House of Eratosthenes

It is baffling to me how quickly Trump stopped being Hitler. An electoral win should not have done that. But it did. What’s happening here? There’s a problem with the way Americans think about things, and the problem predates the creation of DOE. But I still blame the Department for this widespread errant thinking, because the problem has gotten worse, not better, following its creation.

I can’t in good conscience feign ignorance of this problem, or of its effects. I was in it for thirteen years just like everyone else who graduated from public schools.

It’s become a real elephant in the room.

The error is: Consensus as a compass. Figure out where it is. Figure out where it’s going. That way is the “right” way. The other way is fringe-kook. Avoid that. Tens of millions of people have carried this into adulthood, never going against the grain, and when there’s an election they play it like a lottery, picking the winner. They think it’s their job as a voter to predict. This time, they picked Harris, and were momentarily disappointed and fazed when they found out they picked wrong. So they did what you do when you play the wrong numbers in the lottery: They shrugged, and went on with life.

Just a few of the loud ones are clinging to the ambition of making men and women enemies of each other, in the aftermath of being informed men and women don’t want to be enemies. They’ll fail at that but they’ll give it a few more honest tries.

But the point is: The Department of Education has “gifted” us with an entire nation, 370 million strong, of people who can’t distinguish what’s right from whatever a numeric majority says. Far too many people are wholly unprepared for any situation in which those are two different things.

Teacher says: Let’s see a show of hands…and some hands go up, but before they do, heads swivel from one side to the other and back again. Everyone has to know what everyone else is doing. Public school should have taught the kids to simply ATFQ. It taught them the opposite. And it labored long and hard toward doing that: “Right” is what the majority says.

It’s self affirming. Not everybody is deluded in this way, but most of us are, and if most of us think that’s how it works…that’s how it works.

I keep hearing how we need to get rid of bullies.

I’m all in favor of cornering bullies, getting tough with them, or analyzing them, doing what it takes to make them stop being bullies. Bullying is cowardly. Bullying is also painful to the person being bullied. Believe me, I know. But we shouldn’t “end” it because it’s painful to the bullied person. Life is pain. The real problem with bullying is that it’s cowardly. As far as the effect upon the bullied, I have to be honest. Most of what I have to offer as a manly man, today, apart from manly skills, is an elevated pain threshold and I owe that to my bullies. They made me better.

This nonsense about “Let’s see a show of hands” with a subtext of “Prove to me you can noodle out a consensus and then follow it,” on the other hand, confused me for a good long time and toward no good end. It messed me up good. And it isn’t just me.

You didn’t need to read all this to figure out there’s something grossly wrong. The “consensus” droning on and on and on the way it’s been going, for nearly a decade now, about “That guy is basically Hitler,” followed by “But he’s fun to be around and we can work with him” once he’s proven to represent a majority viewpoint; that’s not the way sane or mentally healthy, non-hurting people think or make decisions. It just isn’t. So you know something’s broken. These are just my ideas about what that might be.

I’ve had time to mull this over, so I’m not harboring too much residual question or uncertainty about it. I’m pretty sure.

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Twenty Years Blogging, and I’m Thinking About Work
Tuesday, November 12th, 2024

Twenty years blogging. My thoughts today are about the relationship between blogs, and work. So often, I have missed opportunities to do the first of those two, because the second one got in the way. Gotta keep paying those bills.

Work. Let’s think about that.

A quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson is “I am a great believer in luck, and find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

This is where people get derailed, and start running off down the bunny trail of “Did he really say that?” But I’m more concerned about the spirit behind the letter. Do you get more luck when you do more work?

I have learned, over the last twenty years, about people’s reaction to blogs: They, too have ideas about the relationship between those, and work. There is this unfounded premise that the work a person does, added up to the volume of bloviating they do online, equals k. In other words, it’s a seesaw. People who work, don’t blog, and people who blog, don’t work. It’s quite popular. So popular, in fact, that if you want to fool people into thinking you’ve been working hard, the first step is to not blog; don’t say anything or do anything. And what do we say when we’re caught languishing, being quiet, inactive wallflowers? “Sorry, I’ve been incredibly busy.”

The louder your are, the less work you must have been doing. Quiet people doing all the work.

The truth, I have learned over the years by watching and listening, is closer to the opposite.

Twenty Years We have rampant inflation still, that the Biden administration would like to blame on external factors. “Supply chain issues” and such. Which in turn come from the China virus they won’t allow anyone to call the China virus. Ah…they’re not entirely wrong, but what is that? People were “sheltered in place,” ordered to stay home…and then allowed to stay home. Death of the workplace. They all gathered around the home swimming pool, or the video game console, maybe with a “work laptop” or maybe not, and they “worked.” Meanwhile the government sent them checks.

These were not the bloggers. The bloggers, by and large, were blogging in protest of this. Rather ineffectively.

When did gas go up 40% in price?

When did the price of milk, eggs and butter — double?

When did the public debt swell?

We, as a nation — as the civilized half of the planet, in fact — didn’t work. And in the aftermath, we didn’t have very good luck. Here we are closing out 2024, and our dollars are weak. They don’t buy very much. You don’t work, you don’t get “paid.” Sure you can take home as many of our arbitrary money units as you did before, even “earn” yourself some increases. But the value isn’t there for us, because we, as a whole, weren’t there adding value for each other.

“Raises have not kept pace with inflation,” the news repeats over and over. Right. No work, no pay.

It is truly marvelous that this late in the game, in the digital age, what we call “communism” remains geographically contiguous. Eastern Europe is more steeped in communism than Europe overall, and Europe overall is much more into it than the United States. But we still need to worry about “the spread of communism.” It’s just like a puddle of something someone spilled on a kitchen floor; swelling. The collectives are assimilating more organisms into it — looking for someone to do all the work. The people who are already within, haven’t been doing it. Not because they’re lazy. But because the incentives have been removed. Some would argue that’s the definition of lazy. But, being human, just try living with the incentives removed for a decade or so. Try living with punishment for working.

Communism, like progressivism and Satan, has to keep changing its name, and for much the same reason as those other two: For it to accomplish what it wants to do, it can’t afford to be seen by the populace at large, as destructive an agent as it truly is. It’s the same story over and over again: Everyone understands their continuing survival depends on work, and everyone expects someone else to be doing all of it.

And then nobody does it.

And then our “luck” turns bad, and scarce.

There’s another quote that addresses this directly, one we have caught on video: “Socialist governments…always run out of other people’s money.” Margaret Thatcher.

This isn’t complicated at all. “Inflation” is simply a fancy name for what we should fully expect to be seeing in the aftermath of collective sloth. You present money to buy a thing; what is that? “Here is a dollar. It represents work I did.” That’s what you’re saying when you buy things, right? Oh. A dollar. “Work,” pffft. Right after we were all getting paid by the government to lounge around the swimming pool, participating in “zoom” meetings, and then heading inside to towel off and play video games. Tell you what; you got another one of those? If you do, then we can haggle, otherwise off with you.

And that’s inflation.

Individuals may rightly protest: Unfair! I worked as hard during the China virus debacle as I did before. Harder, even! And they’re right. But that’s the cost of living in a collective. The collective is lazy, and endures the consequences of being lazy; YOU are lazy. Unfair? Absolutely. You might have been working your ass to the bone. You might be a first-responder who’s been saving others. It’s the height of unfairness. That’s why we don’t like it.

Blame the people who have been saying something about it? “They’ve been blogging so that must mean they’re not doing any work!”

My twenty years have taught me many things, and that one thing above & before all the others: This premise is off course by about 180 degrees.

Generally speaking, experience has shown it’s the people who were quiet about the whole thing, who cashed the checks, and spread the suntan oil and continued with the napping and the video game playing and the lounging. And subsequently, were the most shocked that prices had skyrocketed as the dollar, that token of “work I got done to buy the thing,” lost its value. It wasn’t their fault. They thought they were being good citizens of the country and of their various employing entities. They went to wherever they were led. When they were led to the swimming pool and the video game console, they obliged, and when they were given checks for being idle, they cashed them.

Blogging is not work. But, it is “If you see something, say something.” And if you’re working, or trying to get work, struggling to figure out how you can contribute to society productively, you’re going to be seeing quite a lot, and much of it will have been, these past two decades, very, very wrong. That doesn’t make bloggers better people than non-bloggers. I would never go that far with these observations.

But I will say, if someone’s been existing these last twenty years, not seeing anything wrong; there must be something way heap busted about them. It’s been a rather goofy stretch of time, hasn’t it? We may disagree about what policies were good or bad, or who came up with the problems and who came up with the solutions. But we should all agree it hasn’t exactly been a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state. Blogging doesn’t fix that. But silence comes with a guarantee no one will fix anything. And no guarantee at all — contrary to popular opinion — that someone’s getting real work done.

People who’ve been getting the work done, almost always, will have something to say about it. We should make a point of listening to them.

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Choices About Cheating
Sunday, November 10th, 2024

So what I’m getting out of this, is that we get cheating if we are negligent. We don’t need to wonder about it and we don’t need to indulge in silly mind games like “Prove beyond the doubt the cheating happened or else you’re obliged to accept that it didn’t.” If you leave the hen house unlocked, the fox will have a feast, period end of story. Leave the pie on the shelf, the flies will attack; leave the fish on the counter the cat will take it, etc., etc., pick your metaphor.

If we are vigilant, the cheating stops.

This graph that was put together and put up at ZeroHedge, really tells the whole story. The room for doubt it leaves, will have to be decided by each viewer — but in any case it doesn’t leave much.

It’s just like any other field of endeavor involving a valuable asset that has to be secured. If we allow the cheating, we get it. If we get the cheating, we get rampant inflation and Putin invades the Ukraine.

If we don’t allow the cheating, the other guy wins and we get screaming liberals.

Seems to me from the last four years, that’s the whole takeaway. Am I missing anything? Remain vigilant against cheating, deal with toddlers and temper tantrums as many an adult must…allow the cheating, deal with ALL the other adult problems. At their worst. Hard to get a job, hard to keep it, month left at the end of the money, inflation, widespread poverty, idiots in charge, all the problems up to, and possibly including, World War III.

I seek only to distill down to its essentials, this binary choice that has emerged to confront us. The reader will not benefit from me saying which one I’d pick. We all have to make our own decisions.

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He’s Been President Already
Sunday, November 10th, 2024

It’s the weekend. The election was on Tuesday.

I have seen and heard from many, many Harris supporters struggling to figure out how their side lost. Many of them are reporting what they’ve seen and heard from others. Many ideas. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Not all unique, but…lots of effort to figure out where they went wrong.

Not a single one has said anything even vaguely resembling: We conjured up all these fearful prognostications about what life would be under a guy who’s been President already. We didn’t scare ’em like we wanted to. Because he’s been President already.

The most obvious theory. Just lying out there, bloated and baking in the sun belly-up, like road kill, waiting to be…theorized upon.

Not a single Harris supporter has stumbled across it.

Not one.

It’s truly amazing.

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On Leadership
Thursday, October 31st, 2024

Something has happened relatively recently with the concept of leadership, and it isn’t good. It might have started with the pandemic, or maybe a little bit before that with the Disney Star Wars movies. Someone takes over something; they announce with great fanfare their guiding principles, which may be “woke,” but there may be something else wrong with them. And right off the bat they have their critics and they have their defenders, with most of the earnest enthusiasm “enjoyed” by the former as it’s already easy to see what’s going to go wrong.

There’s lots of bluster about “I’m large and in charge” or whatever, but no responsibility taken for bad results. The response to the criticism that should be expected, is a gritty determination to keep on making the same mistakes — and there’s nothing you can do about it! And, to call the critics sexists or racists. Name-calling and intransigence. That’s the rebuttal to the criticism, any & all criticism.

It’s as if the entire “civilized” world woke up one morning and decided: Leadership is nothing but being obstinate and pushy.

Meanwhile, the despair felt far and wide, from having someone “in charge” who won’t listen to anybody else, won’t self-correct or learn from mistakes, and won’t take responsibility for the mistakes made — is palpable. It thickens month by month, year by year, to the point you can almost cut it with the metaphorical knife. It metastasizes into a depression, which the “leadership” notices, and usually blames on someone else.

It wasn’t like this just a short time ago. What happened? How do we fix it?

Maybe we can hold a contest. They do seem to be competing with each other to see who can come up with the worst ideas, the fastest, or implement them with the most intense of misplaced enthusiasm, or show the greatest agility in dodging responsibility. Or, to display the most intractable resolve to maintain the bad policy in response to reasoned criticism.

Within arts and fiction, the clear winner would be Kathleen Kennedy. Whoever is the runner-up, isn’t worth mentioning because the gap between the two is so broad, it isn’t even close. It’s just embarrassing to listen to her anymore. People have entirely given up on her company, and on the industry as a whole. She’s literally destroyed movies.

Out here in the real world of public policy, it might be Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, maybe Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. This weird new brand of leadership that consists of just being stubborn, learning nothing, regretting nothing, conceding no points to their opposition no matter how valid the criticism may be, is commonly illustrated to us as women finally finding their voice. This is unfair to women, for it isn’t only women doing this. Gavin Newsom of California has come up with just as many bad ideas as anybody, done at least as much damage as anyone else, and certainly takes the cake in avoiding responsibility. Or, responding to valid criticism with that now-familiar gritty determination to change exactly nothing and keep-on keeping-on. Should I list examples? It’s hard to know where to begin. Criminal justice reform, battling the “homeless” problem, taxation, environmental — he sucks at all of it and will admit to no errors, concede no points to his critics, change nothing.

It’s like the public at large is a wild animal, and “leadership” in both arts and politics is engaged in a long, drawn out maneuver that does nothing but wound and then corner the animal, giving it nowhere to go. This doesn’t seem smart, to me anyway. Looks like just asking for something bad to happen.
It wasn’t always like this. Leadership used to listen. Maybe show a bit of lethargy in admitting to mistakes, I guess that’s to be expected. But time was, they’d eventually either admit to the mistakes, or quietly change strategy.

I guess, now that we have “social media,” the spoken word enjoys greater currency and greater agility. The criticism flows easily, but the rebuttal to the criticism flows even more easily. The rebuttal, unlike the criticism, doesn’t have to make sense. Just a theory I have to explain it. I’m not sure.
But it’s obvious, lately, when there is valid criticism and then rebuttal to the criticism, the rebuttal consistently wins. Someone is expecting it to go that way. And, it is going that way.

This does not portend good things. We know smaller problems that ought to get fixed, today, and don’t get fixed, grow into larger problems that arise tomorrow. We know cornering a wounded beast is never a smart idea.

And it’s been awhile by now since I’ve seen quality leadership. By which I mean, don’t make good decisions all the time necessarily, but at least admit it and change things in the aftermath of having made some bad ones. I haven’t seen that in a very long time. We seem to be getting quite comfortable with bad leaders making bad decisions and then showing a bad intransigence in keepin’-on the same way. It’s quickly becoming the default strategy of leadership, and everywhere. I’m really not sure what we can do about this.

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Men Are Replaceable
Thursday, October 31st, 2024

The narrative is that men are replaceable. I say “the narrative is” because the desire to believe it came first. People act like the evidence came first and after awhile, someone noticed it out loud. That would be legitimate. But it wouldn’t be accurate. The desire to believe came first and we’re waiting on the evidence; that’s essentially what a narrative is.

Reasonable discussions can be had about whether the evidence has emerged, or whether we’re still waiting on it, or whether it never will emerge because it isn’t true. But that is not the point I wish to inspect. I want to look into the desire to believe that men are devoid of unique purpose and could be easily replaced. It’s everywhere, and it’s intense. From whence does it come? Seems rather useless to me. Are we all supposed to be going somewhere?

This is not an offshoot of women’s lib. It is ancient. It goes back to the days when the woman’s father reserved all the agency in screening out her suitors. “You can do better than him.” It has always run in one direction. Men did not talk about whether they or their sons could do better than the current wife, girlfriend or…obsession. They acted on it, and that’s philandering, or infidelity. Men have been at that for quite awhile. But this has always been a quiet pastime. They acted on it but didn’t speak of it. They didn’t huddle together in these groups to figure out for sure, or make dinner table conversation out of, Is it time to dispose of and replace the wife. But “she can do better than him” hangs around extended family frameworks, across years, even decades, like a bad smell. It’s common. And it isn’t quiet.

This asymmetry is reflected in our fiction, as well as in our truth. The ready made family, joining up with a stepdad. You’ll notice throughout the years, as the female head-of-household has become more and more normalized, the backstory has gone entirely missing. She has kids? You still need a man to come up with those. Where’s the bio-dad? Alive or dead? You may as well be asking where a cow got her calves. “Not in the picture” is a good enough answer, assuming the question is ever asked at all. And it usually isn’t.

This isn’t true of fictional exploits in which a stepmom integrates with a single dad and his kids. When that happens, there has to be a backstory. Where’s the mom? Usually dead. But you have to say what happened to her. Moms are not so easily replaced. A story that even weakly suggests they might be, will surely end up on the cutting room floor before anyone sees it.

“Women can do anything men can do” is a commentary on men being disposable. It’s false. “Men can do anything women can do” would be equally false, but we don’t need to worry about that because no one says it.

We accept — correctly — that women are not replaceable. We men can’t do what they do. Where they are present, and then disappear, they leave a hole. No one bothers to pretend any different.

“Your husband or boyfriend could do better than you” has always been just plain rude. Like asking a woman what she weighs, or how old she is. It just isn’t done. It’s one of those double standards feminism was built to confront, in its pursuit of “equality” — and once they confronted this one, they left it alone because they liked it. It’s always been part of western civilized society that women, and whoever cares about them, should wonder constantly if they can do better than him, but men are not supposed to wonder if they can do better than her.

Ann Landers put the pedal to the metal: “Are you better off with him, or without him?”

There are three reasons for this.

Men are protectors. It is fitting, when you have a protector, to wonder if you can somehow get hold of a better protector. But we can’t have our protectors wondering if there’s someone else somewhere more worthy of their protection. That wouldn’t be a very suitable protector.

Women are shoppers. Men don’t shop much, and when they do they shop like their pants are on fire and they can’t put it out until they’re done shopping. In-and-out. So for centuries, women have monopolized the experience of shopping, and the natural sharpening and honing of skills that comes with engaging the activity. It’s natural for a shopper to wonder if she’s acquired the correct product in the correct quantity, and then wonder about it some more. Even after the sale is closed, the question remains open. But we can’t very well have our merchandise wondering if the shopper is good enough.

And, eyelash-politics. Men just aren’t as cute. You have an opportunity to climb the social ladder when you reinforce a woman’s questions, or inspire her to start pondering the questions, about whether her current mate is good enough for her. Women have longer eyelashes and they’re easier on the eyes. People relate to women. You don’t slog your way up the food chain by looking out for a man’s interests. We pretend men run the world and have been running it throughout the centuries, like the men have been on top. Men have actually been on the bottom this whole time. It’s true in the animal kingdom as well: You work your way up through the social hierarchy, not by looking out for a man’s interests or defending his status in his household or in the tribe, but rather by challenging it.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Modern society wonders aloud if it can do without men, or if it has to have men, how interchangeable they are. As this question has intensified, the men have been wondering more and more if they can do without society. That is a turn of events entirely unanticipated by those with the most strident opinions, the ones who insist that since men are so replaceable, it’s up to each man to work continuously on improving himself, to make himself the best, so that no one will think of replacing him — even though they could, on a lark. Men are responding to this with a pointed question about why they should bother, with the criteria for keeping versus replacing being so arbitrary, and the decision to replace being more and more a fait accompli.

Perhaps I’m biased, but it seems to me that this fad of man-ejecting and man-swapping, or of casually thinking about doing it, where it was destined to bring some positive deliverables to society at large, has already brought them. That we’ve crossed the point of diminishing returns. I think we crossed it when men started to hesitate to sacrifice things to build up their careers, which could come to an end on someone’s arbitrary say-so. And were no longer being relied-upon to feed, clothe and provide for others.
We have been building advanced “societies” for many thousands of years by now, and in doing so we’ve lost our innocence, lost our excuse for having not learned some rather plain lessons. We know now that a society has to value the people in it, all of them. All of the people who contribute constructively to it, anyway. If it doesn’t, then those people will not value the society, and society loses value overall. Then everything becomes a little bit less functional than it was before.

There’s no advantage in asking if a specific demographic is disposable, or replaceable. By all means, feel free to ask that of individual people, based on their individual acts. But don’t ask that of groups based on their immutable characteristics. That’s bigotry and it doesn’t help anybody.

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They Chase Their Rainbows
Thursday, October 31st, 2024

Kamala Harris could still emerge victorious in this thing, but she’s not doing quite as well as she’d like, I think. There’s no one single misstep to point to for the bulk of the blame. I perceive that the American public is belatedly catching on to what’s long been obvious to just some of us: Liberalism is not about solving problems, or even about making anything better. It is rainbow-chasing and complaining. It is just like a rainbow in fact. Most coherent, definable and relatable when distant, losing any semblance of structure upon the observer’s approach.

Every single issue follows the same pattern. The liberal agitator states the case for reform, and it isn’t tiny-step reform, it requires societal overhaul: Oppressors are oppressing victims. The victim’s situation is this, and that, and this and that, and such and such and so and so. “And we think that’s wrong!!!” Stating this case, they capture all they want to capture. Hearts, minds, votes, emotions. And then there’s some kind of incursion, involving some combination of force and guile. The movement becomes an actual movement, with the good guys making good-guy movement into bad-guy territory. Like the Trojan horse into the city’s gates. Activists, and their sympathizers, go to where the problem is, where the slope-foreheads occupy, those undesirables who have yet to be enlightened.

And then…?

Confront the problem-people. And…?

Convert them? Isolate them? Banish them? Obliterate them? What are we doing now?

Each single individual curled up in the belly of the great wooden beast, might have a good solid understanding of next steps. But a consensus has yet to emerge. And it won’t. If such a consensus were necessary, it would, but it isn’t. And that’s the embarrassment right there. In the end, it turns out to be all about the bitching. And the incursion. The posing of an inconvenience onto others. That’s all.

Just the tiniest sampling of available issues confirms this…

America is a racist nation! Easy to say. But then the position is…no wall at the border. Everybody is seeking asylum. From what? Uh, something, so okay. Remain here. Everyone ought to be able to get in, and stay, and “path to citizenship,” and vote, and we will mock and ridicule you if you so much as suggest it shouldn’t happen, or that some further case evaluation has to be done even on an individual level, that some of these might be terrorists. That’s racist! They all have to be here! Well if America is a racist nation, why are we doing this? You won’t let us take a closer look at these people, because if we want to do that we’re racists, even though it’s confirmed we’re that already, and the people we want to study are brown, so you want to be nice to the brown people and keep them in a racist nation. The logic falls apart.

Next issue. Patriarchy! Put a woman in the White House! Okay. But we already have woman governors and legislators. We’ve actually had quite a few of those, and for quite a while. Have we gotten rid of patriarchy? Dissenters and reform sympathizers alike would agree, no we have not. Wasn’t so long ago we were going to get rid of racism by electing a black President. That guy is term-limited out now, and following His eight years, have we cured racism? It’s noticeable how far backward we’ve regressed, and how quickly. There’s more bitching about it in the aftermath of His presidency than there was before. Race relations have noticeably deteriorated. That administration was lots of things, but the resolution to any sort of a problem was not one of the things.

Next issue. Capitalism! How terrible it is! It exacerbates inequality! Exploits the masses! Alright…so what do we do? Once again, liberalism turns out to be all about putting the horse inside the gates, going to the hated-thing and — what? Take it over? The liberals have invaded corporate America through the “human resources departments,” forcing the diversity-equity-inclusion nonsense upon the businesses. And? C.A.L.W.W.N.T.Y.: “Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet”…forever. Again, we do not solve the problem. We don’t even chip away at it. And, again, that’s after giving the liberal reformers every little thing they want, no exceptions. Everything they want plus a few things.

It’s rainbow chasing. They approach the goal, and as they get closer, the goal loses composition and deteriorates. Every time.

What they lack in problem solving, they more than make up for in reducing and berating. They’ve got men apologizing for being men and they’ve got white people apologizing for being white. Then what? When the white guy appears before you offering his regrets and his atonement for being white, what do you do then? Forgive him? Welcome him into the fold? Execute him? Certainly, you hold him up as an example of what other white people should do, but after that? Nobody seems to know. Or, to be precise about it, I suppose I should say: A few individuals “know,” but nobody seems to agree.

Like a small child, they’re excited by the approach. The junction point between rainbow and ground, is fixated on a tiny spot, over there! Half an acre, maybe less. Maybe I’m already familiar with that place, how exciting! It’s practically riveted to that spot, over by the tree stump!

And…we approach. Everything changes. It’s not supposed to happen that way, but it does.

Because things change upon approach, the “overhaul” becomes all about the incursion. It becomes purely binary: We go into the bad people’s territory, that’s good. They make an incursion into ours, that’s super duper duper bad. The college kids protesting when a conservative speaker comes to talk, confirm this direction-sensitive passion. It’s quite intense.

The longer I watch conservatives and liberals go at it, the more it looks to me like we’re having a fundamental disagreement about the nature of problem solving. Conservatives are into presuming the worst, so as to engage preventative plans while those plans can still be effective and preventative in nature, thus less invasive and less costly. But they’re also into learning from experience, and experience suggests the conservatives don’t have it completely right either; it consistently shows the liberals are invested in putting the horse inside the city gates and then just sitting there, divided among themselves about what to do next. An argument could be made that this infighting is so all-consuming, that perhaps the horse isn’t a threat after all, and the problem is limited to an object simply being where it doesn’t belong. So the great conflict is about stopping the horse from entering the gates.

As far as what the liberals, and their fresh recruits, need to worry about: It’s a betrayal. The liberals do their complaining about patriarchy or white supremacy, and they pick up the support of those who don’t care too much about ideology and just want to be compassionate. People who want the problem solved. Once the recruitment is done, the rainbow chasing begins. The liberals don’t solve the problem. They don’t even get to the part where they eliminate people, subjugate people or convert people. They just do a lot of bitching. You know. The fun part.

They don’t catch the rainbow. They don’t get to the massacre. If they were so disorganized as to remain completely ineffective, the rest of us could just ignore it all. But along the way, they govern ineptly, and do a lot of damage.

Among those who have figured this out, if only partially, there seems to be a myth that has become entrenched — that the worst betrayal the liberals can inflict, once empowered, is to do nothing. But just look at the large, dense cities laboring away under their tutelage. The poverty, the blight, the vices, the dereliction among living things and inanimate objects. The common theme permeates, achieving a consistency up to and past the point of monotony. Dozens of examples, surely hundreds, maybe thousands. All those cities, run by liberals, looking the same. You don’t stay still with their kind in charge. You lose. Their leadership is toxic. It makes the problems worse.

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Go Ahead and Discuss Things
Monday, September 30th, 2024

Regardless of how the election goes, I’m still concerned. Things are good, but broken. They are good in spite of being broken, and may not remain good for long because of the breakage. And the breakage didn’t happen overnight. Things got broken in phases, and they’re still breaking.

I’m seeing a lot of people “winning arguments” by saying “I don’t care.” What is that? If you don’t care about something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you shouldn’t care about it. Maybe you should, in which case, if you still don’t care about it, that makes you something of an ignoramus. It doesn’t make you superior to anybody. Really when you get down to it, apathy is just a feeling. That’s the problem here. People making important decisions based on feelings, not taking into account all the things they should be taking into account because they “don’t care.” It’s incompetent decision-making. And it’s seemingly become the default.

I see people brushing aside evidence of something by saying “There is no evidence of that.” What they really mean to say is, although this is just the latest circumstantial evidence of something, there hasn’t been any direct evidence. They’re refusing to consider trace evidence of something, suggestive evidence. They don’t like where it points. So they’re laying down a new rule, of sorts, that you have to prove things beyond any reasonable doubt, in order to merely consider them as possibilities, and if you can’t do that then you’re not allowed to even mention them as possibilities. That’s quite absurd. More incompetent decision-making.

I’m seeing there are people elevated to these platforms of “expertise,” as in, “Let’s listen to the experts” which means just do what they say without question. We see a lot of this in tech. The “experts” often turn out to be kids embarking on adulthood, who’ve been hailed as “technophiles” and “techies” because they know more about tech than anybody else in the family…and more often than not, that turns out to be computer games. They knew how to deliver a killing blow in Mortal Kombat involving four, five, six or more buttons pushed in rapid sequence. It’s a common confusion: People who use the tech, are worshiped by others as if they built the tech, and they come to believe that this is the tech they’ve mastered, building what they in reality merely know how to use. Kids who’ve been gifted with smartphones too early in life, hailed as if they’ve mastered all it takes to engineer the phone.

Learning disabilities: We just diagnose them, medicate and move on — leaving the child handicapped for life. Because again, “the experts” have spoken. This is a particularly pernicious habit we have, for the effects are long lasting. “Experts” are people who profit from the prevalence of this hitherto undiscovered learning disability, and yet once they say someone has it, the rest of us who do not share in the profits, aren’t even allowed to talk back.

What these all have in common is an open discussion that should be happening, and isn’t, because too many people either don’t know how to discuss things or aren’t comfortable with discussing those things. Perhaps that’s the epicenter of the breakage, the original point of origin of where things started to get broken. Discussing things is something we should supposedly stop doing, because discussing is arguing, and arguing is heated. So we stopped discussing?

But we haven’t stopped arguing, and things are heated.

That’s why I think maybe, just maybe…we as a society took a wrong turn back there. Should have kept discussing things.

Someone stands up and says “Stop discussing things, just do it my way” we should have said “Sit down, junior, we’re going to keep discussing it” instead of what we did say. Something like “Yeah, sure, okay, I don’t see why not, let’s do that then.”

We should discuss things, because people are flawed. It’s easier to come up with a bad idea than a good one. But no idea is so toxic that we’ll be doing further damage merely by talking about it, or defining what it is, or defining some of the arguments against it. If people don’t know how to discuss something, that’s really their own problem and we should treat it that way.

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Voting on Maturity Levels
Wednesday, September 18th, 2024

As the radical Left and the beltway swamp continue to blame Trump for the attempts on his life, after going nearly a full decade with their constant windbaggery about what an “existential threat” he is and how he’s “basically Hitler” — a thought occurs to me. It’s a thought about a rethink. Maybe we need to do one. Maybe it’s overdue.

We have these “issues.” Supposedly, we can separate Left from Right by way of these issues. An unwanted pregnancy; kill it, or put it up for adoption? Trouble is, a lot of these issues are manufactured. Repeal Obamacare? What will you replace it with? How do we “shore up Social Security”? And hey, experts say this-or-that county is back in trouble with the Covidiot numbers. So they should repeat the ineffective rituals there? Hey buddy, where’s your mask?

And some of these issues aren’t good litmus-test issues, because the sides switch. Hawks or doves? It used to be, The Left counseled caution, understanding, compromise and appeasement, “nuanced” and “shades of gray” thinking, while The Right was more ready to rattle sabers. Sometime in either the Trump or Obama eras, this flipped. Trump supporters would say that’s the benefit of having a strong presence in the White House; confronting the belligerents properly and with effective negotiation tactics, you lose the need to rattle sabers. I notice nobody else seems to be offering any cogent alternative explanation.

The Mobius Strip Twist with “questioning authority” confounds and perplexes me. Back when housewives spent weekend afternoons cooking roasts for their husbands, who were out in the driveway changing oil in the family sedan, and beer cans were steel and had pull tabs — this was easy peasy. The Left meant questioning authority, up to and past the point of anarchy. Now The Left means fawning obeisance to St. Anthony and not-questioning any of his most questionable dictates. The Right, meanwhile, having been lied to about anything and everything over the years, and having noticed, scrutinizes everything and when they’re criticized for this, they scrutinize the criticism. The two sides have switched; they were emphatic in their positions before, and are even more emphatic about their newer positions now. What happened? I can form some a theory about it, several in fact. But none of them justify my complete confidence. I’m open to the ideas of others.

Most to all of the other issues melt down into the now familiar non-form and non-shape puddles of nonsense and goo. And that includes everything economic: Whatever you’re experiencing that’s good, our side gets the credit, and so far we’ve received short shrift on that. Not getting the credit we deserve. Whatever you’re experiencing that’s bad, blame the other guys. Both sides argue this way. The few positions that emerge that appear to be actual positions, are really just historical artifacts from this-or-that highly visible party-aligned figure, usually a President, having done something out in the open with great fanfare. And we argue about whether that was a good idea or not.

That all is prelude to my main point, which is this: Sometime over the last several years, like forty of them give or take — sometime since “supply side economics” or “voodoo economics” — positions on issues lost their definitional power to indicate to us what a party, faction or ideology was supporting or opposing. We see this now all too clearly, as “Trump is worse than Hitler and must be kept from power” has become a dominant “issue.” Then we have this derivative issue of the two assassination attempts against him this summer, and what culpability the loudmouths have in motivating that after calling him Hitler all these years. As issues go, this one doesn’t look difficult or murky, to me; how many times can you publicly call a man Hitler, before someone decides to do something about it?

And does it really make sense to evade responsibility, ducking behind the heat-shield of “one man’s words are not another man’s action,” after burning off months and years going on and on about “Trump incited an insurrection on January 6”?

But to go on all this time pegging Donald Trump as an “existential threat to our democracy” and threatening violence against him, and fight-fight-fight; watch the assassination attempts unfold; and then, monologue some more about how the target‘s “inflammatory rhetoric” is to blame for these assassination attempts. It is, as Darth Vader might have said, impressive, most impressive. Indeed you are bonkers, as the Emperor has foreseen…

What we’re looking at here is this unwritten and unspoken policy among the American Left, that you never concede anything that would stir up a headwind against the flight path of your agenda. Never say what a decent person would say: “Crazy people are motivated by a fuzzy confluence of many different factors, and the possibility exists that my words contributed. I will try to be more mindful of my rhetoric in the future.”

The cult forbids it. Instead deny, deny, deny, and on your way back from denying, do what damage you can against The Target. Inside the echo chamber I’m sure it looks like something that makes a lot of sense: Trump is to blame for the assassination attempts on Trump! He needs to tone down his irresponsible rhetoric!

Outside the echo chamber though, it looks like what it is. Nuts.

The thought that occurs to me is, maybe we’re in a new era now and we’re no longer voting on issues at all. If we reward this absolute and unyielding reluctance to accept any responsibility, we are bound to see a lot more of it. I can think of no quicker way to make all of America look like the worst of our blight-infested, crumbling, democrat-run and economically destroyed inner cities. Surveying the hundreds and hundreds of those, you find that’s the key ingredient to the deterioration: Lack of accountability among those who wield the greatest influence. Oh no, nothing wrong with my decisions. Oh no, nothing wrong with my statements or actions in office. Oh no. Can’t be that. It must be climate change.

Issues have given way to maturity levels.

These are the people who grew up telling mommy that actually, what I was doing was putting the cookie back into the jar. And unfortunately, we are left to surmise, mommy bought it and in so doing reinforced to the sneaky little shit that he can equivocate and prevaricate his way out of anything and everything.

A generation, or two generations maybe, came and went.

And now this is the true difference between the “parties.” One side, embarrassed in public repeatedly by the highly visible debacles involving Jussie Smollett, Hunter Biden’s laptop, “Russia Russia Russia,” Steele Dossier, Mueller Report…concedes nothing. Not even as a throwaway prelude, palliative packaging material to cram in before the word “but” on the way to making a stronger, opposing point. They won’t even do that. True cult thinking.

I mean, you try it. Facing down a Trump hating leftist, challenge them to concede there never were any prostitutes hired to pee on a bed. Be completely up front with them. “My litmus test for a cult is, that you can’t concede stories were told, and given high visibility, about Trump and they turned out to be false. Let’s see if you can concede just one of those.” See if they can admit it was a falsehood, even given that. They won’t do it. It’s less of a concern that the cult be exposed, than that they be kicked out of it.

And we the electorate — whether we realize it or not — sit in judgment of this when we cast our votes. We give signals about tactics, whether we should see more of them or less of them. What we reward and what we punish, determines what will be deployed in future campaigns. When I say, in politics, “cause is effect, and effect is cause,” I’m talking about that. When you see bizarre campaign tactics used that weren’t known or even imaginable just a few years ago, that’s because someone tried it for the first time, and it worked. The mud stuck to the wall.

We’re voting on maturity levels, and on cult thinking. We’re sending signals about how the country overall does its thinking. How grown-up of a society we are.

Issues are effectively dead, or are at least dying.

That’s my thought.

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Badass Rebels
Friday, August 16th, 2024

When I was a child, we were a nation at war although it didn’t always feel like it. It was an unpopular war. This had an effect of defining what “Left” and “Right” meant. Right was law-and-order; you did what you were told. Left meant you were always ready for that confounding moment when obeying the law meant doing something immoral, and your moral code imposed on you an obligation to flout the law. “Civil disobedience” they called it.

The division started when people on The Left stopped being ready to flout the law, and started being eager to flout it. It intensified with the Watergate Scandal, which culminated in an impeachment showdown, with Congress against the President. The Law against The Law. It was a confusing time.

Not so confusing, though, as now. The Left remains eager to flout the law, but this eagerness to apply critical thinking where their opposition had abandoned it — it’s simply not there. Perhaps it was mythical in the first place. “Joe Biden’s running, don’t even question it because Kamala is dead weight” replaced, in a matter of minutes, with “Kamala is the best thing since sliced bread and so is Stable-Boy Tim.” Nobody can sell the idea that this twisty-turn, in a single day, en masse, is the result of individual thinking. Nobody tries. They just memory-hole all the relevant events and pretend it never happened.

And the masks! It’s 2024, you’re still walking around with a mask?

How obedient.

It seems we’re learning something about civil disobedience, about rebelling. Seems the human genome can only rebel against one authority figure. Once the rebellion is entirely triumphant and the old authority figure is displaced by a new one, you get complete unquestioning obedience, up to and past the milepost of immorality, into the realm of the absurd.

I’m no longer a spring chicken. I have a head full of gray hair, my Dad died last fall and now my brother and I are senior patriarchs of the clan. And yes, when I sleep wrong I’m in pain for the next two or three months. Feeling the years. But it seems my entire lifespan has been sucked up into a single lesson about authority, law-and-order, and rebellion. I’m still not entirely clear on what I’ve been learning for it looks like nobody else is clear on it either.

But from all I’ve seen of it, the rebellion is not, after all, rigidly attached to any kind of moral code. From what I’ve seen, it’s just rocking the boat for the sake of rocking the boat. The very act of substituting one authority figure with another, is the whole point. Once that’s done, without fail, obedience is restored. More strident, unthinking and slavish than any obedience that came before.

And throughout it all, and beyond, the “rebels” think they’re rebels. Fine, upstanding, moral-code-living, stout hearted badass rebels.

It’s almost cute.

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The Release Candidate
Saturday, August 3rd, 2024

Somewhere I saw one of these “man in the street interview” clips, and the question had something to do with feminism and The Patriarchy. The guy with the microphone allowed the radicalized social-studies girl, who seemed very nice by the way, no facial piercings or green/purple hair, to sound off with all the familiar bumper sticker slogans and college-words. “Patriarchy” must have been one of those, because he had an interesting question: What would a “matriarchy” look like?

Oh, well I suppose guys could still go to school, but women would graduate more often and they’d get the better and higher-paying jobs. Guys would still work, and doing the lower, menial jobs the females don’t want to do. Something like that.

Follow-up: What’s the difference between that, and what we have?

Um, err, ah, uh…don’t know.

This got me to thinking. Here and there in The Bible, we have some entries that seem to establish the male sex as dominant, coming into existence first, etc. Following those, there are wrinkles and contradictions, along with hundreds of years of biblical scholars trying to noodle these things out and make sense of them. What if it’s an error in interpretation?

Civilization after civilization, we see men dominating — “on paper,” you might say. A populace elects or installs some kind of council or legislature, all or mostly men. But very few things get done that men would want, and women wouldn’t. A lot of things get done that women want, that men don’t.

It is what we should expect to see happen. Beth Dutton said it best: They have all the pussy and half the money.

Suppose we just presume God made women first, and see if all the things we’ve observed about life, and our place in the world, fall into place. Just picture it.

God would realize in the immediate aftermath, assuming She didn’t see it coming ahead of time, that there’s something going on here, at worst an architectural oopsie, or at best, an unfinished critical task. Woman would require a helpmate, one capable of getting her pregnant. And so God assembles a response team of Her most trusted and capable angels. The satisfaction of Woman is a core requirement, but this is difficult to achieve and many prototypes are discarded over this. Never Happy

Perhaps this is what drives the human equation: Chasing the approval of women, which is like chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I said all things we know about the world, might fall into place. Looks like I was on to something.

But we’re here, so the trusted and capable angels must have made some progress.

Now picture the meeting when they finally come up with a release candidate. He is ready to have life breathed into him, impressive, masculine, reclining or sitting on some raised platform, the skulls and bones of his predecessors beneath his feet. Unveiled with flourish, along with new pronouns: He/Him/His.

God has questions, naturally.

Woman can live with this?

Yes, absolutely.

She’ll be satisfied and happy?

Erm, probably not.

But he’ll be an adequate helpmate for her?

Yes Boss. We made sure.

Why should she tolerate his presence?

We have imbued him with some advantages. He is taller than she is, so he can reach things she can’t. Also he’s somewhat stronger, so he can open jars she can’t open and do other things she can’t do.

Very good! What else?

His relationship with the flora and fauna is different from hers. He doesn’t creep out at the sight of bugs and other wiggly things, so he can smash those and make sure she doesn’t have to deal with them. We’re thinking later on, they can start to eat meat because he is fleet of foot and can chase things. His peripheral vision is more sensitive to movement, he doesn’t need as much sleep, and he can withstand greater extremes of heat and cold. In short, we have made him into a hunter.

So, he’ll teach her how to hunt?

No, he can’t teach her anything. Our plan is that he’ll do the hunting.

Yes that might work. What about money?

He can make more of it than she can, in less time. But we’ve planted in him an inexplicable desire to give it all to her.

Excellent! So between the two of them, who’s in charge?

He’ll think he is. But we’ve set him up to acquiesce to pretty faces and long eyelashes, and do whatever she says. If all else fails, we’ve put a “joystick” on him, if she plays with that he’ll agree to everything.

And he’ll bring her what she needs?

Yes, as fast as he can.

And he’ll tell her the truth?

Yes.

About everything? All things great and small?

Yes, and yes.

So for example, if she asks him if this fig leaf makes her ass look fat…?

At this last question, there is a hurried exchange of glances among this panel of angels. Much murmuring, many worried faces. After some tense moments, the impromptu discussion comes to an end and the head angel addresses the Heavenly Host once more:

Sorry, God. We’ll have another candidate in the morning.

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Un-Salesman
Wednesday, July 31st, 2024

The more I listen to Trump, the more I realize he is not a master salesman after all. He is an extremely competent salesman. He is better at selling things than I would be. He is much better than most. But among his talents, contrary to popular opinion, selling things is not his peak performance.

He really finds his groove un-selling things. Listing the reasons not to buy the other guy’s stuff. It’s like watching Winter by Antonio Vivaldi performed by a virtuoso. It’s like a vortex-confluence of raw natural born talent, lessons learned over years and years of doing it, and an earnest love and joy of actually doing it. You just want to bottle the performance and put a cork on top. Living greatness.

But after the atmosphere built up by the contagious enthusiasm has come and gone, and the tent has been dismantled and a good night’s sleep has restored sobriety — the core message remains. It’s not a druggy high. It’s durable logic and common sense. It’s truth. Everything he says, once you examine it objectively with patience for the details, is true. It’s only shocking or novel in some way because some people have become hooked on deceptiveness and duplicity. The conflict comes from people who are the problem. Like the villagers who’ve become accustomed to pretending the Emperor is wearing fine clothes, and their churlish attitude against the little boy who points out he’s actually naked.

Trump takes great delight in being that little boy. He’s not like me, or any of the other little boys who mutter dejectedly under our breath “Here we go again…” before pointing out there are no clothes. Trump could wax lyrically about how there are no clothes, morning noon and night, and with gusto.

He’s thoroughly enjoying himself, and his joy is contagious. He was clearly born for this role. The question is…does it do the country any good?

And the answer is — Hell yes. Like a man dying of thirst needs a glass of water. We’ve gotten punch-drunk on pretending the Emperor has clothes. And then we’ve done it a zillion more times. And then made a national pastime out of it. And then kept it up for a couple more generations.

If anybody’s embarrassed by someone else doing the un-selling, that means the un-selling is overdue. It’s the ointment stinging all the worse because the infection set in before you could get it applied.

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July Recap
Wednesday, July 31st, 2024

Put this month into a time capsule. You could do a lot worse.

Going into it I had some concerns already. How things shook out, is interesting, and that’s an understatement. As of the nation’s birthday, our incumbent p-Resident was beset with the task of picking up pieces of his own viability following the June 27 debate. It was historic. The first presidential debate in my lifetime where both sides weren’t insisting “Yeah, my guy totally won.” Trump cleaned Biden’s clock without even half trying. Donors insisted Biden drop out, suspending nearly $100 in cash. But nothing doing. Joe’s in it for the long haul!

Then…June 13, a date which will live in infamy. Trump came inches from death — actually a fraction of an inch. As minuscule a degree of separation as you can measure across time, and space. His noggin was supposed to explode in a gory mess with us all watching it live. Miracle it didn’t happen.

Also, our home coffee pot didn’t like the electrical juice supplied at the hotel where we were celebrating my birthday. I had a bit of an un-birthday there, coming out of it cornered, with a desperate problem to be solved, heading into it with a working coffee pot. Kind of backward of how birthdays are supposed to work, but also a reminder to be grateful for your relatively small problems when it seems like life’s out to get you. No one shot at us that weekend.

But then, with the month not nearly half spent, things only started to get strange.

The Director of the Secret Service did about as bad a job managing the resulting public relations debacle, as she had done actually running the Secret Service and preventing this thing from happening. Can’t put an agent on a sloped roof? Really? The Trump campaign should stop holding rallies outdoors? That’s even more historically significant than the assassination attempt itself, or at least, it would be if it stood. Free speech for political candidates only inside auditoriums, following the 2024 Trump assassination attempt. Would that have worked for both sides, or just one? There’s a heady question for you.

Trump proceeded to pick J.D. Vance as his running mate, and with his new martyr status, Biden had a tougher and tougher time closing up that post-debate poll gap, which from here on out only widened. By the following weekend he finally withdrew from the race and threw his support behind his Vice President Kamala Harris.

Diversity, Equity or Inclusion, or DEI. Our modern name for “affirmative action,” the practice of wholly abandoning the previous goal of a color-blind society, specifically looking at immutable characteristics in hiring and promotions, discriminating in the opposite direction. Indefensible, but somehow, the way we do things. People were already talking about it with the Secret Service director, both a beneficiary and implementer of DEI, who around this time resigned. And now the democrat standard bearer was Vice President Harris, who had no reason to be where she was, apart from DEI.

When you’re a DEI beneficiary you benefit from a lot more than just getting hired. The wind is at your back. Headlines started to lie, routinely, frequently, and with great gusto as if they were in competition with each other. Harris raised millions of dollars in a single day. Ha! More like, the previously mentioned millions of dollars were released, the condition of getting rid of Joe, having been met. Hey, News, you’re supposed to be telling us what’s going on in the world. Why you lyin’?

With a hundred days left to the election, or less than that, and only having just settled on who they’re going to run, the democrats were left in a bind. A weird bind. So they settled on solving it for themselves with exactly that word: weird. But this is the age of YouTube and people don’t need to intercept memos or plant bugs in conference rooms to find evidence of the coordination. They can tell just by listening, recording and reviewing. The democrats, supposedly the party of the forgotten and downtrodden, the last vestige of proper representation for those not sufficiently fortunate to populate the respected center of polite society and relegated to the fringes…are now obsessed with properly ostracizing anyone who’s “weird.” Everything is weird. Weird all the time. He’s weird, she’s weird, that’s weird.

Overnight, they’ve become a political party constituted from the Mean Girls who won’t let you sit at their table at lunch. Snooty elitist pricks. They’ve become what they’re supposed to hate.

Sorry to say, I’m heading out of the month with more intense gradations of the concerns I had going into it. I’m worried about courage. A nation where courage decisively dominates, wouldn’t have these problems. We wouldn’t have DEI, which to this straight white boy, looks like little more than a consequence of people failing to say “No, shut up, that’s ridiculous” at the opportune time. Why can’t reverse-discrimination at least work its way up through the ranks, painstakingly, one ladder run at a time like everyone else? How come it has to start out at the very top, receiving all this deference to authority it doesn’t deserve to have?

It makes everybody underneath, or at, look like clowns, total buffoons. And it does this over and over again. But because it’s at the top, you’re not allowed to notice. “So-and-so got the job because of DEI” is something you’re not allowed to say.

It’s significant, or else it isn’t. If it isn’t, we shouldn’t bother with it. It costs resources and makes people in weighty positions look ridiculous.

If it is, and it’s met the goal by way of someone getting a job they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise…we ought to be allowed to say so. It shouldn’t be the DEI advocates stopping us from pointing out the one benefit that can be perceived and then noticed as a result of its presence.

So it changes the outcome, or else it doesn’t. It has to be one or the other. It can’t be both.

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It Runs, and It Doesn’t Run
Thursday, July 4th, 2024

Last car I had to get rid of, was & was not mobile. The CarMax guy asked the question, the tow truck driver asked the question, everybody had to ask and I had to offer this Schrodinger’s-Cat answer of “yes and no.”

There was a crack in the outer wall of the engine block where the water pump was supposed to be affixed. So if your intent was to move the car from one parking lot space to another under its own power, it worked fine. If your vision was for anything of a longer and more useful term than that, then realistically the whole car was finished. This was a total.

If you worked hard at being foolish, you could say: Why get rid of it? It runs fine. Look, it’s going five, ten minutes…this obviously means it’ll go on forever. Drive it to work, go shopping, whatever. But if you live in the real world, that doesn’t work. It’s stupid.

My nightmare is that this is might be a suitable analogy for the United States of America whose birthday we celebrate today. We do all these things that cause overheating. Sophists seek to overhaul our culture along with our system of government, constantly. Their argument is “You know I’m wrong, and I know you know, and you know I know you know…but I’m going to win because I’ll scare people into thinking they’re racists sexists and bigots if they don’t agree with me.”

It must work. It’s worked before. Like moving my Honda Civic from parking lot space A to parking lot space B. Things get a little toasty but it works, right?

If you’ve got a brain in your head though, you know this doesn’t work. If you’ve got a brain in your head, you know this is a total. Time for the car to go. Car no longer among us. Car gone. Car doesn’t know it yet, but it’s dead. Dead car rolling.

I hope to heaven my analogy doesn’t work that way.

But I don’t know. I’m seeing an awful lot of overheating. On purpose. By some very smug people. And I’m seeing it often, like nobody who matters knows any other way to do it. It’s become the Modus Operandi by default, the way we’re gonna do it until & unless some other strategy emerges: Figure out who our enemy is, and then piss ’em off on purpose.

The engine runs, but the cooling system is broken.

Can you really keep it rolling?

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Memo For File CCXX
Sunday, June 30th, 2024

The version I heard of this joke, it was the husband who asked the question. They were a brand new married couple, just back from their honeymoon. The very first home-cooked meal. Also, there was an extra generation inserted because these jokes always have to have three iterations. The new bride cuts off the ends of the roast and the husband asks why. That’s the way my Mother always did it…

She asks Mom. Mom asks Grandma. Grandma asks great-Grandma. Great-great-Grandma still walks among us, thank goodness, in a nursing home…proceed to the punchline: “If I didn’t, it wouldn’t have fit in our pan.” It’s a commentary on business and how easy it is to get caught entrenched in policies and procedures that aren’t there for any established or rational reason, just that’s-the-way-we-always-dunnit. One of my own Mother’s favorite jokes. I’ve often wondered if, in the decade she and Dad were married before my brother and I made our appearances, something in real life happened to make her appreciate it.

That all having been said, did you catch what happened during the debate? President Biden, summing up the position of our friends the liberals…accurately, although incoherently, and frankly a little stupidly…but accurately. Summarizing the liberal take on the Dobbs decision:

It’s been a terrible thing what you’ve done.

The fact is that the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe when it was decided, supported Roe. And I was – that’s – this idea that they were all against it is just ridiculous.

And this is the guy who says the states should be able to have it. We’re in a state where in six weeks you don’t even know whether you’re pregnant or not, but you cannot see a doctor, have your – and have him decide on what your circumstances are, whether you need help.

The idea that states are able to do this is a little like saying, we’re going to turn civil rights back to the states, let each state have a different rule.

[snip]

I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters.

First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.

The idea that the politicians – that the founders wanted the politicians to be the ones making decisions about a woman’s health is ridiculous. That’s the last – no politician should be making that decision. A doctor should be making those decisions. That’s how it should be run. That’s what you’re going to do.

And if I’m elected, I’m going to restore Roe v. Wade.

[snip]

For 51 years, that was the law. 51 years, constitutional scholarship said it was the right way to go. 51 years. And it was taken away because this guy put very conservative members on the Supreme Court. Takes credit for taking it away.

The/this idea that…look…here’s the deal. Why does this guy have any supporters at all, let alone 81 million votes, when everything that comes out of his mouth is an insult to the intellect of the listener. Well that’s a different subject I suppose.

But did you catch it? This terrible thing the previous President did. Presidents do not decide such things, nor do they decide who decides them. They don’t decide states get to decide. Presidents nominate Supreme Court justices, along with other federal officers, with the advice and consent of the Senate by simple majority vote.

And then, once made whole — or not — the Supreme Court takes a look at these issues of interpretation and application of codified law, to see if established interpretations make sense. The nine made a call that the established interpretations, in the Roe v. Wade decision, didn’t make sense. The six justices affirming this decision included the three Trump nominated and saw confirmed, plus three others who were there already. “Terrible thing what you’ve done” is not so flagrantly inaccurate as to merit some kind of a “fact check,” as those things have worn out their welcome and become obnoxious distractions anyway. It’s spin. Not falsehood, but not the truth either. President Biden, in taking such a position, is talking down to idiots who don’t understand how any of this works.

He proceeds from there to fill us in on why the Dobbs decision is wrong and why the Roe decision was right. Because he’s a stuttering, incoherent, senile, possibly stricken and none too bright inarticulate boob, there’s a lot of nonsense in there. But if you peel away the “look” and the “here’s the deal” and “the idea that” — what you’re left with is an argument for unified authority sticking by one set of consistent rules. Biden and the liberals don’t like the fifty laboratories.

They liked Roe v. Wade, and it wasn’t because “the vast majority of constitutional scholars” liked it. For 51 years it was the law of the land, 51 years…

That’s the way we always done it!

This is exactly what “conservatives” are supposed to be doing, by way of definition: Defending ideas that aren’t entirely worthy of being defended, just because we’ve always done it that way. Now he’s got some other supporting arguments to make. A woman can go six weeks, or even more, not even knowing she’s pregnant and a state’s proscription and various restrictions against abortion can put her in a plight. But we’ve had 51 years to noodle through that, during which time the argument has become weaker and weaker. People have had time to realize some things.

“Politicians” don’t “make the decision.” Legislators legislate laws, that protect people. That includes the unborn.

We don’t “let” each state have a different rule. The states have that right, and they get it from God, not from the feds.

When judicial officers act like legislators, someone is getting gypped. Roe v. Wade is widely recognized as bad “law,” in no small part because it hasn’t got any business being a law at all. All Biden needed to realize this was step out of his echo chamber and talk to some “constitutional scholars” who aren’t marching in lockstep with liberal ideology.

This is an important observation to make because it reflects the times in which we live. We’re in uncharted territory here. Our “liberals” are not doing any liberating. They’re not for any new ideas like they’re supposed to be; quite to the contrary, they’re the homemaker cutting off the ends of the roast and throwing them in the trash, because Momma always did it that way. You heard what happened when Biden tried to summarize who decides what, when, and why, according to the always-done-it-this-way. You got a jumbled mess.

Liberals, we’re taught, are looking forward through the big windshield, while conservatives are obsessed with the halcyon images in the rear view mirror. That isn’t quite right. Conservatives are looking both forward and backward. Their arguments frequently reflect this: “If we do X, we’ll get such-and-such an thing; we know this for sure, because we’ve tried X before, over here…and here (good or bad) is what happened.” They want the car to get what it’s going, unscratched, with all its passengers uninjured.

Whereas liberals are focused on the steering wheel. They just want to be in control.

Not accountable for results, or anything like that. Just in control.

It’s a maturity thing. They never learned how to share control with anybody, to depend on anybody, to trust anybody. To share a society with other people who are deserving of respect.

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Cult
Wednesday, June 19th, 2024

Some people are “Ridin’ with Biden” and not relying on social services of any kind. We should look into that very carefully.

Back when it was Obama versus Romney, this crowd could say they were going after the superior leadership, the better wisdom, the Replacement Jesus. Now all the leadership, or whatever looked like it, is gone and it’s just Joe — stumbling, babbling, and having to be led offstage by his wife. People cay say they see leadership in that but it’s a lie and not a convincing one.

So what do they want?

The death of western civilization? The United States brought to its knees by an illegally permissive geographical border, manufactured famine and forced Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) policies? Are these all investors betting on America’s fortunes, and selling short? Maybe that. But there’s something else, something middle-class.

Americans, after all these years, are still struggling with the group dynamic. Some people commune with some other people, and in so doing create a conglomerate that is bigger than the sum of its parts. The hopeful narrative is that all communities are like that. “Not a one of us is as smart as all of us.” So seductive is this leitmotif that people can go their whole lives, seeing the opposite demonstrated to them over and over again, watching committees make some of the most execrable decisions just because they’re committees; and still they’ll cling to it. Some of the more toxic groups, meanwhile, have a way of handicapping their members. “You can’t be part of us if you think for yourself,” they’ll say. “Our emulsifying agent is fear, not hope. If you show you can do things without us that you can’t do with us, or if you merely aspire toward such an ability, you will be shunned.”

To be clear, not all gatherings are like that.

But when you’re in such a cult, it’s hard to see.

Even when you’re constantly put on the spot to prove your loyalty. To say “No, I don’t read anything, I don’t learn anything by myself that I don’t learn in the group. I can’t do anything for myself. I’m not like those people over there. I’m not M.A.G.A.”

That’s why people vote blue when blue won’t do anything for them. When they’re not poor enough to be fed by the blue, and not rich enough to speculate blue. In between, in the middle classes, they congregate-blue. Eggs milk and meat costing double means nothing to them; they’ll give up that, and much more, to maintain their good standing in the cult. The kind of community that demands individuals amputate the best of themselves — sometimes literally! — to avoid ostracism.

They don’t see themselves as cult members. And to be fair, that’s not an entirely precise term. They’re more like mediocre choir singers. Belting out a tune, hitting the right pitch, reciting the right lyrics — with just average competence. Sometimes below. Getting it right just maybe three quarters of the time. Not good enough to sing solo, hiding behind each other. So not “Ridin’ with Biden” but more like “Hidin’ with Biden.”

But if you want to stay in the group, you better keep hidin’. If you’re good enough to sing solo, or if you merely try to improve so that one day maybe you can — you’re making the other mediocre singers feel bad. So stop that. The group dynamic won’t tolerate people who are in the group just because it makes them happy. The group has to be needed.

It’s an ancient dilemma in the saga of human development: Grow up, ALL of the way…learn how to do all you can learn how to do, and be all that you have the potential to be…or, be part of the group. But pick one. You can only have one of the two.

And if people pick the group, they can’t see it. They don’t want to see what they’ve given up for their happy community membership. The Faustian bargain warps your thinking, because it demands you accept terms without acknowledging their imposition or their existence.

This is why, when liberals summarize the conservative beliefs for other liberals, what spews out of their maws is such a confluence of dizzying spellbinding ignorance. It’s a blind spot within a larger blind spot. They don’t have a clue what their opposition wants, because they’ve been so diligently avoiding admitting what they themselves want. What they themselves want is to hide behind each other, to live less life, to kill off a part of themselves for sake of continued membership in their dysfunctional communities.

It’s not that extravagant of an idea, you know. “Make America Great Again” offends them.

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Symbols
Saturday, June 1st, 2024

“Symbol(s) of hate.” I’m not quoting any one particular thing. It’s the concept. Progressives see a S.O.H. and they want it covered, removed, preferably destroyed. You put up text or an image on Facebook expressing a “hateful” idea, their cops will see to it the display is as temporary as possible. Get rid of those symbols.

I mean think about it. It’s weird. Symbols are symbols — manifestations of something else. Manifestations, not causes. Do the fish make the river flow? Did we invent an alphabet so we’d have a way to read the books that were already lying around?

Does a ballot generate a voter? Hmmm…

For all the importance progressives put on symbols, they don’t understand the concept. And I notice this stuff works with supply and demand too: They think they can create a prevailing acceptance of a thing that wasn’t accepted before, by flooding us with instances of the thing so that we can’t get away from it. Minorities, women, gays, transvestites, their bathrooms, fat people in electric scooters, electric vehicles, and environmentally-friendly spoons, straws and cups. If we’re saturated with them and can’t opt out of them, we’ll learn to like ’em.

And, stuff we’ve been accepting that they don’t want us to accept. Masculinity, smoking, classy refined women who wear modest dresses, Christianity, guns, patriotism, kids who are respectful of their elders, western civilization, committed monogamous romantic relationships, being able to tell boys and girls apart. Get rid of it, make it so no one ever sees it, after awhile people will learn to loathe what they haven’t been seeing for a long time. Of course that’s the opposite of the way human nature works.

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That’s What You Get For Threatening The Establishment
Friday, May 31st, 2024

Laura Ingraham sums it all up in a one-hour video. It’s interesting that, thus far, Trump’s guilty verdict has had a far greater unifying effect upon The Right than on The Left. Isn’t this what the latter has been wanting all along?

But they’re unable to answer the question: What happens next. Trump in an orange jumpsuit is supposed to be the first step toward making everything better. Well? I’m still seeing tents under overpasses, still paying six dollars a gallon for gas. You guys got what you wanted. When do the rest of us see a benefit?

I’m not a lawyer, but there looks to be so, so much to merit an appeal. The instructions to the jury, for example, which culminate in the conviction itself on falsification of business records to conceal a crime without agreement as to what the crime is supposed to be. The crime is what makes the falsification a felony, right? And if it’s not a felony then none of this would have happened.

I’m seeing a lot of graphics on social media that look like this:

This isn’t working on any level. It’s not galvanizing people opposed to Trump, nearly as much as it’s galvanizing people who support him. As a political stunt it’s failed, since everyone voting against him now was voting against him anyway; but, people who were on the fence can see what’s wrong.

And as a function of our legal system, it’s a stink-bomb. It has nothing to do with me not liking it. No one anywhere is taking real pride in it. Or very few, anyway. What, in criminal law, got fixed here? What’s the precedent?

I’m still learning, all these years later, about what we mean when we say The Left. I notice this theme permeates everything they do: Some new fad is about to fall on all of us, which doesn’t reflect legality or morality, in any way, but it will be “real.” It will separate winners from losers, and people on The Left want to be the winners. They want to be the ones complying, and therefore not ostracized.

I saw it with the COVID hysteria. I see it in the environmentalism.

Black Lives Matter, the radical feminist movement, transgenderism, the bathroom lunacy.

“It may not be just, but it’s real, we got on the good side of it and you didn’t, sucks to be you.”

Times like this, I seriously think they don’t have any other goals in mind. They just want to be the villager watching his friends & family ushered to the city gates, or to the boxcar, leaning on his shovel — the guy who’s allowed to live his life a little while longer, because he complied.

They’re the compliant ones. Not with the written law, but with the latest fad. The fad with teeth. That’s the one objective that remains consistent across time: “Monster eat me last, because I do what I’m told.”

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Wounded, Incomplete, Toxic Females Saturate Social Media With Their Execrable Ideas About Bears
Saturday, May 4th, 2024

Internet phenomena are rather like campfire fuel: Some are like wet logs, you can sit there until your butt gets tired trying magnifying glasses, matches, Bic lighters, whatever have you, putting unlimited effort into it — and some people do! Nothing happens. They end up embarrassing themselves and tiring out their butts. Other things are like gasoline, the white variety, burning so fast that there’s no time for the flame to take to the wood and the accelerant can’t do anything but forcefully explode.

Most are in between the two extremes. This dumb bear thing is more like the latter. Match, toss, kaboom. I think it can be truthfully said, in all my Internet years, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Alone at last! I first became aware of it by way of this Daily Mail article, which leans hard on the social-activist lever, struggling to raise awareness of the perceived dangers of strange men. Women, given the choice, would rather be stranded in the woods with a bear! Oh noes! What’s wrong with the men? There must be something wrong with the men.

That’s not where the phenomenon took off, though. At least it doesn’t look that way to me.

Just like with the little boy and the Emperor With No Clothes, it took just one solitary voice to point out the obvious, and an avalanche followed: Women shouldn’t be choosing the bear, and if they are making this choice, they need to smarten up and it isn’t a male problem.

I have noticed these women who’d prefer a bear over a (strange) man, where they are sounding off in video clips and text messages, don’t have husbands or at least don’t have any worth mentioning. So okay. You ask women who haven’t yet figured out how to co-exist with men, if they would choose to co-exist with a strange man, you’ll get back a negative. I choose the bear! Yes of course. Urban chicks, compelled by circumstances to be around these “strange” men they don’t get to choose…when, being urban women, they get to choose just about everything else. I’m sure they’ve racked up lots of encounters, close & distant, with these substandard men around town, at social events, in the subway. But they haven’t been around bears. Yeah, I’d probably pick the bear too. If I were female, single, young, inexperienced…and extraordinarily un-curious. Haven’t seen a bear before. They’re probably okay.

Some have come out and said it: If I don’t harass the bear, it’ll probably leave me alone.

Oh, Honey…no. Sweetheart! Stick to the city.

Yeah the bear will probably leave you alone…IF…there’s nothing going on with its hibernation schedule, its apetite, its cubs, the weather, an imminent storm or earthquake or who knows what else in nature can agitate a bear. Or maybe it just likes the way you smell. That time of the month? There are reasons why, in agrarian constructs, for thousands of years hunting was left up to the men. Or are you wearing perfume that might smell like steak sauce in an ursine sinus cavity?

Probability plays a gender role. I’ve noticed some of the bear-choosing females are ready, willing and able to acknowledge even a strange creepy guy is unlikely to actually hurt you. Saw a man peg it at 2-3%, and the bear-choosing woman acknowledged this is in the ballpark. Whereas the bear mauling you is a near certainty. She acknowledged that too, then…stuck to her feelings. Whoa whoa whoa feelings. But I feel! So she continued to choose the bear.

At this point we need to pause and remember all women aren’t like this. So if you’re hiring or taking volunteers for a job that needs doing and it’s a critical job demanding good decision-making, you should go ahead and consider females for it. Just not females like this one.

There are lots of layers and permutations to this, but the core of what matters is neatly covered in this screenie right here:

Right-O. The wounded, incomplete, toxic females imagine this is some kind of learning experience for someone else — specifically, males, familiar & otherwise, who have failed to meet their approval. We’re to go off-line, perhaps collaborate among ourselves, and work to improve.

Sometimes the message is not so subtle:

Simp!

To a real man, two obvious questions emerge: What exactly is it we’re supposed to be fixing?

And when we get it fixed, can we have some of that sweet, sweet, mommy-approval from the females that is being so deliberately and so theatrically denied to us?

Easiest questions in the world. Nothing…and…no. It is an occasion for The Morgan Rule: If I’m gonna be accused anyway, I wanna be guilty. Toxic women who are just shells of what they’re supposed to be, don’t want us. We’re supposed to change something so they’d prefer us to bears. Well some of us are decades and decades ahead of that. We realized early on there are certain women who we don’t want wanting us, we’d rather keep our distance from them. And you’re it, sweetie.

That, too, is often displayed in Internet-land none-too-subtly:

Now, about that. Something I’m seeing over and over again, is this continuing reference to “incels” and other males who are reacting to the “I choose the bear” verdict with anger. Grrrr! And the rejoinder to the reaction to the answer to the question, is repeated cookie-cutter style, without so much as a single word of variance: “That’s why I choose the bear.” The male anger.

Anger? I myself haven’t seen any. And I’ve been looking.

I suppose, if you’re looking too, and you’re a thin-skinned drama queen seeing whatever it is in the world around you that you want to see, ready to invent it when it’s not there…some of the reactions might come sufficiently close.

Yeah…no. There’s no desire here for men to change or improve in any way. That’s the dirty little unspoken secret here. “Bear-choosing women” do not want to choose the bear. They want to be seen choosing the bear. That’s an entirely different thing.

And if they knew how they looked to normal people as they choose the bear, they probably wouldn’t want to be seen quite so fervently.

But these are not real women. Try as they might, they don’t represent all women. A lot of women have common sense about them, and understand that a bear is very likely to maul you to death for one reason or another. Bloody It will incapacitate you and start eating you, face first, while you’re still alive. This isn’t Teddy Ruxpin or Winnie The Pooh.

A real woman has either learned how to live with a man, or has the capability of learning to do that after she’s been around men. She’s not spoiling for a fight like these bints. And real women, I daresay, or at least I like to think, outnumber the bints. It’s a possibility. After all, they’re much, much quieter. Nobody anywhere is saying “I choose the man”…because it’s just common sense. Nobody says “Water is wet” either. It isn’t necessary.

Someone is missing the point. The bear girls, and the simps who align with them, seem awfully sure it’s the fellas missing the point; the fellas like me, who are reacting with snotty derision, or disagreement, or anything outside of fawning color-within-the-lines compliance and obeisance. We’re not getting it, they say. And sometimes the male simps are more outspoken about it than the bear girls:

A lot of my fellow men have really misunderstood the assignment with the whole man vs bear thing.

Your job wasn’t to come charging in to manaplain [sic] to women why they were wrong for choosing the bear.

Your job was to listen to them about WHY they would choose the bear.

And THEN to hold our fellow men accountable so that in the future women would not feel inclined to choose the bear.

That was the assignment fellas.

Job? Assignment?

Fellow men?

This is a case of the blind leading the not-blind. A real man knows some psychologically fractured cow on the Internet has no business giving him “assignments.” And he understands perfectly well that, within the Internet and outside of it, most of the disapproval aimed at males is pre-fabricated and pre-packaged. It’s there for its own sake. Someone is climbing the social ladder. It has nothing to do with what the singular or plural male entity has been doing, or failing to do. Nothing at all.

It’s all about scolding males. Scolding males is quick, easy, fun, socially rewarding and doesn’t cost anything. It’s simply what you do when you don’t know what else to say. So…hold my fellow men accountable? Against what? Women who want to choose the bear, wouldn’t choose the bear? Silly boy.

The bear-lady who “hope[s] this pisses you off” nailed it on behalf of everybody else, I think. This male reaction of pure anger, far from exceeding in supply what is spelled out in demand, is quite the reverse. The dumb bints are spoiling for a fight. I mean, it’s so obvious it’s just right out there in front of us, like the elephant in the room. Can we just admit that this motivation is there? It’s silly to deny it. You end up having to pretend, and that sort of pretending is unhealthy.

And if they’re trying to make us angry, that’s important. The narrative is that they’d prefer the bear because we’re just so unpredictable and scary, introducing unstable elements to a protagonist who would strongly prefer the stability we’re dislodging. Obviously, if that’s the narrative, there are problems with it if someone’s pissing us off on purpose. It doesn’t matter if they’re successful or not.

If there’s disharmony between the sexes, they’re the ones bringing it.

Some of them might not be aware. There is a type of thinking going on here, and it may be female-dominant but it’s likely not female-monopolized…it says the whole point of discussion is to emphasize agreements, not to reconcile disagreements. If you’re a man married or thinking of getting married, you’ve no doubt heard it said that when a woman brings a problem to you, you’re just going to confuse, bore or frustrate her if you do what comes naturally to a man — leapfrog to the possible solutions. That she just wants to vent. She doesn’t want to hear your opinion, she wants to hear her own opinion, with a male voice behind it.

Now, being a man, I don’t often have such conversations with men unless there’s a time sheet and a paycheck involved. Problem-solving on my own time, I tend to do by myself. Like Batman. If I’m collaborating with someone and no one is paying me to do it, I’m usually collaborating with a woman, and better than even odds I’m running into that ancient, ancient issue where I’m torquing off the woman because I’m offering solutions when she just wants empathy or whatever. But I daresay, based on my admittedly limited knowledge: Men don’t do this.

I do not consent We don’t script out in our heads, how the other person is supposed to validate our feelings about the problem, and then get “sad” when the other person veers off into some other direction, offering further analyses or — heaven forbid — the makings of a possible remedy. I’ve noticed even healthy, whole women who know how to co-exist with men, sometimes do this, and it seems to me to be a female thing.

But the damaged, broken, toxic “bear girls” do it even more.

They say they have experience, with the men “attacking” them and they anticipate the bear won’t be doing this. They make it sound like rape. But I know from #MeToo that a lot of people get high on making lots of things sound like rape. They made dirty jokes sound like rape. They make “He walked into the room and it made me feel uncomfortable” sound like rape.

I’m wondering: Mere disagreement, or “are you sure?” challenges, or any other behavior outside the tightly-scripted this-is-where-you-say-this-line stuff…could that be the “attack”?

I learned something about this last time I was available as a single man: A lot of women who are available as single women, are available for a reason. They don’t want, or need, a man at all. Any thoughts they want out of you, they’ll figure it out on your behalf. And then give you signals to peg down exactly what it is you’re supposed to say. What they really need and want, are stuffed animals. They simply haven’t matured to the point where they can share their lives with another thinking person with thoughts and reactions all his own. Being First World Females, and thus the most privileged demographic that has ever walked the surface of the planet, they’ve never had a reason to develop this need or the skills that would have to come with it.

No, not all women. Not even all the single women, or all of the single women I dated. Just a big chunk, out of the available ones. It was a recurring pattern I couldn’t help noticing.

I recognize the people who need to hear it, don’t want my opinion or any male opinion for that matter (except for the simps I suppose). But to me, that’s what this “I choose the bear” thing has manifested. There is a problem brewing within the female half of our population, or I should say mostly within the female half — “My choice is the final word.” She makes a choice. What more is there to be said? It’s the be-all end-all argument-ender. She’s handed down her decision as final arbiter.

But the bear will kill yo–

Omigaw!! You’re still talking! Why are you still talking? I made my choice!

Now…how did this mindset come to be so ingrained? I’m given to understand that we’ve been living, knowingly or not, in a “patriarchy.” Women have supposedly been subjugated and oppressed, just like the subjugated and oppressed classes that have been better recognized: Slaves, Jews, Jewish slaves, Catholics, Protestants, trade unionists, homosexuals, other various pariah classes…

The question that is left standing is, How does a pariah class come to take it as a given that its members should have the final word on things? To such an extent that any rejoinder to a nonsensical opinion like “I prefer the bear because it will leave me alone” is nothing more than annoying buzz?

And I’ll just leave that question there. Pull pin, walk away.

Update: Fellas…no. It is not going to work for you.

Props for trying, though.

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Someone is Indoctrinating Women to be Afraid of Men
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024

Yes, the headline above is probably not the takeaway I’m supposed to be putting together in my head…but, if I said I got anything else out of it, I’d be lying.

Would you rather be stuck in the forest with a man or bear? Why this simple yet loaded “viral” question is leading to breakups across the world

• Woman reveal why they would rather encounter a bear or a strange man

Women who went to a Sydney rally that called for an end to gendered violence held up signs that said “At this point I’d rather the f**king bear”, “Ladies prefer the bear”, and “[I’d rather be] alone in the woods with a bear.”

“Men are scary,” a woman argued, while another said: “Bears don’t always attack you unless you [provoke] them.”

[snip]

Many Australian women on a popular Facebook revealed that they’ve been arguing with their boyfriends and husbands over the matter after receiving the “wrong” answer from them.

“If a man can’t even acknowledge the risk many of them pose to women or the atrocities they have committed against us then he doesn’t care,” a woman said. “I don’t think it’s stupid to end a relationship over this.”

I agree. Way back in my younger days when I was kind of dumb, I was in relationships with some liberal women. At least, to such an extent it’s possible for a man to have one with them. Like the man-hater said, clearly, men are scary. So if it comes time to end a relationship over this, I think it likely both the men and the women involved will make a surprising discovery: There never really was a relationship in the first place. So frightened has she been taught to be of human males, she’d prefer the bear.

In all the reporting on this “viral” question though, I’ve not seen anyone try to answer the obvious question: Who’s teaching them this? Someone somewhere doesn’t want men and women to get along. Someone’s sowing the seeds of division.

Meanwhile, for the guy, it’s much better to mix things up with a real, whole, grown-up woman. A woman who’d prefer the man over the beast. These guys who are about to be dumped because they’re giving the “wrong” answer to the question, are about to trade up, and for a lot of them it may not take too long at all for it to become obvious. I know from my own experience that when this narrative just hangs in the air like a bad smell seven days a week, that you’re a towering asshole just because you’re human and a man, it’s a drag. It drags you down into the dirt. It’s like wearing a belt of lead weights around your waist, interfering with everything you try to do. It’s a relief when it isn’t there anymore.

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Friends
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024

“Friends.”

I’ve noticed, over the years, there are some that just don’t work as friends. They want you to do something, or to stop doing something, and won’t take no for an answer. Something serious or not-so-serious.

I had a friend who was a real friend. We were at a Chinese restaurant having lunch, and he upbraided me for not having just one beer. I was driving, and I have a twelve-hours-between-bottle-and-throttle rule. Comes from a confrontation I had with a cop, back in 1992, that I needed to have happen. So that’s something weird about me. So my friend encouraged, and then did some lecturing, finally a bit of good-natured mockery. Then he dropped it, because he was a real friend. He’s dead now. I miss him.

A fake friend will come up with some kind of narrative about other things you do, or what you are, to try to manipulate you.

“You’re trying to control me.”

“You think women are property.”

“You lack the sophistication needed to recognize there are more than two genders.”

“You don’t think black lives matter.”

“You’re insecure in your masculinity.”

“You’re afraid of strong women and can’t handle seeing them in a movie.”

“You MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy.”

“You like to go around making people feel like idiots.”

“You cling to your guns and your bibles.”

Some of them make it impossible to continue the friendship. The exchange is quick and efficient and goes something like:

You’re motivated by such-and-such.

I assure you, I’m not.

Oh yes you are!

What do you do with that? It’s hard not to interpret it as an accusation of lying. How can you take it otherwise? And how do you take it seriously? Oh dear. You caught me. I tried to fool you but you’re way too smart for me. Yes, you’re right…I’m out to whatever, and I shall not rest until all the whatever are whatever’d. See? Doesn’t work. You can’t take it seriously.

Real friends don’t manipulate this way. It’s really the first test of friendship, and we need to get back to recognizing it as such: A real friend will want you to do something you don’t want to do, nudge you about it for a little while — and then drop it. A real friend will ultimately say “Well, that’s your decision.”

Maybe if it’s something important, and they’re so sure they’re right, they’ll come back around after the consequences have landed, to ask “Did we learn anything?” Which is annoying. Some friendships have ended over that, I suppose. But that shouldn’t be the case. We need to be ending friendships over the manipulation, the narrative-building. That’s the real sign of a fake friend.

What we’re missing, is balls.

It takes balls to take an attitude of: You won’t do what I want you to do, okay that’s just fine. We can stay friends. It’s your call; up to you.

It takes balls to respond to the narrative-building with: Okay, you think I’m an “incel” who hates strong women in movies. So be it. I’m not going to like your crappy movie to prove you wrong.

Western society, currently, is in trouble. Too many people have crafted these narratives about other people they’re trying to manipulate, to get them to do what they want them to do. And too many people have caved in on this. “Oh no, I don’t want anyone thinking that about me, so I’ll do what you want.” Which never works.

But at some point, while we were snoozing, that became the default way of selling things. People don’t want to take no for an answer. They don’t deal with rejection. They respond to the rejection with these efforts to manipulate.

And then it works.

And then they respond to “I’m doing something slightly different from the what you would have me do, if I were a puppet” with more manipulation. It becomes a vicious cycle. An expectation sets in that you are, after all, a puppet, and to pull the strings all anybody has to do is come up with an unflattering narrative about you, and then you’ll do it. Some marriages work this way. Some people live out their whole lives that way.

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The Men Coming Out on Top
Thursday, April 4th, 2024

The “Women can do everything men can do” craze — that’s what it is, a craze, as in it doesn’t make any sense — started somewhere in the late 1960’s to early 1970’s. Probably with Angie Dickinson in “Police Woman.” Then it became a way for hack writers to stay relevant, which is where we are now. Mara Jade is just as powerful a Jedi as Luke Skywalker…which, again, doesn’t make any sense. Supergirl is stronger than Superman, and that doesn’t make any sense either.

Supergirl This is all fiction and it shouldn’t impact real life. In any way. But you know what, these are affairs of human beings, which also don’t make any sense. Fiction is affecting real life. Girls of dating age are ready to start some “serious” relationships with guys, and they don’t know how to do it because they’re not sure why we need guys. At all. For anything.

Mrs. Freeberg isn’t keeping up with the times. She and I have a “Martha and George Washington” height difference…or a Mathilda of Flanders / William the Conqueror height difference. Oh, she has step stools and when I’m not around and something’s on the top shelf, she does what must be done. But when I’m home…Honey? Can you get the thing? Usually the flour. Third shelf above the dishwasher.

She’s my Number One. Of course I jump up and get her what she needs. I may be a lazy asshole, but I’m a six foot tall lazy asshole, and she’s cooking my dinner. So I can continue to be an obese six foot tall lazy asshole. Oh yeah, and then the jars. She needs to open jars. Honey…?

I say: She’s smart. These “Women can do everything men can do” types are the dumb ones. They should be learning from her.

This targeting of men for uselessness — it’s counterproductive and cruel. It’s the cart before the horse. The conclusion comes first, and then we’re supposed to shoehorn reality into it. That isn’t how it’s supposed to work, at all, anywhere. And reality isn’t complying, because it turns out men can do quite a few things women can’t do. The cruelty is what’s inflicted upon the boys-coming-of-age. The message has gotten across to them that they lack value, aren’t supposed to be able to do anything, and if they’ve learned to do anything women can do it so much better. That’s a terrible message to deliver to anybody who’s teetering on the brink of adulthood, no matter what their gender is.

“Women can do it all” is false. It’s an argument that’s over before it’s started. You just pay attention to the “reality” taking shape around us, and you see even the title of “Woman of the Year” is being taken by a man.

And you know what else? It’s boring. It didn’t start last year, or the year before. It’s been going on for decades. Decades, and decades, and more decades, our noses being ground into it, like it’s punishment, the way you would grind a puppy’s nose into its own mess during the housebreaking. Except this is not our own mess.

Masculinity In addition to being false, and boring, it’s divisive. We don’t need this. Women and men complement each other. We belong together. My wife is five feet one inch — no more than that — of amazing-ness, and if she sees something needs doing she’s going to do it even though her knees are missing cartilage, her neck bones are fused together and she’s allergic to everything. But I’m the never-sick guy who can’t find anything in the drug store because he never needs anything, full size, full height. So if I can see she’s going to wreck herself trying to do something, I’m going to do it first.

The current cultural norm, and target of motion, is: Men are useless. We should just lie in the sunbeam, like cats, waiting for our mistresses to do everything.

But it isn’t going to work, because it doesn’t mesh with reality. It doesn’t even mesh with the fake-reality we’re building elsewhere, doesn’t mesh with the Mulvaney “reality.” Men come out on top here and there, now and then, in a lot of places. Because we should. Just like women should & do come out on top in other places. That’s the design, in both intent and in effect.

If you like, you might say God knew what she was doing when making that call. But the call got made, and that’s the way it is. We don’t work well as replacements for each other, because that’s not what we are. We’re all built for a higher purpose than that.

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When They Tell Us How It’s Gonna Be
Thursday, April 4th, 2024

Sometimes bureaucracy doesn’t tell. It asks.

And it seems quite out of place. The IRS sends you a letter saying they think you still owe $4,500. They’re probably right — they made sure they had you dead to rights before they sent the letter. But they ask. There’s an appeals process.

Ditto with Facebook removing your content. Sometimes they ask. They provide a way for you to protest the decision. Sometimes the link even works! They ask, don’t tell, even if they mean to tell and their openness to the dissenting opinion is merely an illusion.

Now there are other times where the bureaucracy makes a point of telling not asking. And that’s what has happened with DEI. The new officials and their salaries, the programs, the promotional materials, the mandated training, the indoctrination about “white fragility” — none of this existed just a handful of years ago. But it’s here now. Settled. There is no appeal. Don’t even think of it. You’re going to class. Resign. Submit.

Young people who have been herded through the public school K-12 system, have this tendency that’s entirely understandable. They think the more emphatic the bureaucracy is, the more right it must be. If you are lacking an appeals process, don’t worry about it because you probably don’t need one. Just worry about appealing the things you can appeal.

Well, I used to be a young person. But I’ve seen some years come and go, and I’ve been impressed by something. It’s the opposite that’s true.

If the bureaucracy doesn’t provide an appeals process, it’s because of one reason, and that one reason is that they’re afraid it will be used. The judgments and edicts handed down without any pathway for questioning or appeal, with very few exceptions, turn out to be ridiculous. The bureaucracy renders the judgment without appeal, because if they allowed for an appeal, ensuing events would show that the appeal is right, and the judgment was wrong. This is why nobody ever brags about having founded a “bureaucracy.” It’s not a good word.

And among the ones we have, nobody anywhere relies on them with genuine faith. They’re just there.

The less a bureaucracy allows for dissent, question or appeal, the less sense the decision makes. That’s because it’s less likely it would remain standing in the end with all credibility left intact, if the discussion were allowed to happen. You don’t need to take my word for it. Just pay attention. Paper straws, yanking Uncle Ben off boxes of rice and disappearing the Indian girl from Land O Lakes. Dudes competing in women’s sports. Pronouns, pronouns and more pronouns. “In establishing whether sexual harassment or aggression has taken place, it is the impression of the complainant that decides everything. The intent of the offender is irrelevant.” Do these decisions make sense? Really?

Let’s put Dr. Fauci in charge of everything, including how we let each other know we care. Make him the national Miss Manners. Let’s wait for Saint Anthony to tell us it’s okay to barbecue in our own back yard…with four people. Masks. Vaccination mandates. Who told you it’s okay to collect rainwater off your own roof?

Fact checkers. “Our ruling is false.” Oh is it now? Is your ruling supposed to be determined by the facts, or are the “facts” going to be molded and shaped by your ruling?

Whether to tag allegations about the 2020 election, and associated shenanigans, “baseless,” or “false.” It looks like, as they say, “a matter of fact.” Yes, it makes perfect sense that we shouldn’t consider public opinion in evaluating those; they are what they are, regardless of what anybody thinks. But when a star chamber of nameless and faceless deciders leaps to the conclusion they want and hands it down to the rest of us, is that really what’s happening?

Because after they do that, a lot of people are going to like it. And then those same people are going to tell us the Supreme Court, or some lower court, screwed up and made the wrong decision. This is where my interest hits a spike, because deciding on matters of fact and where logic leads from those facts, without any deference to public whim, is what those courts are supposed to do.

Meanwhile, there’s supposed to be a lot of distress over how much heat there is around our various issues under discussion — how divided we have become. We’d be a lot less divided if someone stopped and asked the public at large about the paper straws, or if it would be alright for men to pretend to be women in women’s boxing matches and swim matches.

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Fact Check!
Monday, April 1st, 2024

After I’m done reading a “Fact Check,” I am not left with an impression of “Oh good, now I have the whole story, then.” My impression, instead, is one of “I’d sure like to see a back-and-forth debate about this, as opposed to a simple ‘Fact Check’.”

I admit I have biases that could lead me toward that. But honestly, I don’t think they are. Seems to me this is a natural reaction. It is felt by, or ought to be felt by, all persons who think sincerely about things, all throughout the ideological spectrum. Right? I’m pretty sure about that. I’ve seen “my side” fact check some things and I’m left with the same question, of “Yeah but what do the other guys have to say about that?”

Fact checks are essentially ads. They are sponsored by interested organizations. They are about as credible as ads. They answer questions no one anywhere was asking, to give false impressions, like “This peanut butter has no cholesterol.”

I do think the public at large has fallen behind in their understanding of how misleading a fact check can be. Once I saw someone fact checking Ann Coulter in one of her books, where she points out notorious socialist candidate Norman Mattoon Thomas was the father of Newsweek editor Evan Thomas. He’s not!, said the fact check. Right…not father. Grandfather. The fact checker deliberately concealed that. Coulter had the necessary correction included in the next edition. Stuff like that.

In this case and others, you’d be better informed if you’d never seen the fact check.

And then there’s the out-and-out failed stuff. We were on the receiving end of a fact check that Hunter Biden’s laptop was actually just planted Russian disinformation. An opinion, not an established fact. But, the opinion of fifty-one highly qualified intelligence experts. So that drove a “fact check” — which turned out to be wrong. The laptop was Hunter’s and there was nothing Russian about it. Apologies all around? Eh…nope.

I’m left wondering: These fact checks are for…whom? Who has faith in them? I think we’ve outgrown them at this point. They’re ads. You litter the landscape with thousands of ’em, like fliers stapled to telephone poles, and one or two out of those thousands will have the desired effect. From that, you justify a budget to run off thousands more. That’s exactly the way they work, and that’s not what honest people have in mind when you use the words “fact check.”

But it makes it easier for some people to WinTheArgument — when they don’t really deserve to win it. So they like it. That’s the truth.

It’s really time for the whole thing to go. No one’s fooled by it anymore. Just barely enough of a false impression, falling on just barely enough people, to justify its continuing existence, as advertising. Just like scam artists calling your elderly parents on the phone to swindle them out of their life savings. Just enough for something like that. Not as anything else. And it’s been this way for quite awhile by now. Just like with many of the other things we do, future generations will be left wondering: Why’d we tolerate it so long? And there’s no good answer.

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Trans Day of Visibility
Sunday, March 31st, 2024

It’s a day-of-visibility for something that’s already highly visible all the other days in the year.

It is associated with a pledge to remember something everyone is already remembering, and can’t forget about even if they want to forget about it. Because reminders are everywhere. Yes, all days of the year.

Also, to drive something from the planet forever and ever, something that will never be driven from the planet — ever. Just like a bunch of other “get rid of it forever” vices, like pollution, war, jealousy, bigotry, blight, poverty…

It is an annual celebration conceived and designed to make sure we never get past something, to preserve resentments.

I say, let’s use the day to think about how easily manipulated we are.

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Market Value
Sunday, March 31st, 2024

I notice on social media lately there are lots of comments for me to read about men and women forming relationships with each other. It’s funny that I’m happily married and I’m not in need of this “wisdom,” which comes from male and females who have yet to form a lasting relationship with the other. It’s the blind leading the not-blind.

I’m seeing a lot about “market value.” There seem to be a lot of people in need of being told: This is not a male-female thing. I sense much confusion about this. Females seem to think it’s a win for females if males have to prove their market value. Males seem to think it’s a win for males if females have to prove their market value. That’s not how any of this works.

Market value is a real thing, but it’s a courtship thing. After courtship there is supposed to be attachment, some inertia built up if you want to think of it in those terms. Affection. At that point, market value isn’t supposed to matter, and if it does, then you’ve established a relationship that isn’t going to last.

But at some point, it’s a real thing. There is filtering that has to be applied here. Stenciling. Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn’t. Our evolving society has settled this the way it settles everything else that sometimes-matters and sometimes-doesn’t: By kissing lady-butt. Marketability matters when the females like it. When it puts them at a disadvantage, we’re not supposed to acknowledge it or talk about it, and we’re supposed to pretend it doesn’t exist even though it does.

In high school, girl is plugged into the social framework, boy isn’t, he’s a scrawny, geeky sort of thing — marketability matters. He doesn’t bring market value, doesn’t “bring anything to the table.” He needs to “up his game.” She is “out of his league.” We can go ahead and talk about marketability.

Ten years after, she’s a single mom reeking of baby puke twenty hours a day, and he’s an up-and-coming successful software engineer. Then you don’t talk about it. What’s she bring to the table? By asking the question you have offended every female. And he’s a “high value male”? You’ve just offended them again…even though it’s true.

We love to talk about how she needs to make her suitors prove their worth before she goes out on dates.

We don’t like to talk about how he needs to do the same thing, with his various pursuits. Even though disaster follows if he doesn’t.

We’ve filtered this out incorrectly, because we crave female approval. We have built all these customs around female approval. The truth is that marketability applies to everyone, but it is pre attachment. Once you’re with someone, you’re with them. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But when you’re just in the courtship stage, if things don’t go beyond that, like ever…maybe there’s an issue. “Bring to the table” becomes a real concept. It’s possible someone needs to go and look at that. Maybe there’s a little too much ass-sitting and not enough self-building.

That could apply to either one. Neither one is automatically entitled to one of that special someone. You have to show respect to the other. You have to earn it.

But…what do I know? I’m off the market. So don’t listen to me.

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If the Fly Lives, the Spider Starves
Saturday, March 30th, 2024

For those who are presenting themselves as newcomers to politics and desiring a simple, one-line explanation of “right” vs. “left”; you could do far worse than this.

The Left sees things in terms of “Thunderdome” competition; two go in but only one comes out again. A good day for the lion is a lousy day for the gazelle. If the fly lives, the spider starves. If the economy is good, you can count on them to weep and mope about “The Forgotten Man.” Their big thing is not forgetting people who would ordinarily be forgotten. Remember perspective; the sinking of the Titanic was a miracle for the lobsters in the kitchen.

With the emergence of the environmental movement, they reached an apex with their “what about” attitude and became particularly vexatious: A dam that helps everybody! Well, what about the snail darters? Logging that helps everybody! But what about the spotted owls?

They think this makes them positive, and broad-minded. In reality, it makes them scary. As they acknowledge, or invent, these situations in which one side must lose so another one wins, their method of resolving the conflict is to vote. Democracy, as the old saying goes, is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for lunch.

This creates a difference, and it’s probably the most important difference. The Right believes in running a society — right. A rising tide can, and should, lift all boats. There’s a right way to control traffic at this intersection, or to collect garbage weekly, and if you do that then we win. We do. All of us.

You’ll notice a lot of the time when The Right is provoked into offense, or action, or a combination of those two things — the issue is very often one of incentives. The Left doesn’t seem to understand this. They might say “What about someone who needs the thing and doesn’t have the means to pay for it?” and so the thing has to be provided. Then The Right will say “If it’s free, then people will consume the thing who otherwise would not.” If you want more of something, subsidize it, and if you want less of it you tax it. The Left doesn’t engage this. They miss out on the whole subtopic, or they pretend not to understand it, or they change the subject. The Right thinks big and The Left thinks small. The Right is more concerned with making society work.

For any of this to happen, you have to have law and order. This distinguishes humans from animals. We have figured out how to make advanced societies, and the whole point to having these is that everyone can win. Everyone, everywhere, all at once.

The Left, confronted with this, puts on their “what about” hat and creates conflict where there is none. “Law and order? But what about the persons and groups historically oppressed by police?” So they talk of defunding the police. They may as well be discussing the dismantling of civilization itself. Look, they say; we cooked up a situation in which your law-and-order costs somebody something. So get rid of it.

Well — if what you’re trying to do is break the law, then yes. Law and order would get in the way of that. It’s supposed to do that. That’s the only way we can get to the “public good” the way The Right sees it, where everyone benefits, and you don’t need to hold a vote so that 51 can enjoy the omelet while 49 fill the role of the eggs. Far from The Left being broad-minded, they’re actually the narrow-minded ones, who can’t see this. They’re the ones who only see omelet-diners, omelet-chefs, and eggs. But when the governed provide their consent to the government, we’re actually supposed to be trying for something more benign than that, more sophisticated and grander than that.

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We Need Humility
Sunday, February 25th, 2024

We have a problem with humility.

You have heard it said that humility focuses on what’s right, while the Sin of Pride is concerned with who’s right. Everyone wants to be right all the time. It’s understandable, but all sins are understandable or they wouldn’t be sins.

Women aren’t being held to standards. You find one little shortcoming with a woman or with what she’s done, people swarm out of the woodwork to point out a man did something just as bad or worse. Which changes the subject. What the woman did wrong, doesn’t get addressed. And they’ll be right. But, it’s not a contest. Very few people care about whether men are better than women, or the other way around, and the question is as unanswerable as it is useless. But what’s wrong with the men anyway? Their shortcomings are pointed out all the time…men engage, get criticized, they disengage and get criticized some more. Many have gotten to the point where they just don’t care. They self-isolate and play video games. Two sexes, two entirely different problems. They are diametrically opposite problems. Neither one gets effectively worked, either by the person showing the shortcoming or by anybody else. Humility.

Our so-called “leaders” want us to curb our carbon emissions while they fly around on jets. That’s a humility problem. Do as I say, not as I do. Everyone can see what’s wrong about it. So many people don’t do anything about it, in fact a lot of people sign up to help the phony carbon misers chide the rest of us. Scolding is fun.

There are a lot of bold new decisions being made about how to write and produce movies. “Reimaginings,” and so forth, with this-or-that white straight character made black or gay. But these decisions are not really bold, because when the ticket revenues fall short and the poor reviews come rolling in, the people who made the movie blame the audience for not liking it. They’re steadfastly unready to receive any criticism. Humility.

People say it is of paramount importance that Donald Trump be kept as far away as possible from the presidency, or any office of trust, honor or authority. Ever again. It’s certainly their right to vote that way, and to voice their opinion about it. But their attempts to prosecute him reveal that if the majority is still with them on this, they’re not too confident about it. And the content of the cases against him reveal a quality control problem. They’re laughably stupid. Such cases exist only because of this drive to keep Trump out of office, which should be limited to votes and speech. Everyone knows it’s wrong to abuse the justice system this way, but people are doing it anyhow because they’re afraid to lose. Humility.

As far as Trump’s wealth, I keep hearing about how he inherited it. But nobody anywhere is asserting that he inherited all of it; he’s worth more than what he got. He made money. If people are so fixated on it, shouldn’t they be more concerned about what Trump knows how to do, to make this money? You don’t get to inherit it and then just stick it in a mattress and expect it to grow.

Now we have people talking up the Biden presidency as some edifice of greatness. Joe Biden, so goes the narrative, far from being senile has it all together. He’s sharp; he’s energetic; can’t keep up with him; gets more done in an hour than some people do all day. Silly. Not even worth arguing, just risible nonsense. People, seeking to attend to their social standing, making asses out of themselves. They don’t want to admit voting for Biden was a mistake. Don’t want to admit the lesson they got, when you kick a guy out you need to think more about the quality of his replacement — which they didn’t do. A mistake, followed by a second mistake of refusing to admit to the first. Humility.

Social media has woven people together with a net of social engagement, that’s a bit too effective; the strands of the web are just a bit too thick. People are making judgment calls, and decisions about what to do, based on how these choices will affect their social altitude, whether they’ll generate lift or drag. They want to be “right” all the time, but only right in the judgment of their peer group. To make a decision that’s right from the perspective of nature and nature’s God, in the sense that it will make things better, is of decidedly second priority to them. That’s the Sin of Pride.

In fact it’s worse than that; we have a month where we actually celebrate pride. We’re proud, and making dreadful decisions, about everything, often. It’s hurting us.

Humility. We’re missing some. Need to get it back again.

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Defining the Cause and Effect
Monday, February 19th, 2024

Republicans and democrats both hitting me up for donations…

I notice something. The democrats, who I’ve long noticed are opposed to the preservation of any definitions we rely on to make society go, and in fact are strongly in favor of destroying the definitions we have already (legal immigrant, illegal substance, marriage, man/woman)…continue their perfect streak of defining absolutely nothing when begging for votes and money. “My opponent is too extreme for California!” …like…in what way? One quickly gathers the impression Adam Schiff isn’t saying, because he can’t afford to say. California where you still have to pay five bucks a gallon for gas. Yeah, I want to pay Trump-era gas prices. Real extreme.

It seems like Republicans are taking a page out of this playbook. Define nothing. Like, you’ll alienate voters and potential donors if you say anything about the actual issues. We all know why we don’t want democrats elected, so it’s smart to just leave that unmentioned.

I say: No. It isn’t smart. It’s dumb. People are so much more eager to say “I’m conservative” than “I’m Republican,” because the latter has not often been the former. The people who might be persuaded to support the Republican party with their votes or with their donations, are typically jaded. There’s been a long string of abuses, a track record of bait and switch, and they’ve had enough of it. They want assurances. Also, a lot of them became Republicans or conservatives in the first place because they’re hypersensitive to this business of “I just give you tiny teaspoons of information because if I tell you too much you’ll go away (because you’ll figure out you should).” If you’re worthy of their support, you’ll say what you mean, and you’ll mean what you say.

I have to wait for Donald Trump himself to give a speech to find out what it means to Make America Great Again. Nobody else is even mentioning it, except democrats, by way of the single word MAGA which they use as a put-down. Yes, an undefined put-down. “Those MAGA Republicans.”

Gee I don’t know about that, Joe & others. I never saw any MAGA Republicans install local prosecutors who refused to prosecute felons, or bus in violent thugs and child molesters to crowded cities to stage dangerous, destructive George Floyd protests. And I haven’t seen any of them bench-press the cost of energy upward, to make me poorer, on purpose.

It’s aggravating. The 2024 election year shouldn’t be a nail-biter, shouldn’t be any kind of photo-finish. The other side has the Senate and White House; the case to be made for a change in leadership is strong, and their election-year bragging rights are as thin as during any election in my living memory.

If it isn’t a Reagan-Carter rout, that can only mean the Republican leadership is making bad decisions, heading in the wrong direction. And it almost certainly is not going to be that.

Specify stuff. State your case. Define things.

It is the essence of conservatism to define that which should be defined. Liberalism obfuscates and obliterates definitions; it takes **liberties** with them. Define the things. Or, give up and go home.

You might start with what causes what. Connect them together. Yes, you’ll be unable to prove it, and the “fact checkers” would jump on such fastenings like hungry hyenas on a carcass. But the fact checkers are hyenas; they’ll do that no matter what.

Let’s look into that. And start with recognizing the disconnect, and correcting a misconception. Liberals say conservatives are extreme and conservatives say liberals are extreme.

But people generally agree, conservatives want to keep things the way they are and liberals want to try out new ideas. Unfortunately, this common ground is faulty. There are situations in which it does not hold. For example, right now we’re looking forward to the day electric vehicles can entirely displace, at least in some efforts, internal combustion. Do you know of any conservatives taking the position “Nosiree, I will keep my gas engine forever and ever, no matter what”? I’m not like that. I’m too cheap. Stubborn, sure. But also cheap. You get me an electric unit that can save me money, I will buy it as long as I can count on it.

And really, everything is like that.

So it’s more like: A new idea emerges; liberals pounce on the idea, while conservatives are still asking questions about it. Sensible questions. The kinds of questions grown-ups ask. Conservatives want to treat the new idea as a new idea. Has it been tested? Are we going to phase the roll-out, in an isolated sandbox first? Opt-in? Opt-out? Reliable rollback strategy if it goes to shit?

Whereas liberals go rushing after the idea, like a dog chasing a car. That is your distinction between the two — the real one. Conservatives think, liberals don’t.

As such, conservatives have a better and more disciplined understanding of cause and effect. They believe in it. Liberals don’t believe in cause and effect unless they’re blaming a bad thing on Republicans; then they believe in it. Republicans did the bad thing, humans are trashing the planet, other than that nothing causes anything in the liberal world. It’s a world of sensationalist headlines, effects without cause. Refugee crisis, energy crisis, inflation crisis, and don’t forget the poor people, losers of life’s lottery.

Of course the thing about cause and effect is, with very few exceptions, no one can really prove anything.

But if you want to make a plan that’s got a better chance to succeed than a random selection, you have to think about the C&E. That is at the heart of all strategy, what causes what. Without those connecting rods, it’s all just a crap-shoot, a roll of the dice followed by a “let’s hope.” That’s not strategy.

I think…

1. When the Government prints money without anything to back it, that results in inflation. Really, I’m stunned that anybody who thinks highly of their own understanding of economics would disagree, but people do. And I can’t prove it. But I know it’s right.

2. When you tighten down on gun restrictions you really only impose the restrictions on the people who are willing to follow the law, which criminals, by definition, are not willing to follow. The tendency is going to be for crime to increase as a result, including violent crime.

3. Lowering the voting age results in less wise voting, by which I mean, stupid. It takes awhile to figure out how to vote like you’re not an impressionable dumbass, and a lot of that learning has to do with — yup. Cause and effect. Shutting your mouth, sitting back, and watching it.

4. Female conduct leads the conduct of society overall. Women deciding, en masse, to shun family life and limp from cradle to grave as spinsters, leads to large numbers of women becoming disoriented and unhinged, and that leads to society overall becoming unhinged.

5. Men become disoriented too, if they’re missing a sense of purpose. Without a sense of benefit to their deeds or consequence to their misdeeds, men lose their way. Very, very few men will maintain their sense of direction without anyone depending on them, and even they will become disoriented if their decisions and actions don’t seem to affect their own prospects.

6. Children require discipline. They have to learn at a young age to respect others. If they don’t, they grow up to be assholes.

7. People who read too much about how to do something, without actually doing it, will become clean-hands idiots. It’s in our nature. We’ll start to think of ourselves as superior to the dirty-hand people who are actually doing the work. If anything, it should be the other way around, because when people get their hands dirty they get to experience first-hand — yup, cause and effect. The book-reading people with their clean hands, generally speaking, are sheltered from this. But they’re offered a superficial impression that their education is better and they know more. It’s a dangerous combination.

8. College tuition, legal services, petroleum products, housing and food are expensive because government has stepped in at some point and started subsidizing these goods. When government “helps” people to acquire something, you can expect the market price of whatever that is to skyrocket. That’s because whoever opts to pay for the thing themselves, has to wade out into the market as a consumer and compete with the government.

9. Feminists are the progressive activists most keenly invested in our evolving culture; they are affected by it, and they also induce an effect upon it. As you look at their various efforts over the years, you’re going to see a pattern where they label something as oppressive evidence of patriarchy, and when you look at who wanted that thing in the first place, you’ll see it was the feminists. They clamor for something, get it, and a generation later they’re complaining about that very thing.

10. Technology has an atrophying effect upon the mind. As it provides us with more conveniences, raising our safety, our security and our standard of living, it compels more people to think like idiots. It essentially manufactures liberalism. People feel like they can make it without parents, without family, without God, without any stable definitions of anything anywhere — but, at the same time, they can’t make it at all. Need Government to give them freebies, or else they’re doomed to become victims of the patriarchy.

It may not result in Republicans winning reliably right away; may not give us a red-wave rout this year like we should be getting. But we really should — need to — start debating issues in terms of what causes what, rather than leapfrogging ahead to policy changes or reversions of earlier changes. When we jump ahead to “what’s our next move,” that’s when we alienate people needlessly, and we tend to argue around the real disparities, avoiding explorations of other things. Those things we’re leaving unexplored, discussed in the daylight more openly, would prove injurious to liberals and other people with bad ideas who should by rights be losing.

Of course…I can’t prove that either. Such is life.

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The Problem with the Problematizing Problematizers
Sunday, February 4th, 2024

So I was reading this epistle posted on this Internet woke-kiosk called The Mary Sue, which was sounding the familiar clarion call of the woke, “Oh how much I hate this thing, come gather around and help me hate it.” In this case, for today, “it” would be J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter adventures.

The author piqued my curiosity by willfully using the word “problematic.” This isn’t a good word. It doesn’t say anything. Take an object, let’s say it’s a beehive, or a pair of salt & pepper shakers. A milk bucket. You tell me it’s “problematic” and what does that say about the thing? Nothing. You’re telling me about yourself, and your objectives. You’re trying to start a new cultural more in which the thing is generally disliked, for some reason. You’re instigating an exchange. You’ll grant me approval if I help you dislike the thing. Or, you’ll withhold the approval unless I help you. And…that’s it. That’s all you’re saying.

You don’t need to overthink it like this to see the — problems. The word is just awkward and weird. It is a punchline all unto itself, fairly screaming “educated beyond my intellect.” But our newer generation of woke-people just can’t stop using it. The walls of their echo chamber are so thick? They can’t see this?

It’s like they’ve become, bit by bit, now perfectly willing to ‘fess up to anyone paying attention

1) They haven’t got anything to say besides telling us about their dislike of something;
2) They haven’t got any reason for disliking it, other than someone else gave them instructions to dislike it;
3) If the thing they dislike were to go away, it wouldn’t help anybody besides them — in short, there’s really no reason for anyone to listen to ’em.

Van Harvey clued me in on something that gave me a bit of a shock. There’s a verb to go with the adjective: Problematize.

Problematizing is, as adherents to Critical Social Justice and other critical theories would say, the process of making those oppressions (and other moral failings) â€œvisible.â€ Put otherwise, problematics are what critical theories criticize, and problematizing is how it does its criticism. The goal of this activity is to replace false consciousness (especially internalized oppression) with critical consciousness (i.e., wokeness) and thus agitate for a social and cultural revolution.

So wait…what? The anti-woke, like me, have been accusing the woke of just looking for reasons to be upset. Advancing the notion that peace with them is impossible, that if their demands are ever met in total, they’ll just come up with more. And here they are, not only admitting it, but being proud to do so?

It seems like something they should only be talking about behind closed doors.

Well if this isn’t a secret, or hasn’t been one, then I can only conclude the “progress” progressives have been making is due to a monumental misunderstanding.

We entered a cul de sac, doomed to stall or beat a retreat, way back in the prior century. When we allowed progressives to assume a role as final arbiter in the rules of good manners.

It isn’t because my biases are the opposite of theirs, and I don’t trust their judgment. Although those apply. No. I would expect a reasonable progressive, if you can find one, to concede the point that never being happy is an indispensable part of their ideology. This is easily defined and easily tested. Just give them whatever they want, which is something we’ve done many times. They’ll find a new way to be unhappy, to say “Still not good enough.” Progress, remember?

This sounds so captivating, especially to decent people. “We’re making a perfect new world, one in which that behavior, acceptable now, simply isn’t good enough.” Who could say no? What could possibly be the problem?

The problem is that, ironically, it makes us all into wretched people.

We become a society in which, if any one of us plays Rip van Winkle and falls asleep for twenty years, when he wakes up he finds himself a pariah among those who used to accept him, through no fault of his own. It doesn’t matter which guy. It doesn’t matter what twenty years those are. Our society is one in which you’re obliged to stay up on where all these reforms are going, and what ones are coming along next, in order to keep your status. In fact, in order to remain only marginally acceptable.

The higher standards are not the focus. The whole point of the activity is the rejection. The goal is to find more things “problematic.”

It’s a motte-and-bailey argument. The motte, the mild and easily defended argument, is: People shouldn’t be annoying each other on purpose. They should put just a minimal amount of effort into complying with these new rules, to avoid offense. Unfortunately this comes attached to a whole slew of baileys, as reliable as a thunderclap following the lightning. Ignorance is no excuse. If you don’t follow these rules we made up, you’re unfit. Your shortcoming must be deliberate. It must prove something deficient in your character, irredeemable. And if you occupy a position of authority, profit or honor then you must be unfit for that and the rest of us have to separate you from it.

We can’t continue down this road.

Ultimately we’re going to have to admit society took a wrong turn, quite a ways back. This is a tough thing to admit, because it all started with “It’s a sign of bad character to treat a black fellow differently from the way you’d treat his white counterpart.” Which is true. Progressives want all the credit for guiding us out of that sort of discrimination. Well, a lot of people gave it up without progressivism helping them, and a lot of people never started on it. But more importantly: It’s not a manners thing. Can we admit that now? That’s a “make society go” thing, a “the American dream is for everybody” thing. A don’t-be-stupid thing.

Very subtle difference but an important one. You can be a rude cluck and concede that the American dream is for everyone. Manners were not on the bill.

We goofed way back there. Nowadays, it’s many times a year progressives have new ideas for our ever-evolving “manners.”

Whoever proposes a bold change for all of us, should be ready to deal with rejection. The bolder the change, the greater the readiness, and the bigger the problems that emerge if the readiness is not there. Now we’re armpits deep in this wreckage of progressives telling us “The change we have in mind for today, is [blank]”…and they’re entirely unready to deal with any dissent, or even any questions. To the contrary. We’ve become accustomed to their readiness for the opposite, to destroy anybody who so much as hesitates to go along, let alone those who refuse to do so.

This is unmaintainable even if the progressive ideas are good.

A pattern has emerged in which, the more impractical and extravagant the progressive idea, the harsher the social penalties to be lowered on those who resist. We have to pretend men can get pregnant now. Use the pronouns. Go to the training. Our ability to earn money to pay our mortgages, utilities and grocery bills depends on accepting the falsehoods.

We’re running out of road.

We shouldn’t have put progressives in charge of manners. It’s not their thing anyway. Their agenda is not for people to be better mannered or less offensive to each other. They thrive on the offense. They aren’t about manners. They are about control.

We’ve accepted clear and obvious falsehood, and now we’re paying the penalty.

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Twenty Years Blogging, and I’m Thinking About WorkTuesday, November 12th, 2024

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He’s Been President AlreadySunday, November 10th, 2024

On LeadershipThursday, October 31st, 2024

Men Are ReplaceableThursday, October 31st, 2024

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It Runs, and It Doesn’t RunThursday, July 4th, 2024

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CultWednesday, June 19th, 2024

SymbolsSaturday, June 1st, 2024

That’s What You Get For Threatening The EstablishmentFriday, May 31st, 2024

Wounded, Incomplete, Toxic Females Saturate Social Media With Their Execrable Ideas About BearsSaturday, May 4th, 2024

Someone is Indoctrinating Women to be Afraid of MenTuesday, April 30th, 2024

FriendsTuesday, April 30th, 2024

The Men Coming Out on TopThursday, April 4th, 2024

When They Tell Us How It’s Gonna BeThursday, April 4th, 2024

Fact Check!Monday, April 1st, 2024

Trans Day of VisibilitySunday, March 31st, 2024

Market ValueSunday, March 31st, 2024

If the Fly Lives, the Spider StarvesSaturday, March 30th, 2024

We Need HumilitySunday, February 25th, 2024

Defining the Cause and EffectMonday, February 19th, 2024

The Problem with the Problematizing ProblematizersSunday, February 4th, 2024

Consensus as a Compass
Monday, December 9th, 2024

Twenty Years Blogging, and I’m Thinking About Work
Tuesday, November 12th, 2024

Choices About Cheating
Sunday, November 10th, 2024

He’s Been President Already
Sunday, November 10th, 2024

On Leadership
Thursday, October 31st, 2024

Men Are Replaceable
Thursday, October 31st, 2024

They Chase Their Rainbows
Thursday, October 31st, 2024

Go Ahead and Discuss Things
Monday, September 30th, 2024

Voting on Maturity Levels
Wednesday, September 18th, 2024

Badass Rebels
Friday, August 16th, 2024

The Release Candidate
Saturday, August 3rd, 2024

Un-Salesman
Wednesday, July 31st, 2024

July Recap
Wednesday, July 31st, 2024

It Runs, and It Doesn’t Run
Thursday, July 4th, 2024

Memo For File CCXX
Sunday, June 30th, 2024

Cult
Wednesday, June 19th, 2024

Symbols
Saturday, June 1st, 2024

That’s What You Get For Threatening The Establishment
Friday, May 31st, 2024

Wounded, Incomplete, Toxic Females Saturate Social Media With Their Execrable Ideas About Bears
Saturday, May 4th, 2024

Someone is Indoctrinating Women to be Afraid of Men
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024

Friends
Tuesday, April 30th, 2024

The Men Coming Out on Top
Thursday, April 4th, 2024

When They Tell Us How It’s Gonna Be
Thursday, April 4th, 2024

Fact Check!
Monday, April 1st, 2024

Trans Day of Visibility
Sunday, March 31st, 2024

Market Value
Sunday, March 31st, 2024

If the Fly Lives, the Spider Starves
Saturday, March 30th, 2024

We Need Humility
Sunday, February 25th, 2024

Defining the Cause and Effect
Monday, February 19th, 2024

The Problem with the Problematizing Problematizers
Sunday, February 4th, 2024