value asset in the struggle to slow the spread of the China Virus. And then they got rid of that sense of trust as fast as they could, as if it were a liability. In most cases, it’s genuinely difficult to envision how they could have done a “better” job of that. This has been a debacle wrapped in a flaming dumpster fire wrapped in a shitshow. A disaster bigger than Biden or Trump…although historians will blame it on one or the other of those guys, depending on which way they lean, and you can guess which way the loudest “historians” will lean. But the big takeaway is what it takes to enable a loss of liberty on such an unprecedented scale, and how well it works. I’ve read about it in the write-ups over all the stuff that happened before I was born, and it did make an impression on me, but now that I’ve lived through it — words don’t do it justice. I’m just genuinely shocked. There’s-a-virus-out-there and…that’s it? That’s all it takes? Just like that, we’re a command economy with stay-at-home orders and you need a Mother-may-I to do anything?

Just speaking for myself, it’s a thing I needed to have happen. I had no idea we as a species were so pliable. And here in America.

But it’s not all humble pie for people like us. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Anybody who chastised me for “paying too much attention to politics” before the Voldemort Virus came along, can apologize to me anytime they want. And I do have some names in mind. But people also suffer from the sin of pride, so I know if I expect no apologies I won’t be disappointed.

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Liberals vs. Leftists
Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

I’m not in favor of replacing the word “liberals” with “leftists.” It is true that much of the criticism we have for the liberals should more fairly be redirected toward dedicated leftists, and in a lot of cases it is true that the real problem is there, with leftism. But not all the criticism, and not all the cases.

There is something we could call, for lack of a better term, a “liberation fallacy.” We have been inundated for the past several decades with a variety of movements to “liberate” women, minorities, or this-or-that designated-oppressed victim-group. And we have become accustomed to an all-but-expected bait-and-switch fake-out of sorts. We see the most vivid evidence of this in what we consider to be “higher education.” “You’re liberated, so don’t listen to anything anybody in authority has to say, at least without questioning it — unless the authority is me, your college professor.” I have never understood how this works. It’s almost like a magic spell from a fairy tale. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something? The kid’s parents are so uncool, if they say it’s sunny outside that must be proof it’s raining. But the prof can decide on their grades, and they see their grades as their gateway to their glorious future, I guess. I dunno. Like I said, I’ve never fully understood.

Doubt all those uncool gassy old people, but believe everything the professor says.

Before that it was in the labor unions. Don’t listen to that boss of yours, he can’t tell you what to do. He’s in “management.” But we’re the union! Men who laugh at the law, tremble in fear at our edicts. We’re the new boss. You’re liberated from those guys over there. Not from us.

Feminism has treated women no differently. Their narrative for half a century has been that women can, or ought to be able to, choose

1. Whether to work or not
2. Whether to live out the sex life of a nun, housewife or whore
3. Whether or not to dress to appeal to the male gaze
4. Their religion/spirituality

And nobody should deign to influence a woman in any way about any of this under any circumstances. But the feminist movement, which illustrates itself as the bringer of all this freedom, so deigns, pretty much constantly and without a second thought. The movement has been constantly pressuring them to work, to flirt, to divorce, to abandon Christianity, and as far as how to make up and dress…well, thanks to the magic of the “fashion industry” it’s gone back and forth on that. Liberated fashion, what is that? You have to buy magazines to find out what it is. Today. It’ll change tomorrow.

But everyone who’s been “liberated” has been subjected to a similar mind-scramble. It’s quite invasive. You might as well peel back their skull and stick an egg beater in there. What’s that like, anyway? Us white males can only guess at it. The liberation-fallacy doesn’t focus its mind-control on us, it just casts us as the bad guys. I don’t have any basis of comparison, but I think I’d prefer it that way. The activists want to blame us for everything but they’re not trying to bamboozle us, gaslight us or confound us. Our opinions aren’t that important to them.

The point is — the above is quite a lot of detail. All of it is accurate. None of it really applies to “leftism.” This is how modern liberalism works. Through a fallacy.

It’s the same practical joke played out over and over again, just like…fishing. Fishing is a joke, the same one applied repeatedly throughout thousands of years. We name liberals after the thing they promise to provide but don’t provide, which is “liberty.” We do this because the liberals want us to do it. Every person participating in communication in English, is a potential recruit. If each participant were similarly susceptible to the practical joke played by the fishermen, the fishermen would have an interest in being represented according to what they purport to provide but are not actually providing, and we would call them “worm givers.” But they play their joke on fish, not people, so that’s why we call them fishermen.

Liberals, like fishermen, do not care if their joke fails on an individual level. Here and there, now and then, a woman may be “liberated” and appreciate the “liberty” she has…and use it to make a choice that the liberals don’t like. She may decide to become a housewife. And the liberals will react with scorn, ridicule, stigma, and a subtext of “Hold up there, we wanted you to have the choice so you could make it the way we want you to make it.” Some women pick up on this, are not bothered by it in the least, and keep on homeschooling. They’re very much like the fish making off with the bait. Liberals being concerned with group dynamics, will just ignore her and go on about their business of recruiting others, just like the fisherman reaching for another worm to put on the hook. It’s a bulk process, concerned with breadth and not depth. That’s why liberal ideas are derailed and devastated with just a little bit of honest inspection.

Liberalism works according to this fallacy: You’re oppressed, you’re put-upon, we’re going to march in the streets and achieve “change” so we can get even with the dirty rotten so-and-sos. This is what was born with the Storming of the Bastille in 1789. It is an indoctrination tool, a sort of on-ramp to the highway of leftism. Leftism, being the superset, incorporates everything else; the moral relativism, the nanny-state nonsense, the big-government tax-and-spend redistribution schemes, the graft, the grift, the thuggery, the corruption. “If you’re friends with us, we’ll just wave all those environmental restrictions and you can go ahead and build.” That’s leftism. They aren’t synonymous.

I like, admire and respect Dennis Prager and everybody else who’s trying to recapture the word “liberal” and restore it to its original meaning. Your intentions are noble. Just a little misguided is all.

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Memo For File CCXVII
Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

Where do we go from here? Can we hope to reverse this massive power/freedom transfer imposed on us by the Voldemort Virus? Where is the technology taking us? These are complicated questions because technology changes us as it evolves; and we evolve with it. But, it seems, never in quite the way we expected. In fact when history records how it all went down, in the end we can’t trust the history.

First we have to understand what we mean when we use the word “technology.”

Technology, we think, began with fire. Or, hunting weapons. Spear points, maybe. We don’t know for sure because we weren’t there. But we can be pretty sure the first invention came from the arsneal of tools you have to have to kill an animal, cook it and eat it. Vegans, lacto-ovo, health nuts and other meat-haters would protest that the rabbit-food diet came first so their tools must have come first, but that won’t work because you can eat that pottage without tools. We must have built things first to take down the small game. Traps, maybe. But also fire.

Community arrived, with all of its challenges, when someone killed something too big for their family or clan to eat. Others who were outside the clan wanted some, because the smell of the pig meat over the fire was delicious, they’d never experienced anything like it. Anyone who’s smelled pork roast at a barbecue understands this. Pigs, I surmise, were built by God to smell good over a fire, to serve as a launching point for what came next. After a few false starts, some “sucks to be you,” and some rotting pig carcasses lying around going to waste, the clan had to settle on the unavoidable thought: We have nothing to gain by keeping this to ourselves, we can’t eat all of it. And so multiple families would gather around a common fire with a common carcass roasting over it, because, why not? What a beautiful evening that must have been. The birth of community. Think about this when you have those cookouts King Joe is thinking about maybe allowing you to have. You’re celebrating the first time humans became genuinely better, through their own innovation.

And from this came a question: Can I have seconds?

And so community arrived with its first challenge: Apportionment. We have gathered together to bring a demand commensurate with the supply. How do we figure out who gets what? And so there was capitalism. There was ownership. This caveman brought down the boar. That caveman did not. Therefore, he must remit a service. Professions, starting with “the oldest profession,” came from that. “Performance reviews” came from that. If a hunter sucked at hunting, it wasn’t just an isolated opinion, it was evident to everybody.

With just this much technology, and no more, there was merit. If a “leftist caveman” tried to “earn” a bigger share of the roast pig by way of his charisma, giving fancy speeches, or writing poetry, he would have been ostracized. Perhaps leftism got a brief but abortive start back then when community was born. The conversation would have been very short. “You did not hunt the pig, what will you do to earn more?” “I know, I’ll make all the decisions about who gets how much, so you don’t have to worry about it! How’s that?” “Hmmmm…fuck off.”

We’ll never know for sure, but we do know you need some more technology to sustain that nonsense. Cavemen wouldn’t have tolerated it. We tolerate it just fine.

The nonsense might have started with simple machines. Maybe with the wheel. Look what I built! It rolls! That’s really great…I have no idea what you did and I can’t understand how it works, so use your wheel to bring me things. Uh, what? And so slavery was born. And the dysfunction that enshrouds us, to this day, was born. He who can do things, must serve the one who doesn’t bother to try.

The guy who fixes your computer will understand this perfectly. He knows how to do something, you don’t know how to do it. So you get to order him around like he’s your little bitch because you “need” him to do it. You break the computer, he fixes it, after he leaves you find you can’t do the thing you used to be able to do, so you blame him. This is why he hates you.

Ah well…maybe I’m letting my personal experiences get in the way. Slavery must have existed before tech. It is the default condition. It’s our Original Sin. Although, if technology can’t be blamed for our desire to enslave others, we probably can blame it fairly for enabling our hunt for excuses. Before technology there was only one justification for it: I’m bigger than you are and I’ll kill you if you don’t serve me. With technology, as kingdoms and civilizations rose and fell, the excuses thrived and multiplied. The Sun God Ra, or Jupiter, or Yahweh, or Allah, put me and my friends in charge. Our secular types fancy themselves to have ended all that, but they haven’t ended anything at all. Instead, they’ve started something, and what they’ve started is a whole new round of these excuses.

We’re doing it for “the workers.” They have nothing to lose but their chains.

Vox Populi Vox Dei; the people chose me. You have to do what I say.

We have to decrease the surplus population. We can’t have undesirables breeding faster than normal, better people.

We’re just taxing you to make you pay your fair share.

A lot of evolving civilizations older than ours, and ours included, claim to have “ended slavery.” It would be nice if that were true. But you don’t need cotton fields or whips and chains to have slavery. It’s in the human heart. Theft of services is our default behavior. Technology has served to highlight this, and often to eliminate it by getting rid of the opportunity. But it’s also given us new opportunities for slavery.

The latest is “climate change.” People with access to the instrumentation that can measure our climate, have begun publishing alarmist gossip about the measurements they’re making. They can detect variations they weren’t detecting before, which stands to reason because the instrumentation is more precise than it used to be. But it’s really just a new wave of Malthusianism — the Chicken-Little “sky is falling” screed that humans will overpopulate the planet and deplete its resources, triggering a mass extinction event.

It’s true that the Earth has seen mass extinction events. But if the past has taught us anything about these events, it’s that when they’re sudden, they require sudden triggers. History has all but falsified the notion of population, or any other gradually changing metric, slowly trudging toward some “tipping point” and setting off a cataclysm. The Earth is a living thing, and living things adapt to changes on a micro scale by way of adjustments on a micro scale. The Malthusian dread did not come to pass, because as the population increases, resources become available to service them, until they can’t for whatever reason. And where the resources are no longer available, the population doesn’t increase there. It increases somewhere else. It’s how nature works. It’s really quite amazing.

Carbon in the atmosphere works the same way. There’s no such thing as “too much” of it. If you get a heavy saturation, what you have is a global environment that’s just a tiny bit friendlier to plants and a tiny bit more hostile to animals. So in a few generations you’ll have more plants and fewer animals. It works both ways. If there isn’t “enough” carbon you’re going to get more animals and fewer plants. It’s like a pendulum, and the fossil record shows it’s been working that way. Again, it’s all really quite amazing.

Ah…maybe I’m wrong about all this. The above contains all sorts of stuff I can’t prove, just like the existence of God is something I can’t prove. These are matters of faith, and inferential reasoning based on circumstantial evidence, and my knowledge of history and technology, which I admit fall short of what could be considered exhaustive, or even commanding. I’ve been waiting for years with an open mind to see something that will upset it and require a macro-scale rethink. Occasionally it’s happened, and now, in 2021, that’s where I am. That’s how I see it. Technology made us better, thousands and thousands of years ago, when it created a necessity and offered a reward for our coming together and sharing things. Since then, it’s done some amazing things but it hasn’t made us better people. The Internet was supposed to have done that. It was supposed to make us better informed. Then someone figured out that a lot of what’s on the Internet is nonsense. And so we needed “fact checkers.” But no one with a working brain takes the fact checkers seriously anymore, because fact checking has devolved into just one more way for unproductive people to mold and shape the most intimate aspects of the lives of more productive people. There we go again. Another excuse. So no, the Internet has not made us better. It hasn’t even made us more informed. We can probably credit it for clarifying our thinking about challenges that were confronting us before we had the Internet, so that our responses to the challenges improve. But on the whole, the Internet has been an exercise in over-promising and under-delivering. Buying and selling things is quicker and more convenient, thank goodness. There are always cat pictures. And who can ever get tired of Fish Bra nice looking women soaking up the sun, using fish as bras? But, life goes on, and we just keep on truckin’, now with Internet.

Others in my profession do not see it that way. They look forward to some near-future event, just around the corner. Some prognosticate a terrible event, like war, famine, disease, the above-mentioned “climate change” apocalypse. Others foresee something glorious, a “technological singularity,” in which the automatons attend to their own programming and do it so well, and so quickly, that human suppositions about anything & everything will become irrelevant.

They’re succumbing to emotional reasoning. You can tell this because the event that’s going to change everything and turn it all upside-down, is always just around the corner. That’s what commands attention, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that that’s what’s really true. And it has not escaped my notice that my colleagues who most enthusiastically look forward to the technological singularity, are the ones who speak of success and failure only in vague terms, obfuscating and avoiding questions of cause and effect. They speak of this country over here, or that company over there, “doing/did it right” and that other one “doing/did it wrong.” You would reasonably expect, if you were to take these verdicts seriously, there would be a meticulously fleshed-out recipe bundled in showing how the successful entity did it “right” so that other attempts can follow suit. The pattern I’ve noticed is that you very rarely get that, and if you don’t get it, what you’re seeing is essentially cheerleading, not the sober, reasoned assessment of the results it’s pretending to be. I have also noticed these emotional-reasoners, in assessing the processes that turned out “right” or “wrong,” form their opinions in echo chambers. They compare notes with others who think like they do. They don’t ask the people most directly impacted. Some of them build things. But it isn’t in their pattern to hang around after someone has used their creations, and gather end-user evaluations, wart & all.

I do not believe technology is bringing us to a singularity. This is not to say I doubt the ability of automatons to program themselves. That much has already been done. The ramifications for the field of cryptography are real, interesting, and promising. But for us to experience what they’re talking about, the machines would have to do what the singularity-proponents are not doing, and assess. Note that God, who supposedly does everything perfectly, stops, looks back and assesses. Six times, in Genesis 1, He makes the observation that “it was good” — there is no way to interpret that, without some consideration for a residual potential that it might not have been good. It is, clearly, some sort of question getting settled by means of an assessment. And then the seventh time, at the end of the chapter in 1:31 “He saw that it was all very good.” Six unit tests followed by a system test.

This is a uniquely human contribution to the cycle. Machines, by & large, can’t do it. This is why I reserve a special carve-out for cryptography and maintain some hope for a micro-singularity in that one field, because distinguishing success from failure is so easy: Your algorithm is good, if this other self-programming automated process can’t break it. If that other process can break it, then it’s back to the drawing board with you. I see a potential for getting rid of the human element in that one evaluation chore, but in none other. Singularity-proponents don’t understand this. They don’t evaluate.

With the deterioration of monarchal rule just a couple hundred years ago, the idea emerged that humans ordering other humans around without compensation, just by virtue of having been born into some higher station, is wrong. Here in the United States, we’re dedicated to that. But, we don’t always uphold it. This, I think, is where we’re headed. The unproductive people are going to continue to sniff around for excuses, always with the aim of restoring the feudal system and inserting themselves as a higher layer of aristocracy, ready to tell the rest of us when to jump, how high, when we can come back down again. Technology will continue to evolve and improve, providing the rest of us with more & better tools for getting our work done — and providing them with more & better tools to pull their scams. Young people will fall for these scams, since young people can only acquire the knowledge that comes from others, which requires gullibility. Then they’ll get snookered, and become wise. We’re all going to have to do that as the scammers become more and more sophisticated. Sometimes, we’ll achieve this knowledge without having been suckered into commitments, or having established new entitlements that can’t ever be demolished or reversed. Other times, we won’t be so lucky, and we’ll be trapped.

Meanwhile, the massive increase in public debt from the Biden bail-outs, is a millstone around our necks. In our near future, that’s got some influence. If you’re looking for things to worry about that are imminent, worry about that, because it’s there waiting for us no matter what technology does. Buckle up bitches.

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Templates
Sunday, May 16th, 2021

People all throughout the First World are wondering, if we’re all supposed to want the same things then why is there so much arguing on the Internet? The Internet comes off looking not too good; it looks at first blush like we’ve been properly taught throughout all these generations, “Don’t argue about politics, religion or sports” and we obeyed, keeping a long-lived albeit fragile peace, then along came the Internet.

I have a long record of preaching against this. I’m of the opinion that the Internet is one giant tempest-in-a-teapot, not because there is lots of arguing, or because there is mean-spirited, undisciplined arguing. The problem is the level of skill is so low. This “don’t discuss it” thing has worked against us; people are out of practice. They find themselves defending premises they never in their wildest dreams thought would ever be challenged anywhere, and they don’t know how to do it. Lacking the knowledge or the experience needed to defend an axiom with a justifying argument, they retreat into some sort of soothing protective shelter. I examined some of this a month ago by taking a look at the You See people. Poor, sniveling wretches living in a tiny mental cloister in which their idea must win, all the time and every time, because it’s just such a novelty. They are utterly undone by the realization that their idea is not novel.

The Internet is a raucous and noisy place, because people have this need to defend the indefensible, and when that germinates into a need to do some arguing when they don’t know how to argue, they use these templates. The templates exist on what might be thought of as a sort of tree, just like a tree you’d find in a redwood forest, or — forgive me, it’s become part of my vocational discipline to see things this way — a sort of class-inheritance tree you’d find in an application or module written in an object-oriented language. “You see” is at the root. Some well-known and often-seen you-see stuff includes

1. Gender is nothing but a social construct
2. Mankind is a poison on the planet
3. Capitalism is the disease and socialism is the cure
4. “Robber Barons” blah blah blah…

All nonsense. Honest argument and open, scrutinizing discussion would reveal all this stuff to be nonsense, so the purveyors retreat to their dopamine rush of you-see, comforting themselves in this false realization that they’ve hit on something titillating, intellectually stimulating, and new.

And then there is:

5. You see, what we’re trying to do is…

Now you know you’re dealing with a progressive, or at least someone who would like to think of themselves that way. They’ve joined up with a movement that is bigger than themselves. And they think they’re being uplifting, positive, welcoming types by encouraging you to climb aboard the bandwagon. You see, what we’re trying to do is forks off into all sorts of other silly garbage like

1. Atone for the sins of the past
2. Shatter the “glass ceiling”
3. Eliminate inequality in all its forms
4. Make the rich pay their fair share
5. Help the blah blah blah…

Notice that none of this is really an argument at all, it’s just an effort. “You see, what we’re trying to do is” is a sort of escape hatch. The speaker is not arguing, quite to the contrary he’s calling for a cessation of arguing. The subtext is something like: If you’re not onboard with this, no harm no foul, just let us go about our business and you won’t be affected.

But of course you will, if they’re successful. That’s the whole point.

And then there is:

6. You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which…

The poor dears, you almost have to feel sorry for them. They think this spares them from any scrutinizing questions, but anyone who’s been paying attention can see each and every single one of the irritants of our modern world, is a direct result of someone in the past laboring away at world-building. Building that perfect world…in which no one with a working brain would really want to live.

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which is a launch point for such toxic garbage as

1. Everyone can get…
2. There is no…
3. People assume that…

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which everyone can get branches off into

1. Health care
2. to vote
3. Housing
4. Food and/or food stamps
5. College tuition
6. Abortions
7. Whatever gender (identity) they want

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which there is no comes from watching too much Star Trek. The theory is that after we conquer all these undesirable conditions and undesirable behaviors, we can start exploring the stars and meeting alien civilizations or some such thing.

1. Bigotry
2. Intolerance
3. Poverty
4. Illiteracy
5. Disease
6. Fossil fuel consumption
7. Guns
8. Meat
9. Judeo-Christianity
10. Home schooling
11. Nuclear families
12. Individuality
13. Advantage to being a pretty woman
14. Responsibility
15. Distinction between X and Y

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which people assume that is mind control. These are the people-programmers, telling strangers what to think.

1. Women can do anything men can do
2. White people don’t belong wherever they are
3. The United States was actually founded in 1619 and its purpose has always been to keep slavery alive and what-not

You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which there is no distinction between X and Y is the template-argument of the equivocator. An equivocator is a prevaricator, whether he wants to admit it or not, because a lot of these things they want to pretend are the same, are actually different.

1. Republicans and democrats
2. Men and women
3. Illegal and legal aliens
4. Standard of living of ambitious people vs. the standard of living of lazy people

Why is the Internet such a noisy, argumentative place? The problem is that there is a demand for arguments, that outstrips the supply because too many people don’t know how to build an argument.

The other problem is, with such a demand that is greater than the available supply, we have managed to come up with a supply. The arguments are being mass-produced, by people who know how to produce little-to-nothing else. And they’re creating “arguments,” like the ones above, and others, without much thought.

After this past year of “plan-demic,” we have seen how natural it is for people to come up with strange, arcane and counterproductive new rules without taking any responsibility for the end results. It is an intrinsic attribute of our species, I’m afraid. In our heart of hearts, we seek to enslave each other, to come up with these new rules under which others are supposed to live, but not to abide by them ourselves. And we like to think we’re ready to discuss the pros and the cons, but all too often, we’re not. We fall back on these templates.

The Internet has not created the problem. It has revealed it.

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Liz Cheney’s Real Constituents
Sunday, May 16th, 2021

I’m celebrating Liz Cheney’s defrocking by thinking about her constituents, and I don’t mean Wyoming people. I mean her real constituents. The #NeverTrump types can see with their own eyes that someone’s performing competently at a job, and still wish to replace him because they don’t like his vibe. They’d rather let a building burn to the ground than call a fireman who happens to chew tobacco, or use profanity, or skip Church, or watch Beavis and Butthead, or, or, or…

These are people you can invite up into the hills for berry picking, and they’ll go, but they’ll wear the nice slacks they wear to church, along with dark socks and formal business shoes, because they don’t own anything else. So you end up turning around miles earlier than you intended because you don’t want them to slip and break a leg.

Some other things they don’t own:

1. A car that burns gas and has a stick shift.
2. Tools. Spare parts. Anything for which you’d have to remember “righty tighty, lefty loosey.” Which they’ve never heard before.
3. Sneakers, jeans, hiking boots — signs of society’s degeneracy!
4. Any kind of outdoor grill.
5. Lawncare or gardening tools; you hire people to do that.
6. Any music of any genre that was written after 1939.
7. Pretty much anything that has anything to do with sex at all.
8. Buzz saw, chop saw, saw table, router, power drill, power washer, shop vac, chainsaw, etc.
9. Work gloves.
10. Guns & ammo.

This is the guy on the camping trip who isn’t good for anything and complains so much you wish you left him behind. He bought a Thermos along filled with flavored Cuppaccino. He says things like “full of you-know-what” and “poo poo” and “ca ca” when there aren’t any kids in earshot, or even any women. You tell a dirty joke, and he doesn’t get it. Even worse, maybe he does get it, finds it funny, everyone can see he thinks it’s funny, and he still winces in cosmetic disgust as if St. Peter is watching. It’s a familiar gesture. A grimace, a nose-wrinkling, a shaking of the head.

People like this live in tiny worlds, which is fine. We’re all born into tiny worlds. But they work so hard at keeping theirs tiny. They want to do that. They hurt people to do it. They may have lots of kids and they may tell all those kids “You can be anything you want to be in life,” but they don’t really mean it. They don’t give a fig about immediate or eventual results. They’re protocol-obsessed.

They hate Trump because they don’t value what he did. They’ve never had to count on a job actually getting done right, never lost anything because it didn’t happen. They don’t even understand the concept of “an important job”; to their way of thinking, a job is important when it’s a job done by a person who is important, and what makes a person important is their power over you. Their parents paid their college tuition, and to this day, they’re not too sure of how it got done. Their graduation was a ritual and everything after that has been a ritual. You can explain to them until you’re blue in the face that they’re safe because hard men protect them, and are unafraid of doing terrible things, and they’ll nod and agree like they understand. But they don’t. There’s no reason.

They’re important people. We have our current President because of them. They always know who to fire. As far as the long term plan, they haven’t a clue.

We’ve got a lot more people walking around among us who have some awareness of this and think of it as a sort of harmless preference or taste thing. Well yes, they say, there were people hurt by the old ways of doing things and Trump did help them, but my friend coworker neighbor or relative was deeply offended when he said “Grab ’em by the pussy” so she can’t stand him, and I’ve known her for like forever so I support her decision…

Things change when you’ve actually seen good people hurt by bad policies. Things are different when you know there are people in the building that’s burning.

There are words we can use to describe people who want the building to keep burning, knowing there are people inside roasting alive, because their business is in resisting any & all efforts from the fireman or anybody else who uses coarse potty-mouth language. Knowing full well there is human suffering happening that ought to be the focus of their energies, but isn’t. People upholding some cosmetic veneer of decency, while stripping themselves of all empathy for those whose lives are directly impacted by the question at hand.

Monsters.

Style-over-substance, high-hairdo, prickly, over-sensitive, brittle, puritanical, empathy-deficient people-hating sweater-wearing monsters.

As far as I’m concerned, Congresswoman Stefanik hung the moon. It’s true I’ve held other conservatives in high regard and a little while later they disappointed me. Liz Cheney is one of those. Maybe Stefanik will someday too, but to date it hasn’t happened.

Here she is going after Congressman Schiff for his lying about the “whistleblower.”

I am willing to bet a large amount that Elise Stefanik owns hiking boots. And I’ll further bet she looks awesome and fantastic in them.

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Voting With Your Feet
Friday, April 30th, 2021

The Census is a ten-year event so people should be talking about it more. It says something, if anybody’s willing to take the time to notice, about the policies that arouse such passion between these ten-year events. California and New York are losing congressional seats. This is part of a pattern you can see now — with every gain and every loss — so it isn’t just those two states. I’m seeing, among the states losing seats, the only one that could be described as “red” is West Virginia, and among those gaining the only one that could be described as “blue” is Oregon. Each of those is highly debatable, and apart from those two, it’s a clean sweep.

With the last election as close as it was, this is a referendum.

As a referendum, it is not an outlier. Left-wing indictments against the “systemic racism” of the United States, our “patriarchy,” our use of God’s Measurement System as opposed to the flaky Metric surrender-monkey kilo-centi-stuff, guns guns guns, etc. etc. etc…are mere flies upon the windshield of: Which way are the boats headed? This one counter-argument defeats all of those attacks. It’s almost embarrassing to watch. The immigration crisis exists because people want to come here. Yes President Biden made it much worse, but not by making anything work any better than it was working before. He made it worse by saying “come on in!”

The interstate situation is somewhat different, since you don’t need to immigrate when you move from one state to another. And it’s clear there’s a lot of movement. It’s clear that, when leftists run things for awhile, people don’t want to live there anymore and that includes leftists. People in general should be spending more time wondering about this. I think both sides would agree The Right simply wants to keep businesses running; we can argue about whether they’re empowering evil soulless corporations that are polluting the environment or trying to make sure no one has any health care, or whether they’re really just trying to make it easy for people to work for a living. But I think all up and down the ideological spectrum people would agree that’s the overall point, and they’d be right. The Left, on the other hand, wants to Build A Perfect World, in which people have full and unrestricted access to the blah blah blah and there is no more blah blah blah. People in general would agree with that and they’d be right about that too. So where’s the perfect world? How come people keep leaving it after it materializes?

Why — The Left would retort — is The Left running everything right now? The White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. There’s an old Reagan quote that comes to mind: If you’re explaining, you’re losing. Blogs, like this one, don’t really help over the shorter term of time because we explain. If you pay attention while you’re doing this explaining, after a prolonged period of repeated experiences you’ll gradually come to see the wisdom of what Ronald Reagan was saying. People don’t like having things explained to them, even obvious things — especially obvious things. There is no explanation of the right-wing position that leaves a mark, at least, none that leaves a mark on par with simply letting The Left run things for awhile. That is convincing. No right-wing pundit could have delivered a smackdown that would make an impression quite like the two years of putting The Left in charge 1993-1994, or 2009-2010, or 2021-2022. Lots of righties would like to come up with one that does. But it hasn’t happened. I don’t think the human genome permits it. We have to go through the misery of bad ideas to figure out how bad they are. It’s in our genetic wiring. Can’t figure out what a bad idea it was to bite that apple, until we’re cast out of the Garden of Eden.

People talk about “Republicans are dead” or “the democrat party is finished” or “The United States is over.” When they say things like this they’re admitting to their own limitations as they attempt to comprehend a sustained conflict. The concept is an uncomfortable one for us, but that’s the environment in which we live. We live in a tempest in a teapot. There are forces in play which keep the conflict going. The Left has bad ideas; if it were not so, they’d merely take over at any one of the three biannual chapters mentioned in the previous paragraph, we’d all see what good ideas they have, and we’d leave it that way. That hasn’t happened. The Right cannot make an impression on people, that’s on par with letting their opposition run things; if that were not so, any one of a number of pundits or bloggers, like me, would state the case and then the next election would be a rout. That hasn’t happened either. The United States is far from over, and people want to live here. If that were not so, we wouldn’t have an immigration crisis.

The one thing that keeps things screwed up, that might be the easiest to fix, is this “purpling” thing. Blue states losing their population as refugees swarm to red states, with better policies, is nothing new. It’s been happening in California since I moved in, swimming upstream against the crowd, some thirty years ago. If only people would move in to red states and then vote like they’re in a red state, problems would dissipate over time the way problems do when people are applying their intelligence. But we’ve seen how blue-state refugees don’t do that. Their tendency is to vote, in the new state, for the same dumb policies that made their old states miserable, and worth leaving. This has been a constant source of distress to the newer states undergoing the purpling-process. Please remember, they say, you’re refugees and not missionaries. But the refugees don’t listen.

Is there an answer? Maybe some hurdles, some barricades to help thwart this purpling process. But overall, there may not not be an answer. We may be doomed to swim around in this tempest in a teapot forever, as a “reward” for our continued refusal to learn what a dumb, bad policy is. Our system of elected representation is what I like to call a Batman system: It gives us the government we deserve, not necessarily the one we need.

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“You See…”
Sunday, April 18th, 2021

About a month ago someone asked me to make a financial commitment toward a dumb plan, via e-mail. When I declined I got back a paragraph explaining the benefits of the dumb plan. This stuff had already been explained to me, almost word-for-word, when this very brief conversation had started.

I replied curtly: I just gave you my answer, and you responded to my answer by re-explaining your plan. Don’t do that.

This is part of what’s wrong with all of our evolving society now. Too many people simply don’t understand how to have two-way discussions of things. Or, for that matter, to absorb and process reactions other than the single one they have in mind. They talk when they should listen. They’re ready to be masters of puppets, but they’re not ready to truly co-exist with others. They think they are but they aren’t.

They start, or wade into, these exchanges with scripts in their heads they want to see played out to the letter, and when they get back something that’s outside the guardrails they start you-see-ing. They waste their time and everybody else’s time with pablum. “You see, if you wear a mask it slows the spread, and we’re all in this together.” “You see, scientific theories are seldom if ever proven, but they’re still scientific.” “See, black people can’t be racist because they lack the power to do racist things.” “You see, even men should support feminism, because feminism is really all about equality between the sexes.” “You see, by using these slightly heavier bags and charging the ten cents, the stores encourage recycling which will help save the planet.” “You see, in times like these, with things the way they are, we all have to conserve water and a golden brown (dead) lawn looks classy in a way.” “You see, when you plug in your car to charge it, you don’t need to use gas.” “You see, by wearing these masks, we show each other that we care about each other.” “You see, a noose causes a special kind of hurt in black people that white people can’t understand. It’s like a fairy tale, magical kind of hurt.”

There is a bloated “new world” subclass of these that begin with, or could begin with, the words: “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which…”

“You see, we’re trying to make a world in which everyone uses the Metric System.” “You see, we want a new world in which men and boys are not so attracted to fit girls, or who are attracted to girls who are not so fit.” “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which money is not what motivates people.” “You see, we want a better environment in which bullying is a thing of the past.” “You see, we want to rid the world of bigotry forever.” It has not been lost on me that when such activists win at everything and reform everything exactly the way they want it, the things they wanted relegated to the past are not relegated to the past. They “celebrate” these past vices and plagues as if they were present things. Sometimes they even bring them back again so they have something they can continue vanquishing. And the new world they’re building, far from being a dream world, is the stuff of nightmares. No one with a choice would actually live in it…but people who don’t have choices, are compelled to do so, and suffering on a large scale is the unavoidable result.

A very large portion of all “arguing politics on the Internet,” probably more than half of it word-for-word, is just “you see.” Simple minds re-regurgitating things they’ve already said, because they ran into responses they didn’t like, and rather than responding to the responses they didn’t like, just you-see re-explaining.

“You see, when the Government spends that money, it creates jobs…(Whereas if the people and businesses were allowed to keep it Lord knows what they’d do with it, maybe shovel it into a paper shredder).”

They dismiss legitimate questions, anecdotal evidence, and logical problems with their plans by “you see”-ing away the questions, evidence and problems. They re-explain the essentials. It looks like having a discussion but it really isn’t that. It’s more like an involuntary reflex. It’s like a facial tic.

I blame the lilty-voiced kindly old aunties who spent decades and decades warbling away about “No discussion of sports, politics or religion allowed at this supper table.” I blame them, because we now have multiple generations of people who think they understand how to have a discussion, in fact fancy themselves to be experts at it. How could they not be? Look at all the time they put into it. But their go-to maneuver is to retreat into the comforting embryonic sac of “you see” followed by explaining — again — to some imaginary opponent who’s hearing of the issue for the very first time, when the actual situation is that they got back a question they couldn’t answer, or have been shamed by the presentation of some contradiction or conundrum they know they should have settled themselves before bothering anyone else with it. So they go for the facial tic and start explaining.

Telemarketers who bother old people in the middle of the day with their scam phone calls, are much more savvy. When they run into a scrutinizing question for which they’re unprepared, like “Why do you need my money to invest if it’s such a hot prospect, why don’t you do it yourself and keep all the profits?” they just cuss, hang up, and go on to the next call. The Internet-arguers trying to sell scams on blog threads or on social media, aren’t that sharp.

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Conservative and Liberal
Sunday, March 28th, 2021

Friend/Relative #1: “I’m confused by all this conservative/liberal stuff. What’s the difference?”

Friend/Relative #2: “The difference is that liberals boldly embrace change because they’re not afraid of it. Conservatives cling to the past with bloody fingernails, even when it’s going away. They’re like the buggy whip factory worker making more whips after the car has been invented. They doom themselves.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh, well I definitely want to be a liberal then.”

Friend/Relative #2: “I’ve heard they’re called ‘liberals’ because they love liberty.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh! Well so much the better!”

That’s got to stop. This is wrong. Anyone who has been thinking for themselves, even for a moment, at any time over the last five years knows this is balderdash. President Trump was a reformer, a conservative reformer. The liberals resisted his reforms, clinging to a past that was going away, until they looked like buffoons. Now they’re going to try to bring it all back again. They may succeed at it, but they’ll end up looking even more buffoonish. They’re the ones manufacturing buggy whips.

They were, and are, afraid of change because they were, and are, afraid of their liberal swamp rat asses getting sent to jail where they belong.

And they hate liberty as if liberty shot their parents in an alleyway when they were eight. Their solution to every problem is some kind of encroachment or diminution against individual liberty.

The myth is that conservative and liberal have to do with change, and time. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is very much like using a boat’s compass to figure out where the front of the boat is. It is the application of a static concept upon a dynamic object, and such a “definition” will be wrong whenever the boat is headed in a direction different from the one on which you planned. That’s going to be roughly half the time, or more. “Liberals boldly embrace change” fails every time conservatives are the ones bringing the change, which is roughly half the time. “Liberals love liberty” fails all of the time.

Conservative vs. liberal has to do with definitions. Look it up:

Conservative (adj.): “marked by moderation or caution : marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners” (Merriam Webster) “(of an estimate) lower than what is probably the real amount or number” (Oxford)

Liberal (adj.): “not literal or strict : loose : not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms” (Merriam Webster) “Given, used, or occurring in generous amounts : giving generously : broadly construed or understood; not strictly literal or exact” (Oxford)

How it applies:

“Caitlyn Jennier is a woman” is a very *liberal* interpretation of “woman.” Conservatives are going to define “woman” conservatively, and they will tell you that’s a man, baby. And they’ll be right.

“Tom and George are married” is a liberal interpretation of “married.” Believe it or not, there are still conservatives running around who don’t recognize this. Our opinions are illegal, but we still have them…and, being the real lovers of liberty, we know we have a right to them. No matter what.

“Climate change is going to doom us all” is a liberal prognostication. It is the kite severed from the string. It is imagination running wild and free, unconstrained by anything.

“But it’s science!” is a liberal interpretation of “science.” It falls to conservatives to remind everyone else of the conservative understanding of science. Science doesn’t work that way.

“Absentee ballots must be received by this date” was interpreted liberally, which is how Joe Biden won some states last year. In violation of the local laws. Liberals violate laws a lot, rather capriciously, because they violate definitions. It’s what liberals do.

When liberals are “generous,” it’s with someone else’s money, which is a very liberal understanding of the concept of generosity.

In the antebellum era of the United States, history shows we had deep and irreconcilable conflicts regarding the proper interpretation of our founding documents, which held these truths to be self-evident,

…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it[.]

Today’s liberals would like to be viewed as proper ideological descendants of the abolitionists, who sought to end slavery. Those who were interested in the preservation of this institution, bent the rules on interpretations, and liberals would like us to think of them as conservatives. But if you could bring back one of those “conservatives” and ask him to justify his position, he would use tortured, liberal arguments. The most popular one at the time seems to have been something like: Yeah sure, all men are created equal, but these slaves aren’t men, they’re my property. Your document doesn’t say anything about rights of property, only rights of real men, and I don’t recognize them as such. I get to provide the final interpretation on this. Why? Because I want it! I want that authority so just go ahead and give it to me.

Liberals want us to think of those as conservative arguments. Why? Because they want it that way. So just give it to them! And…we do.

That doesn’t work. Not even half the time. In fact, the arguments used by the slaveholders to preserve the institution of slavery, are no different from the argument today’s “pro-choice” liberals use to preserve the industry of abortion. There’s no meaningful difference between these whatsoever. Yeah sure, the baby would have a right to life if it were a baby…but I do not recognize the “clump of cells” as a baby.

Here is something else that absolutely, positively, does not work:

Liberal (adj.) (Oxford) “Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise”

That definition has not been removed yet, nor do I know for sure that it will be anytime soon. But it should be.

Our liberties depend on our legal system. Our legal system relies on definitions remaining strong, and interpreted according to original intent. You can’t be a lover of liberty, while you’re being liberal with interpretations. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to be using your fast-and-loose stretchy-Gumby elasticized definitions to remove someone’s freedom, and better than even odds you’re going to be hurting them by doing so. And feeling very, very smug about yourself while you’re doing it. That’s a liberal.

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“When does it end?”
Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

A year ago when the nonsense started, I took a stab at the “when” and ended up taking a pass on it, veering off into the arguably easier “how”:

Somehow, the relationship between rule-makers and rule-followers is going to get changed, forever…
:
Looks to me like we all go there. Don’t you dare step out of that house, followed by a zillion exclamation marks!! And then followed by…yeah okay, whatever.

I do not like the idea of the other 49 states copying this idea of ours, that laws mean nothing. Like all the rest of our ideas that get copied, it’s bad.

But I think that’s how it goes.

The Washington Examiner just put out an editorial that says more or less the same thing, but views the situation in the context of responsibilities resting on the top layers of our modern aristocracy, going unfulfilled. Our leaders have duties, and the rest of us should expect them to deliver.

Lockdowns, distancing requirements, and mask mandates need to end as soon as possible. That doesn’t mean today. It doesn’t mean tomorrow. But it means at some point.

Our leaders and health experts have a duty to articulate, right away, standards of when these should end.
:
We cannot wait for COVID-19 to disappear. That might never happen. And maybe Fauci has his own yardsticks. Maybe New York City will propose others. Maybe we’ll all disagree over the right ones.

But every public health authority and every government executive should lay down his or her proposed “finish line” right away. At least then, we’ll have something to fight over. Because right now, it seems indefinite. And indefinite “emergency powers” for the government are lethal to human freedom.

It is that very last line that tells the whole story, in my opinion. This should be simple. It’s complicated, not because we need to weigh safety against this “human freedom,” but because the loudest among us don’t give a rat’s south-end-when-facing-north about freedom. They sneer at the idea. They’re proud of not giving a crap.

Let them describe the conflict the way they see it. A hundred times. All hundred times, they’ll describe this concern over sickness and death as a novel idea…as if those of us looking forward to the end, are the neophytes who haven’t thought of things yet. As if we’re supposed to say “Oh the virus might kill people? Gee I hadn’t thought of that.” Time goes on and they learn nothing, because they refuse to think of themselves as the ones who are missing the vital nugget of game-changing information. They want that to be the other guy.

But, no. This is a balancing act of danger versus lethargy, of preserving safety versus preserving opportunity. It is an ancient struggle in our species, and a divisive one. Unfortunately, in these modern times, it’s always the safety-conscious ones, the ones who are so radicalized that they think of liberty as a disposable thing, or even a nuisance, who are the loudest ones.

They’re desperate. They really do think they carry the responsibility to avoid millions and millions of deaths, in their own little hands. And their voices carry. We have built an advanced society that is safety-conscious. That’s not a bad thing.

The problem is time. The more they win, the deeper we head into a territory in which other priorities have to be considered…and now, we’re a year into it.

My concern, just like a year ago, is what happens to the rule of law. We’re well on our way to ratifying ordinances, statues, codes, whatever, but in written form and as seriously as we can every establish any sort of law. And then, out of necessity, forming a more deeply respected but unwritten cultural protocol in which everybody gets to just walk all over it, California-style.

Society can survive the virus. But it can’t survive that.

So that’s my argument. We can listen to these safety-obsessed navel-gazers, and we can take their arguments seriously and we can act on them. But not to the exclusion of all other considerations. That leads to society’s undoing, and in the way I described. It can’t lead anywhere else, unless somewhere along the line there is a course-reversal. Putting it more concisely: It’s unsustainable.

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Laying Low
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

This is the fourth time, in my lifetime, that a democrat administration has settled into a White House previously occupied by Republicans. Now, the democrats don’t have the same priorities or value systems I do, but in 1977, 1993 and 2009 they were able to describe specifically what’s better according to them. There was some petty b.s. like “We have a President who can pronounce ‘nuclear'” and there was some stuff about endangered species and there was some prejudiced bigoted stuff about “diversity” or something, not as many white males.

At least there was stuff!

This time they’re laying low. It’s weird. The party in charge is laying low. We all know why. There’s no bragging to be done. Even taking into account their own weird priorities, from their own weird frame of reference, they can’t brag.

Even if they could brag, they wouldn’t be able to nail down who’s really running the country. Their own supporters don’t know the answer to that.

The cool thing about a republic like ours is, in one way or another, the country as a whole is always winning. Just like people who go through life making decisions smart & dumb; we make good decisions and benefit from them, or we make poor decisions and we end up learning. Right now we’re learning. We’re learning in the aftermath of a decision that was supported by those among us who are opposed to defining things. Seriously, what were the very best arguments for this? “Trump Bad!” “But his tweets!” “OMG I can’t even!” Very convincing. But who among us wanted a White House that “calls a lid” with crises galore, including a border debacle that is defeat snatched from the jaws of victory?

So we’re learning. People who don’t define what the specific problem is and what to do about it and provide at least a high-level rough-sketch overview about how this is supposed to lead to a more desirable state — they’re not the ones who should prevail in these things. In a way, they don’t even want to prevail. They don’t want to accept the responsibility that comes with victory. They’re not in any position.

It’s a valuable lesson. I do tire of seeing it repeated over and over again.

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“Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist”
Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Yesterday morning I inserted a key phrase that looked like a throwaway, but actually carries some significance:

They [liberals] are surreal and they have managed to create factional infighting in their opposition, just by being themselves.

I have long admired Dennis Prager — and there’s really no “but” to that, although there is, you might say, “a thing.” Prager writes a lot about liberals, and so do I, but he does not look at liberalism the way I do. Many others see things the way he does, and many others see them the way I do.

The “factional infighting” is over the word itself. Liberals, as I pointed out, are supposed to be champions of liberty. They’re supposed to be lovers of liberty. Supposed to be. That’s the way it should work, and clearly it doesn’t work that way. The “liberals” we see today hate liberty. They actually look at it as a root cause of our social ills, and their cures tend to have something to do with taking liberty away. And by “tend to have something to do” what I mean is “Go ahead and look for exceptions, like, try really hard.”

People in Prager’s camp tell me the enemy has been co-opting the word “liberal,” and I should not willingly cede ground to the enemy. They’re not wrong. What they overlook is that “ceding ground” is the wrong metaphor, this is more like a horse that’s run out of a barn door never to be seen again, and we’re pondering whether or not to close the door. Liberal means leftist. Rush Limbaugh would bitch about liberals, explain to his audience that “liberals don’t want their plans to be evaluated based on results, they want them evaluated based on intentions and feelings”…there’s zero confusion about what he means. You say “Those [expletive] liberals are trying to ban Dr. Suess,” everybody knows what you mean. We use words to convey meaning. There’s no ambiguity here. If that means the bad guys have won something, well then that’s too bad. Admit it and move on to the next thing. Life is full of ambiguity, we don’t need to go pretending there is some where there isn’t any.

You notice observations that involve, or depend on, this process of subversion or co-opting or however you want to think of it — it’s necessary to explain. “Conservatives today are the only ones who care about liberal values” is not wrong. “Liberals today are exactly what conservatives are supposed to be” is not wrong either. These can cause confusion even though they’re not wrong. That is a good thing. It’s good that explaining it all is necessary to continue the point. I like that. It means the conversations that have to happen, are going to happen. I think both sides of this conflict can agree, there needs to be more attention paid to, and inspection into, this “switch.” If we don’t do it, the liberals get to explain all of it and that’s exactly what’s been happening. They call it “the party switch” and they’re going around saying Republicans became democrats somewhere around 1964 and democrats became Republicans. With no one else discussing it, liberals get to write our history…and they don’t deserve to, if the best thing they can say about themselves is “We’re actually the other guys, and the other guys are actually us.” For those who are interested, Dinesh D’Souza has debunked this nonsense very capably. You talk about ceding ground to the enemy? Let’s stop fighting each other, and talk more about why liberals today behave so illiberally.

Yesterday’s rant had to do with the implications of living in a lie, and asking questions that threaten to breach the lie, like the dome of a pretend-world. When someone asks such questions, whoever is sharing the interest of the lie, or pretend world, can

1. Discourage the question by changing the subject
2. Remold the point of breach into something silly (“Darth Vader couldn’t sense Leia because Leia used The Force to block him…”)
3. Discuss the question honestly, admit that this is something the author of the fiction didn’t bother to entertain, that the pretend-world ends here, and real-reality beckons

Those are the three options. There is no other.

What’s important about this, is this: It is is how you distinguish truth from fiction. Fiction makes sense, because it has to, until it can’t. It is the work of mortal men. We can build universes, like God, but it isn’t within our power to build an infinite one. All pretend-domes have a perimeter…and sorry but no, there is no reason for anything in Skyfall to have happened. It’s a visually beautiful, relatable, intriguing movie filled with plot holes and we want to enjoy it so we just go with it.

This is what we’ve been doing with liberalism. A liberal is going to insist “I’m still a liberal who loves liberty because I want transvestites to have the liberty to choose their pronouns.” We know this is fake and phony, because what we’re really arguing about is applying penalties for using the wrong one. Once again, liberty is a problem to the liberal, and his solution to the problem is to encroach on the liberty. But my point here is, the liberal is sincere. He really does think he’s expanding liberty. Your ensuing argument is going to be about that. They’re not bullshitting us. Well, most of them aren’t.

Liberals have not been displaced by someone else. That’s my point. Liberals become leftists because they think like leftists. And leftists live in a cockeyed silly-world full of cognitive dissonance and false equivalences. They never became the opposite of what they claim to be — they were that from the very start. Their play-pretend dome is a penny-dome. You don’t need to cross it in a sailboat over the course of a day to pound on it’s perimeter. One or two simple honest questions would have pierced the periphery. They just never asked them. That’s because their penny domes are echo chambers. Anyone who would ask these most obvious questions, would be escorted outside and then booted out of the place. They’re doing this constantly.

Anyway. Those are my thoughts on it. While I disagree with Prager and his cohorts about the use of these labels, the questions to be asked are good ones. They can help determine how far gone your liberal/leftist kid/grandkid/nephew/grandniece is.

5. Do you agree that all white Americans are racist?
6. If your answer is yes, would you tell the millions of blacks in Africa and the Caribbean who wish to emigrate to America that they would be making a poor decision? If not, why not?
:
16. Has capitalism been a net-plus for America and the world?
:
29. Is the statement, “Men give birth” science-based?

These questions are likely to create “factional infighting” on the other side…which is not my primary intent here, but these are conversations that should be happening. If division must happen as a result, that’s a division that should be happening too. People who really believe America is inherently racist, shouldn’t be uniting with, or recruiting from the ranks of, people who don’t think so.

“Should we call leftists liberals?” is not that important of a question, in my mind. As I pointed out above, if I say “liberal” everyone knows what I mean. When a friend or family member who hasn’t been paying attention and is willing to admit it, approaches you and says “I don’t understand this conservative/liberal stuff, please explain it to me,” there’s no mystery about what he means. You can play the pedant and start with “Actually, liberal is the wrong term” — I can’t stop you. And many would start with that. Just like a lot of people can’t get over the very professional-looking and expensive labeling of “DRIVE THRU” by the fast food restaurants, which should be spelling it “through.”

The fact remains, liberalism is a pox upon us, a modern plague. And when you look into why people become liberals, you find it has to do with sloppy thinking. People who object to the use of the label, are not wrong, but they’re making inquiries that are exceeding the dimensions of the penny-dome, and breaching the perimeter. They’re over-thinking it.

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Morgan’s Six Dollars
Monday, March 8th, 2021

Sadly, your “wealth/income inequality” imbroglio doesn’t get any more complicated than this:

Brain dead liberals: We make $3 and Morgan makes $6. This is wealth inequity.

Company: Tell us about it. We want to hire Morgan and we’re ready to offer him $7.

BDL: Clearly we have to raise Morgan’s taxes to make the wealth inequity go away.

Government: How much?

BDL: Well let’s see. We pay %10 on our $3 and Morgan pays %40 on his $6. So how about you bump that up to %55 then he’ll be left with the same amount as us.

Government: Okay! Company, and Morgan, you do what you want because we’re not banning or requiring anything here, we lack the balls to take responsibility for anything. But these are the new rates! We’re representing our constituents, don’t you see.

Company: Yikes! Morgan won’t move his fat ass for 45 cents, but we really have to have him. So now we’re going to offer him $10.

Morgan: Uh…um…okay.

BDL: Morgan is making 10!! We’re still making $3, the disparity is getting worse! Who can we blame for this? Derp derp derp.

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Pounding the Dome
Monday, March 8th, 2021

There was this tragic-comedy movie awhile back about a baby born into a pretend-world, filled with actors, and he grows up into a man never realizing his entire life is a television drama. Hollywood does love their existential bullshit, and every now and then they put out something that makes you think. This one has a climactic scene in which the star, Truman, having put all the clues together, takes it upon himself to sail out on the open sea. Sure enough, he meets up with the wall of the dome that contains his pretend-world. And he starts pounding on it in a mixture of fear, realization, confusion, and God knows what else I suppose.

It is a masterful scene. It speaks to all of us who have watched and enjoyed fiction, and asked just a few too many questions about it. And it also entertains questions that have consumed the attention of philosophers across the centuries. How do we know any of this is real? Suppose we’re all Truman. Or suppose there is no “we’re all” and it’s just you. Who’s to say, when you were one year old you didn’t fall asleep in your playpen and start dreaming…and you’re still dreaming?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Man and God can make universes, but only God can make an infinite one. Certain questions about the fictitious, man-made ones that only exist inside domes, pound on the boundary from the inside by sailing too far. I’ve written before about these; with so much fakery around, it seems every time we ask a question about anything at all, it turns out to be one of these “you’re not supposed to be asking that” questions. It seems now that our play-domes are getting tinier, it’s becoming easier to sail out into the boundary and start pounding on it, regardless of whether that’s what we intended to do. One of my favorites has long been “How come Darth Vader can’t sense his own daughter when she’s standing right in front of him?” Such a question can be answered without breaching the dome, by merely extending it, although such an exercise quickly turns comical and silly. See, Leia was so masterful with her use of The Force, surpassing even her brother Luke, that she was blocking Vader — without even consciously realizing she was doing it. And from across the Galaxy, on Dagobah, Yoda was helping her or something.

The fascinating thing about this, to me anyway, is that such questions can only fracture brittle domes. There has to be some agreement that the answers are sensible, and that the dome is hard, crisp, brittle, infused with the appropriate sense of humility, ready to shatter and admit “Okay, you got me” rather than allow itself to be contorted out of shape into absurd positions. And that’s up to the person asking. If you’re really ready to distinguish between fiction and truth, you have to be ready to say: Cut the crap. The correct answer is that Lucas is making this all up as he’s going along, or he was at the time anyway. Vader could have sensed his own daughter, from quite a distance away actually, but at that point she wasn’t his daughter yet so there are plot holes. This space opera is full of such questions, because it’s full of geeky nerds who insist on stretching the dome-wall into a gooey mess with “You see, uh, it’s like this” explanations for every one of these plot holes. You can get much simpler if you want to. How come Cordé felt she had failed her queen by getting blown up, when she actually did a terrific job — the whole job — taking the hit? The sensible, concise and devastating answer is “bad writing.”

But again, geeks can build annexations onto the dome, and stretch it’s wall out of shape. Many have. How do you do a Kessel Run in twelve parsecs when a parsec is a unit of distance? How come Han Solo doesn’t shoot first, only on this planet not on that planet?

It’s not limited to Star Wars. How come the finest journalist in Metropolis can’t figure out her colleague is really Superman, just because he’s wearing glasses? How do rocks from his home world hurt him?

You’re asking questions the maker of this pretend-universe didn’t ask himself. You’ve exceeded the radius of the dome. You’ve overthought it.

And that brings us to our friends, the liberals. They are surreal and they have managed to create factional infighting in their opposition, just by being themselves. Why do we even call liberals liberals, when they don’t love liberty — far from it — and when Donald Trump introduces change, they resist the change by any & all means necessary? Have they been supplanted by a usurping agent? Or were they seduced into something? Were they seduced out of something? Did it happen all at once, or in stages?

The simplest answer, the one that extends humility and demands it as well, will usually be the one to fracture the dome and reveal the truth…provided the person asking really wants that to happen. The trouble with our friends, the liberals, is that they’re human, and we humans all have flaws. Ideas within a philosophical movement remain fixed, but we are not fixed as we seek to propound or to oppose those ideas. Loving liberty…there’s a dicey proposition for you if ever there was one. The truth is that liberty has a lot of fair-weather friends. Your own liberty, when there are no strings attached to it, is an easy thing to love. The test is if you can keep loving it if there are responsibilities connected. Can you love someone else’s liberty. Like many things that have never been tested until late in the game, liberals fail this one when it’s finally administered. They don’t apply it against themselves. And the rest of us haven’t been applying it to them.

We see liberals who hate and fear liberty…because they always did.

You see, these are high-grade interrogations into a low-grade subject. They exceed the dimensions of the dome. And that is what we should have expected to see happen, because this particular “Truman Show” dome is quite tiny. Liberalism isn’t a philosophy at all. It’s a plea for attention, a virtue signaling waste. It has been from the very beginning. Look how wonderful I am. Look how ready I am to boldly embrace change. Look how much I love liberty.

But if the liberty under discussion isn’t one of just a very few things that have to do with deviations from conventional morals, many of them having to do with sex…abortions, gay marriage, taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgeries…there’s no love for the liberty there, none at all, and they’re not ready to let us keep it.

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So Much Fake Stuff
Saturday, February 20th, 2021

Like the electrical power in Texas, public trust in our officials and our institutions is down at crisis levels. And much like the Texas power shortage, this public trust shortage is widely regarded as a spontaneous thing. We like to think of it in passive-voice terms, with no subject to the sentence, no one bearing any responsibility for cratering the quantity of this essential asset. Of course we’re not thinking of it that way because it’s true; we’re thinking of it that way because any inspection of who is responsible, would prove inconvenient to those who brandish the power of telling us what opinions to have.

These crises are hurting people though. Others are doing a better job of looking into the cause of the Texas problem than I could. I shall leave it to them. They’re closer. But on the other problem, the public trust problem, I’m square in the middle of it. I’m a member of the public. And I do not trust. I have reasons not to trust, so let’s look into them because I’m not alone.

I am sure Joe Biden’s election was a sham, and I’m convinced of it because I was awake when the votes were rolling in to those six battleground states. I was tuned in to the daily news in the days following Fraud Day, November 3rd, and I remember the states flipping. I remember how they flipped. In short, I’m not an Etch a Sketch with my contents conveniently erased when someone shakes me. That was fraud. The other thing that convinces me is the behavior of those who want me to believe in the legitimacy of the election. They do not act like it. Their rebuttals are the arguments you use on morons. “No evidence!!” Hey, how about some evidence we have an election system we can trust? It’s too late not to shut down the counting centers, kick people out of them who should be there…and then keep counting game-changing votes. That damage is done. They shouldn’t have done it. And where’s our press asking these kinds of questions? Oh…they’re “fact checking.” Yeah that’s real convincing. So I count this as fakery.

President Biden’s message of unity is fake. He won only just barely and he’s spent his first month signing a zillion executive orders that are raising the price of gas and getting rid of jobs. Why are we pretending he cares?

His mandate is fake. It is a flaw in the design of our system that his party has the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House. All of these were won by statistical flukes and thus do not capture the public will.

The climate crisis is back in the spotlight again. It seems now that there’s real hope for curing the China Virus thanks to the Trump Vaccine, it’s time to swivel back to the Gore Scam. For the last year, there hasn’t been any such crisis. Someone, somewhere is laboring under the heavy burden of making sure we’re frightened out of our wits, and running around like panicked idiots, over exactly one thing at a time. And we’re laboring under the heavy burden of pretending not to notice. Well I’m glad everyone’s succeeding!

Oh, but scientific consensus and what not. Am I the only one who’s sat in a committee or team in a stuffy conference room and watched these consensuses get formed? The very notion of a “consensus” is fake. It’s like sausage, you don’t want to watch it being made. The consensus is fake and so is the expertise of those who have been invited to form the consensus. Mentally enfeebled teenagers from Sweden are considered, by those who decide such things, as “experts” because they have such passionate opinions. We’re not supposed to notice that?

The wisdom of those who run things, is fake. Joe Biden doesn’t know what he’s signing. We have fact checks, that interview experts who say the audio is unclear. Yes that’s where we are now. “Experts” are telling us what we heard. The sense of leadership is fake. The leaders pay no price for making the wrong decision. When the people making decisions pay no price for being wrong, they’re not leading, they’re playing, just fiddling with knobs and levers like a baby in a playpen. Again, we’re not supposed to notice? Their desire for law and order is fake. They don’t know if they’re truly opposed to destructive rioting, until they first figure out if the goal of the riot leans to the political right or to the political left. Once they figure that out, they know all about what to think of it; they don’t need to know anything else!

The protests are all fake. We don’t know for sure the five W’s of these things being coordinated last summer — I’m sure there are a lot of business owners who would love to know — because we don’t have a “free press” that asks the five W’s anymore. Our press sucks so we’re flying blind. But we can know coordination when we see it. Aggravated concerned youths in hundreds of cities didn’t spontaneously rise up and decide to use the phrase “systemic police racism” in all their isolated enclaves. Systemic police racism has to be fake because we don’t have a “police system.” The “hate crimes,” we know for sure, really are fake. The outrage is fake.

These lingering questions of “Isn’t The Right just as bad as The Left” in the aftermath of the Capitol Penetration, are all fake. The premise is fake. There is no position on the ideological spectrum that will imbue its adherents with immunity from the vices of human passion, because we’re all humans and humans are all flawed. There is, however, a position on the ideological spectrum that will make its adherents particularly susceptible — and it’s the other one, The Left. People feel emboldened to challenge that now? Yes, they do, by the millions, but they’re not challenging it honestly. If we’re arguing honestly, we can’t even argue it. The Left is all about whipping people up into frenzies and letting them break things. We spent all last year watching it.

The impeachments against Donald Trump — both of them — were fake. They weren’t serious. You can tell by the timelines. The first one wasn’t delivered to the Senate for nearly a month. Which isn’t serious. That was some sort of three-dimensional chess move on the part of Grey Goose Nancy, which must not have worked because she didn’t repeat it on the second go ’round. But the democrats dropped both of these like hot potatoes when they were no longer convenient. When it takes the Senate less time to acquit from an impeachment than it takes to get the articles delivered to them, that’s not serious, that’s fake.

Masks work to slow the spread of the China Virus — that much is genuine. Defending these “experts” whose recommendations have slid around and flopped back and forth as we learn more about this novel virus, I like to sum it up as: “We started out thinking the big danger was uncleaned surfaces, but it’sSNOT.” Hehehe. Yes, microscopic droplets of snot flying through the air, that’s the big danger, and it looks like this finding isn’t going to be in need of reform. So you should wear your mask if Trikini you’re going to be indoors in a crowd. Here’s the thing though: Why are you indoors in a crowd? Are you displaying symptoms? You should be home then. Are you not displaying symptoms? The science is wobbly on asymptomatic transmission, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. But why are you wearing a mask on the jogging trail? Why are you wearing one riding your bike? Wearing a mask when you’re by yourself is fake and phony. Stop signaling. Or keep signaling, but be aware that it looks like what it is, useless, fake virtue signaling.

The death counts are fake. Dr. Birx was crystal clear about it: If you die with the China Virus, they count that as dying from it. Then a few months later Dr. Fauci settled the matter definitively, in that way he does…

Fauci told the ABC program “Good Morning America” on Tuesday that the CDC guidance, last updated on Aug. 26, indicates that of the people who have died from the virus, “a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just Covid.” However, people with underlying illnesses also die from Covid-19, he said.

“That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did…So the numbers you’ve been hearing — there are 180,000-plus deaths — are real deaths from Covid-19. Let (there) not be any confusion about that.” [emphasis mine]

I never did have any confusion about “If you die with the ‘vid you die from the ‘vid.” Eaten by shark — COVID death. Girlfriend’s husband blows your head off with a shotgun — COVID death. Motorcycle crash — COVID death. But our leading expert tells me to go ahead and believe the numbers. “Let there not be confusion” is, in & of itself, a fake statement. He means let there not be any doubts…and let there not be any where there should be some.

Meanwhile, Tony-The-Tyrant Fauci is the highest-paid person in our federal government. The highest paid one out of all of them, including the President. But if you want to believe bureaucrats are not incentivized in any way to exploit a crisis…go ahead and believe that too, I guess, I can’t stop you.

“We’re all in this together” is fake.

Two weeks to flatten the curve — was, and is, fake. It’s a whole year old. A year.

The WHO is fake and phony. There is a reason Trump acted to defund them. China is fake and phony, even now pushing out fantasy-porn about the United States infecting China, with their virus.

Eleven months ago all us working stiffs were pigeonholed into “essential” and “non-essential” personnel…that’s fake. If your family depends on your job, the job is not non-essential. The process of doing this was fake, since the people making the decisions about others weren’t producing anything. When unproductive people are sending productive people home, that’s fake. But the move hit hard, because a lot of these jobs were fake. What we learned is that those of us who have options, should have been asking more questions about the jobs we held — could they have been classified as non-essential, if disaster struck. I’m in that crowd too. My own job was classified non-essential…then a system crashed and I became essential.

Our new President being able to speak, is a fake idea. He can’t. Television has done this to us. We elect Presidents, and the Presidents have made their careers reading from teleprompters, so whenever and wherever the President speaks we have to put up a teleprompter. Roughly half of these guys can deal with the disaster if the teleprompter happens to fail. The other half can’t. And we just accept this. Now to be clear, the ability to speak off-the-cuff isn’t rigidly connected to having good ideas or good values. (The idea that it is the same, would be fake.) But if you really have to rehearse and script, and you can’t get away from it, you’re probably a flim-flam man and we should never have accepted this. But television is powerful, we did accept it, and so we have these fake “wonderful speakers” who are actually terrible at it, and often the reason they’re terrible at it is they’re trying to sell us fake, phony lies.

Presidents do all sorts of things with “executive orders” now. Presidents of both parties. They’re actually making laws, which is supposed to be Congress’ job. How is it they’re able to do this? It’s because Congress doesn’t do it’s job. We have Separation of Powers in this country, but that’s something that’s supposed to be invoked all of the time, be it convenient or not. The truth is, whenever everyone in power can agree that it’s not convenient to invoke it, we don’t have it. We have fake Separation of Powers.

Texas is in trouble because of fake energy sources. They’ve got these fake energy sources down there because they’ve got fake Texans. Californians voted like idiots, here in California where I am, they ruined the state to the point where they can’t hack it anymore, then they moved to Texas and voted like idiots over there. Texas came close to rolling over for Biden, which they didn’t do, but one thing they did do is manage their energy the blue-state way: Move on to phony-baloney energy sources before the phony-baloney energy sources were fully able to handle the load. And here we are.

Bill Gates’ beef is fake. No thanks! Kill some cows for me, I like the real thing.

The schools are fake. At least, that one district is…their board members were caught saying these things about the parents, because of a fluke. The “If you call me out I will fuck you up” lady asked if their session was closed and private, and she got back the wrong answer. Oops! Okay. So how many other school districts have this rancid attitude. In how many other districts have things rotted away, to this extent, and we don’t know about it because a similar mistake did not get made? It’s the question that should be on everyone’s minds. But we’re barely even talking about it, and by Monday morning it will be all but forgotten. Obviously educating the children is not a priority. And here we have a “consensus” that must be genuine, since I listened to the whole recording and I didn’t hear anyone say “Hey hey now, let’s check ourselves” or anything like that. How angry are the parents getting over this stuff? Angry enough? Are we teaching the children what they need to know to have successful adult lives, or just going through the motions?

We have this exploding, fast, busy proliferation of “learning disabilities” in our schools that are fake. They’re re-defining everything about this and what little “science” is attached to it is writhing around like a dying earthworm on a hot sidewalk — not for reasons science should be moving around. They’re not learning that much that’s new. All they’re really learning about is new ways to game the system and fool the parents, but they’re changing the definitions of everything that matters. What’s a psychotropic drug, what’s the “Autistic spectrum,” what the tell-tale symptoms are for this, or that, how to be “sure” of it. What they’re really uncovering is new ways to diagnose more kids and make more money.

Do I even need to say anything about “fact checking”? Last week I had a liberal debating me on the telephone…”winning” the argument by pointing out that a quote I provided was “missing context.” The fog of proxy embarrassment filled the room. By now, anyone who’s been paying even a casual level of attention knows “missing context” means “My fact checker bosses tasked me to falsify this, and nothing about it is false so here I am not knowing what to do.” Fake, fake, fake.

Feminism is fake. It was supposed to be all about putting men and women on an even playing field, fulfilling the grandest ambitions of both, and supposedly it would be in the interest of fathers and sons to support it because patriarchy hurt males too. That was the selling point. Did the delivery match the promise? Feminist attacks on men have become commonplace, even expected. The sales pitch worked, phony as it was, precisely because most men are not what feminists make us out to be. We have no desire for little girls to grow up into stilted, stunted, handicapped women, chained up in the kitchen cooking food and making babies. We want all children to be empowered to grow up into the most capable adults they can possibly be. However, my addendum to this is “But if your slogan follows the template ‘[blank] is female’ then you can cram it.” Men and boys weren’t supposed to have to pay a price for this new empowerment of girls and women. Indeed, those of us who worried about such a thing, were routinely castigated as kookburgers. Well, we were right, and the castigation was fake and phony. Even though it hasn’t stopped!

President Biden has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and so was his predecessor Donald Trump. President Obama actually won it…and for not doing anything. Fake, fake, fake!

Crybullies have a lot to do with why there’s so much fakery around. These are bullies particularly skilled in acting like victims. That’s a core requirement of what bullying is supposed to be, you know: Always fool the bystanders, particularly the authority figures, into thinking your intended bully-victim is the “real bully” and that you, as the bully, are the “real victim.” It’s become commonplace. Get triggered, talk about your feelings a lot, whine and cry on camera…get someone cancelled. Then puff out your chest and brag about it. Whine and snivel about your next target, repeat the process. So dishonorable. So fake. But we just accept this.

We can’t even tell hope and fear apart from each other anymore. Next time someone expresses hope, take a good long look at what they have to say. A good portion of the time, maybe most of the time, you’ll see they’re not talking about hope at all, they’re talking about fear. They live in fear and what they’re spreading is fear. They want others to live in fear. They actually enjoy doing it.

Too many among us look down upon people who ask appropriate questions about things, people who wait awhile before believing the latest canard, with the same snotty derision a reasonable person reserves for the gullible. They treat healthy, balanced skepticism as if it’s gullibility. If they take the same story to a more credulous person who falls for it without asking the appropriate questions, they find their desired audience and they shower praise on that person as if he were a robust, capable thinker…just because he’s believing what he’s told. This rubs off on people. We have embarked on this path of treating gullibility as if it’s skepticism, and skepticism as if it’s gullibility.

Back to the original, inconvenient question: Who is responsible for public trust in our officials and our institutions reaching this low nadir? Obviously the officials and institutions are to blame, directly, but indirectly — we are. We did this to ourselves. We are surrounded, on all sides, by things that are pretending to be other things…in many cases, pretending to be the exact opposite of what they really are…because we have asked for this. Our lesson here is that you can’t be neutral on this stuff. You can’t merely tolerate it. To quietly allow it is to submit to it, and to submit to it is to approve of it. We’re surrounded by fakery because we have tacitly approved of the fakery, and it didn’t start a year or two ago. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been a process of ask for a little leeway, get back a “Mmmm yeah okay whatever,” then then asking for a little bit more. It’s a problem of life, limb and honor. Time was when your honor was at stake if you went around saying things that weren’t true, and if you believed things you were told that weren’t true, you risked life and limb. We have adapted, downward, to a newer situation in which none of those things are on the table, so we don’t value truth the way we used to value it.

It’s a worthy thing to ponder now when we’re wondering what we can do to help ourselves, and others who are worse-off than we are. We’ve got a lot of problems because we haven’t been preventing them. We as a society have not been conducting ourselves, in the middle of making important decisions, as if these decisions really matter and so now we’re surrounded by scavengers, parasites and grifters because we’ve invited them.

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Should I Even Bother Watching
Wednesday, February 10th, 2021

Seems both sides agree the prosecution did a far better job.

I think I know why: They care about the outcome just about as much as I do, which is hardly at all. I’ve yet to see it mentioned that Trump’s interested in running for President again and pulling a Grover Cleveland, if the option is available to him.

As far as legacy, it’s: Congress impeached him twice but failed to convict both times, versus Congress impeached him twice and ultimately convicted him. Either way, history shows Trump proved we don’t need our political class, and our political class was so childish about being shown up that they couldn’t handle it.

I fail to see how the Senate is deciding anything of any importance here.

4 Comments »

I’m a Man
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

I’m a man. I don’t know, or care, how to “identify” as anything else.

My voice is a natural baritone. I may raise the pitch if I’m trying to sing along to something, but if it gets too far away from me I’m going to drop it down an octave. I’m not going to warble away above middle-C until my throat’s sore just because you feel threatened or triggered. If your parents never taught you to listen to a natural male voice that’s not my problem.

I’m white, straight, six-foot-even and I still possess all twenty-one digits. Not ashamed.

You don’t tell me I have to “get on board” with something or else you’ll leave me behind. Go ahead and leave me behind.

I’m willing to reconsider my opinion if you have facts or a compelling argument to present. You don’t tell me what to think.

I’m not going to try to annoy you or anybody else on purpose. Not unless you or they have already been trying to tick me off on purpose. But I’m not going to try to keep up with rules, rules, rules that are being rewritten every hour of every day just to make offenders out of people who are otherwise inoffensive. Cram that.

Cram your “double masks,” too.

I’m not interested in political correctness. If you have to stick an adjective in front of correctness, you’re really talking about being wrong.

I’m not interested in social justice. If you have to stick an adjective in front of justice, you’re really talking about injustice.

The Other Woman I think men and women are different because they are. This doesn’t mean I treat either one of them unfairly. All in all, I treat both of them more fairly than any of you who are chasing your tails struggling to pretend they’re the same.

I have accomplished things and I have enjoyed advantages as I pursue my efforts. I am not at all ashamed of this. For these “privileges” I have something in place of shame that used to be a common thing: gratitude. Mind-blowing, huh? I’m grateful to my parents, my teachers, my filthy rich bosses, everybody who taught me how to do stuff even accidentally, my ancestors and the forefathers who brought forth this great nation. Hey you know what, I’ve had disadvantages too. I thought about them a lot before I triumphed over them, and after winning out over them I stopped thinking about them. That’s worked out pretty well for me. I recommend that.

I’ve been not-watching football since before not-watching was cool.

I find pretty women appealing. No, I’m not ashamed of that either. Supple, sensuous thighs, heaving bulbous bosom, I just might get whiplash looking although I’ll try to be polite about it. It’s the way God built me. I like shooting guns. I like eating meat. I prefer to fix things myself over calling the repairman. I’d rather build things than buy them, if I can. I like my jokes dirty. I like my beer cold.

Don’t even think about telling me what opinion to have about Placeholder Joe’s stolen election.

You perfect-worlders who want to build your Utopia by indoctrinating the youth, and then waiting around for the hidebound troglodytes to die off so your vision can be complete: I am of the latter. I’m not your puppet. You don’t hold my strings. The sooner you figure that out the better things are going to go between us. It’s too late to fool me about any of this. I know too much.

No sale here. Try the next. Best of luck.

2 Comments »

What’s Most Convincing
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

Leftists who want to have all the election fraud evidence lined up so they can knock it over item by item by item, are just adorable. It looks like they want to debunk just three to five items — to their own satisfaction, not to anybody else’s — announce their check-mate, and if they don’t get immediate capitulation, announce to everyone in earshot something like “See? Nothing will ever convince this guy.”

They don’t understand. There are five big bundles of evidence.

1. The stuff at Here Is The Evidence.com

2. Everything in Mike Lindell’s video at Michael J. Lindell.com

3. The anomalies, statistical anomalies, the failure of the bellwether counties, the enthusiasm and crowd sizes of the Trump gatherings, “Basement Joe,” counties won by Trump vs. Biden, counties won by Obama in 2008 and 2012, vs. Biden, etc….contrasted with these “official” results

4. The behavior of their champions in the White House, Congress, federal agencies, districts attorney, judicial offices, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada

5. Their own behavior

These are not listed in order of importance or persuasive effect. If anything, the bottom two are the most convincing out of all of it. I struggle to think of a single difference between the behavior we would be seeing out of those named above, given the premise that the election was stolen, and the behavior that we are in fact seeing. And I struggle to think of a single thing we would be seeing, given the premise that the election was legitimate and honest — that even vaguely resembles anything we’ve been seeing.

Their narrative says the 2020 election was squeaky clean whereas the 2016 election was contaminated due to “Russian meddling.” That would have to mean something was fixed. Robert Mueller showed us exactly what it looks like when democrats prepare and present fixes to things. That was less than impressive. We saw in the Iowa caucus last year what it looks like when democrats count things. Also less than impressive. Based on that, we know whatever confidence there must be in the integrity of the 2020 election, is all theater: How are you preparing and implementing fixes that are impressive to you, when you can’t prepare and present fixes that are impressive to anyone else?

Their rebuttal to all of this is the stuff you get when people on their side are painted into corners and run out of arguments: Threats. Orders about what to say and what not to say. Social pummeling. Ominous prognostications about some new pariah status that is about to enshroud you if you don’t DROP. IT. RIGHT. NOW.

Yeah…that’s convincing. We’ll file that in the bottom one.

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Capitol Penetration Questions
Saturday, February 6th, 2021

I’m seeing a lot of confrontation both on & off social media, in the wake of this thing that happened a month ago that we’re supposed to think of as an “insurrection.” The problem with using that word is that it presumes motive. If we stick to the facts, and define exactly what was out of the ordinary about it, it’s a penetration. Opinions vary on how much it was forced.

It’s clear there is an effort underway to associate any residual Trump support with domestic terrorism. How organized is this? It doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t have to be organized. A lot of people who voted against Donald Trump want their new world, or their old world, of no-fighting, no conflict, nobody calls anybody “losers,” soothing pastel colors, puppies, rainbows, unicorns, etc….but they still want to be able to call their Trump supporting parents, children, colleagues and fellow citizens fringe-kooky whackadoodles and worse. So they confront us with the QAnon theories — which, if you’re like me, you hadn’t heard spelled out clearly before this year started. Maybe you’re being asked “Do you support this stuff?” or “Are you trying to overthrow the government?”

This coming week Trump is tried in the Senate. We could debate the constitutionality of that, but that’s rather useless as the Senate is gonna go ahead and do it.

This is a good thing. It means we get to ask some questions back to the confronters, who are asking their questions of us.

1. How do you incite a riot, or insurrection, or whatever, to be carried out by people who already brought equipment for doing the rioting? I am of the opinion that this exonerates Trump immediately. You’re ready to do some breaking and some hurting, or else you’re not. If you’re not, but you decided to go ahead and do it because the guy standing next you wanted to do it, it isn’t going to matter what some elected official is saying in a speech. And if you are ready because you brought your pipe bombs with you, again, the speech isn’t going to matter.

2. How do you define the dangerous speech that incites this behavior? If you want to prosecute something, you have to define what it is. I like to make this point by replying to the critic (it really doesn’t matter what they said just before) “This latest thing you said makes me want to grab a brick and throw it through a window. When I do it, it’s on you. Seriously though…do you see the problem now?”

3. Have you been compelled to change your mind about anything since those flawed early reports? There have been some twists & turns in the running narratives. Any zealots who can’t entertain doubts about what they think…the rest of us will have to entertain those doubts for them.

4. Since there is less than full culpability to be placed on those who did the rioting, is this not a referendum against the electoral reforms that the states made just before the election? It’s hard to think of a more scathing indictment to be made against Vote By Mail, than this: The end result was violent rioting due to historically low confidence in the electoral results. So how should a reasonable person view this. As a success?

5. Don’t you think it’s deceptive to use phrases like “a violent protest in which five people died” without disclosing the rioters weren’t directly responsible for hurting anyone? And all of the dead were Trump supporters?

6. Do you agree there was fraud but not enough to change the outcome of the election? How and why? How do you quantify the fraud? Are you comparing it to the national popular vote?

7. Should Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be censured or punished in any way for lying? She certainly does have her defenders, but everyone arguing honestly about it would have to concede she was at least highly deceptive.

8. Is it dangerous to voice doubts about Biden’s victory, or about election integrity, even when those doubts are sincere? It wasn’t so long ago liberals wanted us to “question authority.”

9. How confident should we be about the integrity of our elections?

10. Would you say there were significant problems with integrity or foreign influence in the 2016 elections? Has anything been fixed since then? It seems to me like it’s a lot more reasonable to think the 2016 elections were trustworthy and the 2020 elections were not, as opposed to the other way around. We didn’t pick Vote By Mail because it made the best sense or yielded the most trustworthy results; we were cornered into it by the Chinese Virus.

11. Do you agree with Congresswoman Maxine Waters that Trump should be charged with premeditated murder? After all, these “Do you support this?” questions should be a two-way street if they’re going to be asked at all. And charging someone with premeditated murder would necessitate proving the existence of a plan. This seems like a rather dicey plan.

12. Do you think Waters should be held responsible for calling for confrontations against Trump supporters and harassment of administration officials? Pot, meet kettle.

13. Is there a danger here that one major political party will be allowed to call for confrontations and harassment, and the other won’t? I think most Americans agree with me: There ought to be free speech, there ought to be accountability for those who are abusing this right (just like any other right can be abused)…but the playing field should be level. But just as there are people willing to break things and hurt people, there are people who don’t want a level playing field.

14. What do you suppose the democrats are trying to hide with these repeated efforts to get rid of Trump? After all, it’s not like Washington DC is a Mount Olympus with cerebral ideas and harmony and congeniality with Trump gone.

15. Should we allow people to talk in public about vote count anomalies, voting machine problems, etc.? Should we allow people to speculate that maybe Trump won the election after all? Don’t people have the right to speak freely? If they don’t, how do we prosecute them? Gets back to the point made earlier about defining this dangerous speech. Prosecuting it without defining it would be a lot more dangerous than not prosecuting it.

16. Why do you think the BLM riots turned violent last year? If they were infiltrated by outside groups, why should we not think the Trump supporting crowd was not similarly infiltrated? There is some evidence suggesting this was exactly the case.

17. What do you have to say about the many Trump events that did not turn violent? There have been quite a few of them.

18. Do you agree with the idea that if destructive individuals in the BLM protests had been more consistently punished the Capitol Penetration would not have happened? There is a name for this: Broken Windows theory. It is, as the young people say, “a thing.”

19. Does Vice President Kamala Harris bear any responsibility for her bail fund? If this is all about cause and effect, I have some sincere trouble envisioning her skating free on this thing if Trump is supposed to be convicted. How do you square that circle?

20. Is it more serious when unproductive politicians are deterred from their activities, than when businesses are deterred from doing the things that pay the politicians’ salaries? But I suppose we should all be elated that our friends, the liberals, have finally figured out destructive rioting is a bad thing. Baby steps!

3 Comments »

You Can Reopen Now
Sunday, January 31st, 2021

There is no “science” that says it’s okay to reopen now, as opposed to several weeks ago. So although no one is admitting it, this is purely political. We have discovered the cure for the Chinese Virus here in California, and it’s got to do with cracking a million signatures on Guessin’ Gavin’s recall petition.

Our signatures are in there. I am so proud. It is likely the most positive and direct impact I’ve had on public policy since I voted to re-elect Ronald Reagan.

We here in California are strange. It goes beyond strange. It’s like, if someone stands to personally lose something from making the decision the wrong way, that’s a disqualification; we want these judgment calls made by people who pay no price for being wrong.

If you were to make a list of stellar examples of this, from specimens coast to coast, Gov. Newsom would make a high cut on it close to the top. He’s a cartoon caricature and I’m somewhat taken aback you have to wait this long to see cartoon caricatures made of him, like this. He’s a joke that practically makes itself.

1 Comment »

Showstopper Questions
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

It is in our nature, that when we hear the beginning of a good story and we want to hear how it ends, or when we get a taste of a narrative we happen to like, we overlook things that are real problems. Deep down we know they really are problems but we sidestep them to get to the part we like. It’s a universal failing, no one is immune.

Once you head down that road…a single, inconvenient question can stop the whole show. We don’t ask these, because they’re almost certain to lead to rancor — and, no answer. It’s rude to stop the show.

But that doesn’t mean they’re bad questions.

1. Why is the U.S. Senate conducting a trial declared unconstitutional by nearly half of its members, when it requires a 2/3 vote to convict?

2. Why would Batman ever care what Ma Kent’s first name is?

3. Why are California, New Jersey and Michigan opening when the Chinese Virus statistics are not good in those states?

4. Where’s that plan President Biden said he had?

5. If James Bond’s brother did all this bad stuff, just to get back at him over daddy issues, when does MI-6 revoke his double-oh clearance and access to top secret information?

6. How do we address gender disparities if people just identify as whatever gender they want?

7. Why did Luke Skywalker leave a trail of clues to his location on Ach-To if he just wanted everyone to leave him alone?

8. How do we objectively define “Incitement”?

9. What science is there to justify keeping the schools closed for the Chinese Virus?

10. If democrats represent people who are financially insecure, what is their incentive to strengthen the financial position of the average American?

11. Come to think of it, why is it so hard for democrats to win elections if they’re supposed to represent the 99%?

12. Does Wonder Woman’s golden lasso stop topic drift? Because I’d be all…wow that rack…those thighs…

13. Speaking of women, why do we pretend they’re a disadvantaged minority, when they’re not & not?

14. Where does the potential energy go when you beam Starfleet officers down to a planet?

15. How could a minimum wage increase not affect employment?

16. How much air is in Super-Breath? What makes it cold?

17. If antiwar activists represented their concerns honestly, why did they vote against Trump?

18. What — exactly — do masks have to do with “beating” a virus?

19. How big does the Incredible Hulk get?

20. How does keeping dissenting views from being expressed anywhere, foster a new national “spirit of unity”?

21. Come to think of it, if your arguments are right, why de-platform anyone?

22. How does being Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter make Rey powerful?

23. How does it work that Russians meddled in elections in 2016 but in 2020 we can trust the results?

24. Where does Iron Man keep the fuel for the rockets in his boots?

25. Why do college kids shut out their parents and just about everyone else over 30, then let their college professors dictate to them what to think?

26. How come when Han Solo is in Cloud City, suddenly he can go ahead and shoot first?

27. Is it immoral for spiders to eat flies? If not, why is murder immoral? If so, what do we do to make sure it never happens again?

28. What is the origin of Terminator/Skynet technology?

29. How do you use words to “incite” someone to commit violent acts who has traveled with gear, and other signs of preparation, for committing violent acts?

30. Wouldn’t Bo & Luke become fugitives each time they resist arrest?

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Constitutional
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

I’m not a lawyer in Constitutional Law and I don’t play one on teevee, but I’ve been mulling this thing over and over in my mind. People say I never change my mind about anything, but when they say that what they’re really wanting to say is they had a script all written in their heads where they’d change my mind for me, and it didn’t work because I didn’t correctly play my part in their script. They’re really saying they thought more highly of the arguments they presented to me, than I thought of them, which is something that happens often when people argue about things.

I do mull things over and change my mind. It just happened…I think. Unless I see or hear something that changes my mind again, I’ll have to tentatively come down on the side of the democrats and Mitt Romney, against the 45 Republicans. It’s constitutional to try a former President of the United States in the U.S. Senate. At least, in this case, only because Donald Trump was still in office when the House of Representatives impeached him.

Now. If the Senate votes to acquit, and the House of Representatives says “Oh wait we just thought of something else, we’ve got more articles headed your way” — that would be unconstitutional.

What really decides this for me is the way Article I, Section 3 is worded:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present. Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States; but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has refused to sit for this, I’m hearing second-hand, because he does not preside over impeachment trials of casino owners and real estate developers, and right now that’s all Mr. Trump is. That’s correct.

This situation is weird but it is not out of the scope of what was anticipated by the framers of the Constitution. They did think of it. The “articles” make up the mechanism within the Constitution that deals with this. The House of Representatives has to worry about what office is being occupied by the person they’re impeaching; the Senate doesn’t need to worry about that at all. They have articles. They are reviewing the articles that have been delivered to them and reaching a verdict on those articles.

We here in modern times have an obsession with that “remove” thing. The Constitution clearly lists the punishments upon which the Senate may decide. There are two, not just one. “[R]emoval from Office” is listed first because it’s more important. But here, the democrats don’t care about that, they just want to make sure Donald Trump can’t run again.

Things can be stupid and dishonest, and still be constitutional. That’s what’s happening here. Trump didn’t incite violence. The politicians who say he did, know full well he didn’t. The people you meet everyday who say Trump incited violence, often are going to believe he did because they’ve been deceived. Those who are impeaching and chomping at the bit to vote to convict, are really worried about crimes. They don’t want crimes exposed and they want Trump banned from office so that he won’t expose them. Someone somewhere said “The democrats impeached Trump for investigating a crime, then they elected the guy who did the crime.” That’s a pretty accurate summary. This is a lie within a lie. But lies are not necessarily unconstitutional.

As I said, this is a tentative finding on my part and I look forward to the insights of those who are better educated about constitutional matters to see if they agree or not, and why or why not.

No Comments »

Ungaslightable
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

I am hereby declaring a word for 2021: Ungaslightable.

Yeah yeah it’s got a red line under it because it isn’t a real word. Well, someone has to get on that and fix it. It is the MOST Important word. It can save your soul.

People talk about “gaslighting” but it seems no one remembers the most important thing about it: It requires consent of the victim. You have to disrespect yourself, and rely on the inferential powers of another.

To gaslight means to make one feel that they’re perceiving things incorrectly. Feel, not think; feel. To be a victim of gaslighting, you have to rely on emotional reasoning. Just don’t do it.

Be ungaslightable. Especially right now. Rely on facts, common sense, and yes…your own experiences do count. They are “anecdotal” but anecdotal doesn’t mean “it never happened.”

If science, or the establishment, says there are black swans and all the swans you’ve seen are white, your anecdotal experience lacks value. But if the establishment says all swans are white, and you’ve seen a black one, your anecdotes become relevant.

Trump really did win.

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Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

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Links

Memo For File CCXVIIIMonday, July 12th, 2021

Engaging the LiberalsSaturday, July 3rd, 2021

Don’t Trust the NarrativesSunday, June 27th, 2021

Father’s Day 2021Sunday, June 20th, 2021

What Are They Really Trying to Say?Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

We Aren’t Done With TrumpTuesday, June 15th, 2021

A Certain Amount of PainSaturday, May 29th, 2021

What Fact Checking IsWednesday, May 26th, 2021

Victory Lap?Monday, May 24th, 2021

Liberals vs. LeftistsSaturday, May 22nd, 2021

Memo For File CCXVIISaturday, May 22nd, 2021

TemplatesSunday, May 16th, 2021

Liz Cheney’s Real ConstituentsSunday, May 16th, 2021

Voting With Your FeetFriday, April 30th, 2021

“You See…”Sunday, April 18th, 2021

Conservative and LiberalSunday, March 28th, 2021

“When does it end?”Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

Laying LowTuesday, March 23rd, 2021

“Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist”Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Morgan’s Six DollarsMonday, March 8th, 2021

Pounding the DomeMonday, March 8th, 2021

So Much Fake StuffSaturday, February 20th, 2021

Should I Even Bother WatchingWednesday, February 10th, 2021

I’m a ManTuesday, February 9th, 2021

What’s Most ConvincingTuesday, February 9th, 2021

Capitol Penetration QuestionsSaturday, February 6th, 2021

You Can Reopen NowSunday, January 31st, 2021

Showstopper QuestionsSaturday, January 30th, 2021

ConstitutionalSaturday, January 30th, 2021

UngaslightableSaturday, January 30th, 2021

Memo For File CCXVIII
Monday, July 12th, 2021

Engaging the Liberals
Saturday, July 3rd, 2021

Don’t Trust the Narratives
Sunday, June 27th, 2021

Father’s Day 2021
Sunday, June 20th, 2021

What Are They Really Trying to Say?
Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

We Aren’t Done With Trump
Tuesday, June 15th, 2021

A Certain Amount of Pain
Saturday, May 29th, 2021

What Fact Checking Is
Wednesday, May 26th, 2021

Victory Lap?
Monday, May 24th, 2021

Liberals vs. Leftists
Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

Memo For File CCXVII
Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

Templates
Sunday, May 16th, 2021

Liz Cheney’s Real Constituents
Sunday, May 16th, 2021

Voting With Your Feet
Friday, April 30th, 2021

“You See…”
Sunday, April 18th, 2021

Conservative and Liberal
Sunday, March 28th, 2021

“When does it end?”
Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

Laying Low
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

“Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist”
Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Morgan’s Six Dollars
Monday, March 8th, 2021

Pounding the Dome
Monday, March 8th, 2021

So Much Fake Stuff
Saturday, February 20th, 2021

Should I Even Bother Watching
Wednesday, February 10th, 2021

I’m a Man
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

What’s Most Convincing
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

Capitol Penetration Questions
Saturday, February 6th, 2021

You Can Reopen Now
Sunday, January 31st, 2021

Showstopper Questions
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

Constitutional
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

Ungaslightable
Saturday, January 30th, 2021