House of Eratosthenes

Catching up on e-mail, I see I have been embroiled in a number of Facebook arguments without realizing it. Abortion, mass shootings, gas prices, etc. As I’ve noted before, I’m some 35-40 years into figuring out what makes liberals tick and I’m an extremely slow learner, but I couldn’t help noticing something.

All I can do is infer based on what I see, but it seems like my sparring partners do not care that much about whether an unborn baby is a baby, or how to prevent the next mass shooting, or who’s to blame for high gas prices. There’s this pattern of abrupt sign-off with some kind of “I give up, this is a stupid argument”…maybe that’s because I really am stupid and they’re bright enough to see it. They certainly seem to think so. But if that’s the explanation, wouldn’t they be toiling away without my involvement trying to find ways to be fair to both the unborn baby and the mother, or to prevent the next mass shooting (apart from coming up with new gun laws that aren’t related in any way to the tragedies that inspire them)…or, making gas affordable again? Instead all I see them do is mock, ridicule, and re-ignite these arguments on social media that they end up saying are too stupid to justify their continued immersion after a few exchanges.

Liberals, I have determined, don’t care about the end state. They don’t revisit it, like a farmer revisiting a crop he planted, to face a potential abrupt forced about-face, to engage in a forced confession of having had the wrong idea…to exercise good old fashioned humility. They’re not interested in learning anything new, like they say they are, and they’re certainly not interested in learning something new if it comes at the cost of admitting to a mistake.

Liberals are liberals because they want to ratchet up their social status. Rush Limbaugh used to say the whole damn ideological positioning was the most gutless move you could make: Just be for…everything. Don’t see a problem in anything, don’t figure out any weak parts in an argument, don’t criticize, just go with the flow and think happy thoughts. He was right.

They love to start arguments but they can’t stand finishing them.

I can see, when I’m the one poking the bear, or when I’m the bear being poked, there’s a panic setting in that others aren’t seeing. The whole thing is a bribe that goes back to middle school: “Believe, with us, that two and two make five, and your social status will elevate.” And here comes someone like me who knows 2+2=4, but much worse than that, is and has always been unpopular…not willing to make the trade…never has been, ever. And you can see the panic and the fear. Oh shit! Someone we forgot to bribe!

And then they engage in this whirling-cyclone thing, this desperate mad butterchurn-spin, spewing the arguments they have been using on themselves to keep themselves comfortable in their nonsensical positions. It comes off looking like they can’t tell the difference between a strong argument, that could win over a convert, versus a weaker one, just the soothing pablum one says to oneself for sake of self-assurance that no learning is needed. I presume that they simply have no strong arguments available, because they haven’t needed any for a long time. They haven’t been challenged. It is a charitable presumption I am making, for the alternative is that they’re entirely unaccustomed to strong arguments and that’s why they can’t distinguish.

They panic because it’s too late to bribe me, and they can tell. They can’t invite me to any parties, or if they do, they can’t impose this believe-what-we-want condition because I’m past caring, I’ll shrug it aside and accept or refuse the invitation on its own merits, like a grown-up. The social conditioning has zero effect on people like us, we who have achieved adulthood the way you were always supposed to achieve it. We’re not going to pretend water is dry to get along, or that men can get pregnant.

And they DON’T. KNOW. WHAT. TO. DO. About that. Sheer panic.

Maybe this is why so many people in software are liberals: They’ve been conditioned, and the conditioning was manufactured out of necessity. Without it, you’ll be like me, forming whatever conclusions are logical and rational as you bounce from one crime-ridden, blight-invested, oh-so-progressive blue-state unicorn land, to another, working the computer software jobs and seeing with your own eyes how their policies consistently end in the same disasters, which aren’t present in the red states where they grow the food.

Where, if you go around thinking like a liberal, you’ll have your arm ripped out of its socket by a harvester or some such thing. And so people don’t.

After all I’ve seen, if someone wants to spend a lifetime they’ve only just started, writing computer software for a living, as a contractor or FTE, I would have to incorporate this into my advice if they come asking. You can get these jobs in red states, I’m told…for this reason or that reason, that has not been my chosen path. By default, you’ll be working in deep blue, one gig after another after another. And so before we get into data structures and algorithms, first get yourself accustomed to living in places governed by “leaders” who have neither the time or inclination to admit to mistakes, or to learn anything new. Get used to the signs of liberalism. Tents under bridges, needles and human feces on the ground, etc. Lots of tightly packed “income inequality,” together with loud opinionated people complaining about it. Get used to all that, first, then let’s talk about the bubble sort and the binary search trees. Also get used to “middle of the road” types telling you to pay no attention to politics or liberals…while the politics and liberals are literally in your face, all of the time, whenever you’re not in the office coding.

The blue-brains can’t answer simple questions about their own positions. “If recent policy changes are not responsible for high gas prices, then what is?” “If the unborn baby is not a baby, then what is it?” “How would this latest round of new gun laws have prevented that shooting?” They can’t answer these questions. They have no wish to do so. They just want to be popular…like in sixth grade.

Having never been offered even the potential reward, people like me have never cared. And so the two sides end up talking past each other. Others notice this, and pronounce the whole exchange to be futile. They’re right about the first half of that, wrong about the rest. Nestled inside the tire-spinning and other wasted energy in these dysfunctional exchanges, are secret answers to why the things that suck so much lately, suck so much. This is not insignificant. Real people are being hurt, by these policies, for real.

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Don’t Scold Me
Saturday, April 30th, 2022

There’s this mythology that persists, that anyone with a political opinion different from the default must “like/love to argue about politics.” It’s conspicuous because in these current times, the default opinion has a lot to do with starting up conflict where it didn’t exist before. So we seem to be systematically confusing people who just want to go about their lives free of unnecessary conflict, with pugnacious Twitter-denizens spoiling for a fight, and vice versa.

I see if you want to get a fight started where there wasn’t one before, but want to look like you’re just a harmless little mammal on the bottom of the food chain just seeking to co-exist with nature, you just portray yourself as either threatened, or feeling threatened. Oh no. I’m worried about hate crimes. You’re using the wrong pronouns on me. Climate change! Such-and-such a bumper sticker could be construed as a call to arms for people to attack me. It’s reached the point where we can’t get away from this kind of talk anymore, and the truth is that this kind of talk is just the sound bullies make when they want to act like non-bullies. For the record, throughout all of human history an important aspect of bullying has been to put up this false imagery that the bully is a non-bully, and the person getting bullied is “the real bully.”

Because of this, the people who can least afford to get immersed in and distracted by politics, end up being the ones who must.

Speaking just for myself, I don’t actually relish political arguments because they tend to lead to me getting scolded. The people who have yet to make a persuasive argument to me, seem to think when all else has failed, it’s time to do some scolding.

As a child of the 1970’s, not conspicuously one of the brighter males in the class, usually the last one to “get” whatever is the thing all the kids are supposed to get…throughout my lifetime I’ve been scolded a lot. It doesn’t quite enmesh the teeth in my cogs. It strips them. I have a tough time picking out the vowels and consonants with scolding. And it doesn’t inspire me to show much respect. Over the years I’ve learned to recognize it as the one tool left in the bag, of someone who didn’t start out with too many others. It’s a clarion call to me that someone is seeking to WinTheArgument at any cost, when they don’t deserve to win it at all.

When I see a mentally handicapped truant Swedish child scolding an international body of delegates and the delegates cheering for the scolding — at them — what I see is a room for mental health patients, filled to capacity plus one. Nobody of sound mind should cheer scolding at them. It tells me all the “civilized” nations of the world are maintaining a habit, without borders, of investing real authority and influence in mental midgets. I don’t know why all these supposedly advanced nations have all slipped off their rockers this way at the same time, and I don’t really care. It’s evidence that I can’t trust what authorities say, because the authorities by default are cuckoo. It really doesn’t help matters that the “facts” being dished out by the young Swedish mental patient are nonsense.

But seriously. If you have so much passion invested in what you’re saying and you don’t think I’m taking it seriously enough, don’t scold. That’s like finding yourself in a hole, and digging some more. That’s just how I work. But I doubt like the dickens I’m the only one. Since the above-mentioned 1970’s, females and effeminate types scolding males and masculine types, without anyone considering it with the gravity it deserves, has settled in as a sort of default configuration. It’s obvious we have a lot of people with loud voices and influence who can’t seem to get enough of it, nevermind whether they get to play the part of the person scolding or the person being scolded. It hasn’t resulted in any pattern of good decision being made. We’ve arrived at a point where it might be a good idea to take an extended break. Leave those little fists un-balled up and off your hips for a few years, ladies and Justin Trudeau, and throttle back on the whole “how dare you” thing. You don’t need to confront all of the time. It doesn’t look to others the way it looks to you.

I don’t think these things because I deserve scolding and haven’t gotten enough. I think these things because I’m normal, sane and of sound mind. I’m capable of dropping one opinion and picking up another if I can hear a rational argument as to why I should, but I don’t respond to scolding from intellectual indigents. That’s the way we all should be.

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Free Speech and Truth
Friday, April 15th, 2022

So, Elon has made his move on Twitter. And now we’re all talking about free speech, and those awful terrible billionaires doing…stuff.

This debate over “free speech” is about to drift over into “Yeah but what about truth?” The narrative is going to be that we can’t have speech that’s so free that people can sling about untrue things. So it’s like a hose, you see? Or a coffee filter. You can constrict it and be anti-free-speech, but if you open it up too much, a bunch of “disinformation” gets in there…so we have to find a happy medium.

Back up the truck. Before we even get there, let’s inspect this.

Anti-free-speech advocates deleted posts and restricted accounts of people who said Hunter Biden’s laptop was a real thing…and then it turned out to be real.

They deleted posts and restricted accounts of people who were calling bullshit on the “COVIDE came from bat meat at a wet market” thing…which turned out to be bullshit.

We aren’t arguing about whether to let Bill Clinton’s “truth detectors” restrict free speech. No no no. This doesn’t have anything to do with truth. We’re arguing about whether to let “fact checkers,” younger than the socks I’m wearing now, who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit ’em square in their hairless balls — take a SWAG about what’s true and, based on that, play whack-a-mole with the posts and accounts.

You’re better off asking a Magic-8 ball what’s true, than these clowns.

So let’s not even go down that road.

it isn’t free speech versus truth. It’s: Allow free speech so we can hear the story from all sides, and figure out for ourselves what’s true. Because Silicon Valley is not to be trusted. Even if they knew what they were doing they still wouldn’t be trustworthy. But they were in Kindergarten when the World Trade Center fell, and they don’t know what they’re doing.

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No Apology, No Note of Contrition or Regret…Nothing
Sunday, April 10th, 2022

So when all’s said & done, the prosecution couldn’t get a conviction in the Whitmer kidnapping case for lack of evidence. You might say they couldn’t convict anyone of kidnapping, or plotting to kidnap, because there was no kidnapping and there was no plot. This would mean a lot of people who were sure they were right, were actually wrong, and things we were all told had been done or plotted, were never done or plotted.

Is anyone anywhere going to reverse course, pull out of the cul de sac, or maybe just change bearing or velocity…a little tiny bit? No? Hmmm.

You’ll all still make fun of me for “believing in conspiracies”? Fresh off watching our government unsuccessfully attempt to railroad people — yet again?

It’s a lot of conspiracies. Let’s see, what have we got now…

1. Steele Dossier, hookers peeing on bed, all that stuff.
2. Coordinating the “mostly peaceful protests,” and reporting on them that way.
3. Covering up Hunter Biden’s laptop.
4. Circling the wagons around Hillary Clinton and her zillion plus deleted e-mails.
5. Keeping the China Bioweapon secret after it escaped the Chinese lab, the red-herring treatment with the “wet markets,” etc. Gain of Function research. Fifteen days to slow the spread. Playing down natural immunity, playing down Ivermectin, calling it horse dewormer, playing down Hydroxychloroquine, all the China Bioweapon lies.
6. The masks were “the MAGA hat of the left.” Yes that was a conspiracy. Let’s stop pretending. Masks everywhere you look, in the middle of an election year, that was an in-kind contribution.
7. January 6. A setup.
8. Now we have kidnapping Gov. Whitmer. A setup.
9. Counting votes in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada.
10. Calling Kyle Rittenhouse a “white supremacist,” and setting up Nick Sandmann.

Now look. You can tell me something is a certain way, for the very first time, and then immediately ridicule me for not believing it, or for questioning it, or for doubting it…or for merely hesitating to believe it. Or for listening to other people who have a different take on it. You can ridicule me for those things if you want…

But, you’re essentially ridiculing me for doing what any logical, sensible person is going to be doing at this point. When you do that you don’t look smart, or sophisticated.

You look like someone doing P.R. for unscrupulous types, for free, the same P.R. work someone else is doing for lots of money. And no, you’re not fooling anyone into thinking you’re sure of what you’re saying just because you act like it. You look like what you are, which is a bullshitter. We’ve been bullshitted so much. Everyone should be questioning pretty much everything.

In my previous post (and on earlier occasions) I explored these two different ideas about how government should operate, and what exactly it is it’s trying to do. Here we are dealing with something much more fundamental. If you could layer your ideas like the modules in an extremely well-designed and mature software product, at the bottom of it all that has to serve as a foundation, the “kernel” if you will, supporting the primitive operations of everything else, you would find what we could call a “concept of truth.” What exactly do you mean when you say something is true?

Remember what Ronald Reagan said: “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” He was on to something. Conservatives and liberals don’t agree about what’s true, because they don’t agree about what truth is. This is what we explore when we ruminate about such simple things as “two and two make four.” A conservative says that’s “true” in the sense that all correct math equations are true; in the field of math, generally, there is one and only one correct answer. Three is not the correct sum, and neither is five.

To a liberal, it is “true” that Hunter Biden’s laptop is really just Russian disinformation, or that Trump schemed with Vladimir Putin to ratchet up gas prices after he left office. Liberals live in a universe in which everything is an attempt, because everything is a revolution. Someone, somewhere has power and doesn’t deserve to have it, and “we” are going to take it from them. This is why they are most destructive, peculiar and clownish when they already run everything. In California post-Wilson, and in the U.S. after the beer summit (except for you-know-who being President), in Chicago, DC, New York City, Atlanta, DFW they’re like the dog that caught the car. This is where they’re conducting their glorious revolution against a boogeyman that doesn’t really exist.

So they’re always trying to get the ball rolling. Always trying to generate momentum…behind…something.

It’s “true” that the planet is going to die in twelve years if we don’t do something — means — Look, what we’re trying to do is generate some momentum behind the idea that, if we don’t do something, the planet will die in twelve years. That’s not what conservatives hear when they’re told “We only have twelve years to save the planet.” They take that literally. And twelve years afterward, when we’re all still here, someone, somewhere, should be atoning. Someone should, at the very least, be admitting they thought they were right about something, when they weren’t, if for no other reason than to restore confidence in the notion that they’re at least trying to make a good call, or to learn as they go.

But that’s not going to happen because that’s not how liberals think. Passing on the word that Sarah Palin is borderline-retarded, or someone tried to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, or the United States has enough nuclear weaponry to blow up the world seven thousand times, is the liberal equivalent to tossing a ten-spot into the church collection plate. Remember, everything is an effort, everything is a revolution. What passes for their connection to “truth,” is nothing more than an effort. In addition to adding their contribution to the effort, they’re making a spectacle out of themselves as they do so, preening to their fellow liberals, hoping to elevate their own social status. They couldn’t possibly care less if there was a plot to kidnap Whitmer.

So there’s no need to atone for it later when it turns out to be wrong. In the liberal universe, it wasn’t wrong. Rather, it was spent, like the money in the collection plate, now it’s on to the next thing.

When I say — Never let liberals decide for the rest of us what’s true, right, equal or unequal — this is what I mean.

They actually know nothing. They measure nothing. There is no “truth” in their world as the rest of us know it. There is only the glorious revolution that’s always just around the corner. There is only the effort to generate momentum behind…whatever.

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I Will Never Forget
Sunday, April 10th, 2022

I won’t forget the China Bioweapon, ever, in part because now we know China develops bioweapons. The question remains whether they release them on purpose or by accident, but it’s settled that they develop bioweapons and they lie about them.

Also, I’m not inclined to forget about the conflict I saw paraded in front of me for two solid years. We don’t all agree about how a government works or how it’s supposed to operate. I think we elect leaders who we count on to make good decisions, and when they don’t, they’re accountable for the results. I think they’re like captains obliged to go down with the ship. I think, if there are bad consequences from wrong decisions, and these consequences loom larger for the governed than for those doing the governing, something is broken and it was already broken before the decisions turned out to be bad ones.

There is this other mindset, clung to by all sorts of people walking around and living their lives…I have no idea how they do, how they get dressed in the morning. They think the position of governing people is kind of like owner equity. If you’re a “leader” you “own” everything involved in your decisions. If you make a bad decision, it’s like a child breaking a toy he owns, it isn’t anybody else’s business. Momma go buy me a new one. According to this, leaders don’t really make “wrong” decisions because there’s no way for them to make mistakes. If they break something, it’s like the child breaking the toy. They get to do that. If they won an election, or were appointed by someone who was, and the term isn’t up yet then it all belongs to them. Everything they do is their right.

Slaughterhouse It’s the difference between trustees laboring under the burden of making weighty decisions for others, who will hold them to account; versus, a farmer attending to a flock of dumb beasts. Disposable beasts. Not like cows that cost a certain number of dollars per head. More like fleas in a flea circus.

“The science changed!” That’s just a fancy way of saying your talking points changed. And you still don’t want to be accountable. Science never changed.

It’s the difference between remembering the constituents are real people with hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, living real lives…and, forgetting all about that.

The era of living under the dreaded China Bioweapon may have passed, but this difference in visions about what government is, is still with us. A yawning gap.

Many among my fellow citizens have no desire for citizenship. It isn’t true of all of them, but it’s true of far too many. They don’t want to be citizens at all.

And my “leaders” told lie after lie after lie, and then orchestrated witch hunts against the citizens who had the audacity to notice the lies. They produced bogus “science” strongly suggesting, and occasionally coming out and saying, that if you don’t wear a mask everywhere you go, you must not care about people and you’re trying to kill Grandma. That if you don’t get vaccinated, you’ll spread the pathogen quicker, or more surely, or more times, or something. They lied to get more people to do what they wanted them to do, and half my fellow constituents thought this was wonderful to lie this way. Clapped for it and demanded more, like dumb circus seals.

I will never, ever forget. Not if I live to be five hundred.

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Liberals Have Stopped Discussing
Sunday, April 3rd, 2022

Sometime in the last fifty years, and I get the impression this has been changing faster lately — liberals stopped arguing. It used to be they’d rely on appeal to authority, which, say what you want about it, at least it is some sort of an appeal. I think that’s the last appeal to disappear. We saw it throughout the China Bioweapon crisis…and maybe that’s the pivot point. “Who are you to question Dr. Fauci” lost its value as a “This ought to convince you” sort of argument, and subtly shifted its weight toward something like “This magical incantation ought to drown out the sound of your voice.”

In these post-Bioweapon times, they don’t seek to persuade at all. They just sort of repeat their talking points half heartedly. The most charitable way to describe what they’re giving you, is as a rationalization for them thinking what they’re thinking. They aren’t telling me, for example, why we should defund the police. They’re telling me why other people think we should defund the police. This is a significant shift, when the same shift applies to all of their positions about everything.

Maybe it’s the “High gas prices are not Biden’s fault” thing that slipped their center of gravity over the brink. After all, you can’t prove that, even if you believe it to be true. So it’s really just nonsense. It sounds better than “I can’t hear you la la la” but that’s what they’re saying. They’re not indemnifying Biden. They’re just talking over you when you peg Biden as the problem…accurately.

Half a century ago, when they said “We need lower taxes on people who make less money because they need a greater percentage of their income to fulfill the basics,” they believed it…and, they were persuasive. It may or may not have persuaded you. Perhaps it should have. Perhaps it should not have. But the argument, at least, made sense on some level. It was based on fact and/or easily observed situations and it relied on provable basics of economics and household management. It relied on logic, lesser things being treated as lesser things, and greater things being treated as greater things. It play-acted, with some degree of legitimacy, at being grounded in compassion.

If any of their arguments did any of those things today, it would be truly remarkable. What changed?

Here’s a theory: This “argumentum ad poopheadidum” thing, for lack of a better term — in which they call you a terrible person for believing the wrong things, or for not accepting their version, has become a sort of “golden hammer.” They ply you with their version of what you should be thinking, and you buy it or you don’t. If you don’t buy it, they call you a dirty rotten jerk or whatever, show off for each other, and walk away, cowardly. If it were more dignified, it would be canine-like behavior: Bark at the thing, pee on it, walk away.

It’s a change that doesn’t help them in the long run.

It’s really not too good for the rest of us, either. People may not realize it, but there’s a point to arguing about politics. If you’re really right, you should be able to defend your position from someone who is out to attack it — so long as they attack it honestly and in good faith.

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When Liberals Don’t Know
Thursday, March 24th, 2022

Obama said the question of when life begins, is above His pay grade.

Judge Jackson said she can’t define the word “woman” because she’s “not a biologist.”

Weird that liberals know so much that the rest of us don’t know, until a question emerges with some clear practical ramifications to it. Then suddenly, they can’t answer the basics.

When liberals refuse to define things or profess to be unable to define things, we all need to remember it’s not because they can see “nuances” or “shades of gray” that have eluded the rest of us. That’s the story they’d like to sell. But that’s not what’s happening. Not even close.

The acid test is: If being unable to define things keeps them from forming an opinion, will they still be unable to define it? In all test scenarios, the answer is no. They’ll go ahead and define the thing so they can form the opinion. Usually, to get pissed off and bent out of shape over something.

It’s an issue of maturity. The desire to win all the arguments comes way before the ability to do so.

This is why a lot of liberals cut discussion short by cracking some sort of lame-ass joke. It’s all about arousing that feeling of winning the argument, with or without actually saying something enlightening or persuasive.

Liberals can define things just as well as anybody else. They can answer these basic questions just fine. What they’re refusing to do is commit, because that would require some intellectual honesty.

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Liberalism is a Cult
Monday, March 21st, 2022

I can find conservatives willing to concede the United States should not have invaded Iraq, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede Saddam Hussein ever did anything threatening.

I can find conservatives willing to concede that the global climate changes from time to time, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede Al Gore’s house consumes a lot more energy than necessary, or that this might constitute a messaging problem.

I can find conservatives willing to concede Truman should have fired MacArthur, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede communists successfully infiltrated the government under Truman.

I can find conservatives willing to concede the Capitol Penetration on January 6, 2021 was a WrongBad thing, but I can’t find any liberals willing to say the same thing abut the George Floyd race-riots all throughout the previous summer.

I can find lots of conservatives willing to concede they’d been toyed with, with the prospects of Hillary Clinton, James Comey et al going to jail, but I can’t find any liberals willing to let go of the fantasy of “Walls are closing in on Donald J. Trump!!”

I can find conservatives willing to concede Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and not Kenya, but I can’t find any liberals willing to concede the “Trump hired hookers to pee on a bed” story had ever been debunked.

I can find conservatives ready to concede businesses don’t always do the right thing, but I can’t find any liberals ready to concede government agencies don’t always do the right thing…unless those agencies assist the military, or are operating under a Republican president.

I can find a lot of Republicans who thought Trump should have been impeached. Of course I can; they voted that way. I can’t find any liberals or democrats who will concede the stuff and nonsense about “Trump is a Russian asset” was exactly that and nothing more, just stuff and nonsense. It’s been debunked and they won’t go against it, won’t even mention it anymore except to repeat it a few more times.

Conservatives, all over the place, confess that Donald Trump might not be a good role model for boys. It isn’t even a concession. A lot of them are eager to agree to this, in fact will advance it, waiting for others to agree. I can’t find any liberals wiling to concede HIllary Clinton or Kamala Harris make poor role models for girls.

Being a liberal, I’ve concluded, must have a lot to do with never conceding anything, anywhere, at any time. Never admit to having been wrong. Never make a single U-turn. That’s for lesser people.

It isn’t that liberals have a frayed or worn-down tethering to truth, or that they have their own truth, the problem is that they don’t have any. Liberalism is its own “truth.”

A financial analyst or economist who is a liberal, is a liberal first.

A lawyer who is a liberal, is a liberal first.

A scientist who is a liberal, is a liberal first.

It’s a cult.

So yes…when you say 97 out of a 100 scientists agree to X, I want to know how many of them are liberals. I know too much not to ask, and I know too much to remain impressed if you can’t prove to me all the liberals were scrubbed.

I know that when the truth stares a liberal right in the face, and it goes against doctrinaire liberalism, the liberalism will go against what’s true, forsaking it for the doctrinaire liberalism. I mean, it’s not like I have to work at remembering this. We all get a front-row seat so we can watch it, multiple times per week, 52 weeks a year, for years and years at a time.

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Where Are the Regretful Voters?
Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

It’s so strange. I have heard from people who voted for Reagan, and were sorry for having done so. Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump. Losers, too, have repentant voters who would like to have done it differently. Mondale, Dukakis, Perot, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney and yes, even her, the Smartest Woman on the Planet Hillary Clinton. They all had voters who wished they could take back their vote and do it differently.

Even JFK, back in the day. Here and there, now and then, you could read about them. Should-a voted for Nixon, gosh darn it.

But, the 81 million have no regrets.

The guy who hid in his basement…can’t put together two words…is not popular…time comes for him to brag, he’s got nothing…far-and-away record number of votes received, ever, since the nation’s founding, and no one regrets anything?

Oh okay. So they wanted World War III and gas at $7 a gallon?

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Things Happen Because of Other Things
Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

People who follow politics only casually and haven’t seen a reason to commit to either side, get to be loud in our country. It’s the price we pay for our affluence; our populace, or certain portions of it, get to enjoy bizarre, unfitting luxuries and that is one of them. Some of these neutrals figure they’re neutral because they know something the idealogs don’t know, although they typically can’t say what that is. But while they’re running around being loud, one of the ideas they tend to purvey is that the committed conservatives and committed liberals argue more-or-less the same way, just in different directions. And this is attractive to people who haven’t been paying attention at all.

It’s a case of the blind leading the blind.

It’s quite wrong. Or at least, if one dedicates oneself to paying attention to figure out what’s really happening, rather than just to pick up casual, surface-level observations to drop into the next coffee table conversation with friends, co-workers or relatives, this is the first domino to fall.

Liberals, I notice, generally don’t believe in cause and effect. They certainly act like they do, but they don’t. Conservatives say “Increasing the minimum wage costs jobs” and liberals say “No, it actually creates jobs” — seems like here we have an earnest point of discussion. But…we don’t. Conservatives can offer a cogent rationale: Raising the price of any product or service, will generally reduce demand. This is not only strong reasoning, it is the basis of economic theory. Supply, demand and price are interrelated, and this is how markets work. The liberal rebuttal seems to consist of little more than “Paul Krugman says, and who are you to question him,” infused with some “If you get to do that, our side gets to do this” verbal nerd-slap-fighting.

I’m noticing this lately because conservatives have noticed Putin had left things alone while Trump was in charge, a notion that the dedicated liberal overlooks, or rejects, just because it doesn’t gel well with his feelings. As I wrote earlier, we as a country would do well to seriously discuss this idea that bad guys are intimidated into inaction when our leadership is, shall we say, hawkish. Such a discussion might be short, but we wouldn’t know for sure because our liberals don’t want us discussing it. But history seems to support the idea. And again, there is a cogent rationale: Bad guys who run around doing bad things, make decisions about whether or not to do them before they act, and they decide these things in their own self-interest.

Liberals say “inequality” — whether they’re talking about wealth, or income, they typically don’t say — leads to social instability and upheaval. How this works, I don’t know, and you can’t tell me because you don’t know either. They won’t say that part either. It seems to have something to do with the emotions of the people who are causing the social instability and upheaval. Left to guess, I would have to surmise this is a threat that if we don’t redistribute income so that unproductive people get some of it, the unproductive people will march through the streets BLM-protest-style, smashing things. On the other hand, that’s not fair because I’m going beyond what the liberals are actually saying. On the other other hand, that’s the best I can do because they’re not being clear about it.

They establish some link between capitalism and “climate change” that is trashing the planet, but it looks like communism is harder on the planet than capitalism ever has been.

They link some good things to their purported causes, too, like electing Barack Obama President led to the termination of Osama bin Laden. Gotta give ’em that one. Except for one thing: How? What specifically did Obama do to make this happen?

Conservatives say if we let entrepreneurs and other business types keep more of their profits, we’ll see economic benefits for all. Liberals smear that as “Trickle-Down,” but history supports it, and so does common sense: You want more of something to happen, you make it easier and more rewarding for the people who are doing it, you get more of it. Liberals say if we have more infrastructure and education, we’ll reap the same benefits. But when we don’t, they move the goalposts and begin indulging in bizarre arguments that we never should have wanted what we thought we wanted in the first place. Education, so goes the goalpost-move argument, should not be all about making more money, it should be more about making the student into a well rounded individual. On this issue, we could see some agreement between conservatives and liberals, if the liberals would just hold still: Educate the kids, so they grow up with practical skills, learn to provide for themselves, and there’s a benefit for all while we make some serious inroads on that inequality problem. Seems doable. But the liberals tailor their arguments for people who can’t pay attention or remember anything.

It seems a lot of the time like liberals appreciate inequality just fine. Replacing the ABC’s and three R‘s with gender studies, would be a great way to perpetuate inequality.

It is a solid, cogent argument to speculate that Putin invaded Crimea when Obama was President, because Obama was President, and he invaded Ukraine when Biden was President because Biden was President. When Trump was President Putin invaded nothing, because Trump was President.

“COVID happened under Trump’s watch,” on the other hand, while true, is not solid or cogent. Again, it’s just “I get to do this if you get to do that” verbal nerd-slap-fighting. The question remains outstanding: Why? What is it about Trump being President that caused the pathogen to escape the Chinese lab? Or motivated the Chinese to release it on purpose? The most obvious answer would be “They wanted Trump to lose the election so the whole thing was a setup.” We don’t have supporting evidence for all that just yet, but if it emerges, it would hardly be a reflection on Trump himself. Rather, it would indicate that someone had something to hide, and were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it hidden, which would suggest that replacing our President was the wrong thing for us to do.

What we have here is truly a remarkable thing: We have an ideology dedicated to the proposition that events are spontaneous, that nothing happens because of anything else. An ideology that is unaware of the simple concept of cause-and-effect. And that’s something that, on an individual level, its adherents must realize is a real thing. I mean, to go about their day-to-day lives, they must get this, right? What do liberals do every day? Maybe…go to Starbucks to get a seven-dollar daily drink before bitching about how hard it is to make ends meet? So they must know, to get the drink, you have to reload the card…? My point is, the politics apparently are making them stupid. They understand, when they just do their daily-routine things, the events cause other events to happen, and then when they immerse themselves in politics and start spamming conservative blogs with nonsense, suddenly they don’t understand this anymore.

They think “the January 6th insurrection” was such an awful, terrible thing. Conservatives come back and say “Well yeah, BLM had been rampaging through our cities all the previous summer, law enforcement did little to nothing about it, and that sent the message that political violence was okay.” Pretty simple summation, and you get here before you’re obliged to condemn this act or uphold that act. It’s an old, respected custom, that if we don’t prosecute crimes, they become okay and we shouldn’t be surprised when the crimes happen with greater frequency and with more damage done. But somehow, when you get to that point in the discussion, liberals activate their amnesia-shield of “I don’t comprehend cause and effect because it’s too complicated,” and start topic-drifting, goalpost-moving, or filling the sound space with nonsense and noise in some other way.

The longer I watch them, the harder it is for me to chalk it up to true amnesia, lack of focus, or any other kind of incompetence.

To harp on the point that COVID happened under Trump, and then waste time on bogus “fact checks” that say high gas prices aren’t Biden’s fault, is worse than hypocritical. It’s flagrantly dishonest. It says something about our discourse, and the environment in which it takes place, that liberals not only engage in the duplicity on a routine basis, but feel comfortable doing it.

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Shiny and Sweet Under the Hood
Monday, March 7th, 2022

Cheeky hot-pants girl from Eat My Dust says…

You know the thing I’ve always hated about cars, is they’re so gorgeous on the outside but so ugly and dirty under the hood, ya know?

It’s supposed to be a stupid one-liner that helps build on the character’s superficiality…and it is.

But in light of current events, it’s quite profound. Consider what would happen if Darlene got her wish. Start with draining the five quarts of motor oil and replacing it with potpourri, after scrubbing every last remnant of that awful icky slippery black stuff from every machine part. Turtle-wax the engine right down to the core of the crankshaft.

What you are then left with, is a beautiful thing indeed — inside and out — but it will also be immobile. The engine won’t run. If it runs, it will overheat. If it doesn’t overheat, the valves won’t work right and if they do work right, the brakes will fry. The car will self-immolate because you made it into a grease-free, bright, shiny, waxed, non-functional, self-destructive thing. The crankcase smells like cinnamon, the gas tank smells like lemon, all the guts are smooth, colorful and appealing to your delicate sensibilities, And the damn thing is inoperable, melting into a puddle when anyone turns the key.

That’s why there’s a war on now. You assholes got rid of Trump because he was coarse, salty, abrasive and he didn’t tickle your fancy.

The analogy breaks down a bit because without some actual gasoline somewhere, the motor doesn’t run long enough to fry itself. And a “Biden-mobile” doesn’t smell that sweet. Rumors of Grandpa Joe being more congenial and friendly, showing the proper behavior in the selected setting, discretion superior to his predecessor, etc….they’re greatly exaggerated. Not that any of this matters though. A mistake is a mistake.

By all means, extend your compassion. Hopes and prayers. Donate money and blood for the humanitarian crisis coming. But we’re living in your world. You wanted things your way and you got ’em. Never forget that, because I won’t. Not letting you off the hook.

The dumb throwaway line from the 45-year-old movie is there to show that some people, even if you could get them close to the innards of a machine, shouldn’t be allowed there. Well, in 2020 we allowed them there. Yes it’s that simple.

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Intimidated Into Inaction
Monday, February 28th, 2022

Well, since I wrote the previous about the ninnies among us refusing to think about things because it’s just too scary, it happened. Putin invaded the Ukraine. China may be involved, which inspires all sorts of dark thoughts about where this might be going.

Arguing on the Internet doesn’t help anything, people keep telling me. Then they go and argue about it on the Internet…

Well, I dunno. If we’ve just toppled out of the frying pan into the fire, we have done so because of the way people are. Blame this guy, or that guy, we’re supposed to all be the same, right? Or at least related. And the Internet, or before the Internet I guess it was just the arguing — exposes the human frailties that lead to situations like this. The “Too Frightening To Contemplate” fallacy mentioned in the previous post is one of these frailties. And, for those who were blindsided by this, it has led to the blindsiding. Oh no, World War III can’t start in my lifetime, that’s too frightening to contemplate. Well oops, what’s this?

Trump kept it from happening. At least, while he was in, it didn’t happen. Coincidence? A lot of people seem to think so, I notice…and this is based on…squat. Here’s another frailty. We see it in the endless debates about gun control, and criminal incarceration. I remember the debates about it during Reagan’s time in office, and immediately thereafter. Here and there, now and then, we discuss it but we don’t even bother with giving it a name. For lack of a better term, we could call it “malevolent intent properly intimidated into inaction” or some such thing. It applies to domestic issues as well as foreign policy: The house with a sign that says “We believe in gun control” gets burglarized before the one that says “Prayer is a good way to talk to Jesus, trespassing here will get you a meeting with Him.”

Liberals, and sweater-wearing, pearl-clutching Trump-phobes, think of bad guys and their bad deeds like random weather events, such as hurricanes. It’s odd. People who are sure the “economic sanctions” will somehow push today’s Bad Guy, Vladimir Putin, into the correct behavior, are all done with anticipating the Bad Guy’s moves once they’re done with that. They don’t really want to do this. Making a little bit of noise is fine, but they don’t want to play Chess. And so they don’t favor the idea that Bad Guys can be punished or rewarded. Seems they’re figuring, if they take the time to figure out what the Bad Guy wants, they’re making themselves as bad as him and that’s just wrong. So they don’t believe in the concept.

But history does.

Skip Trump This is important stuff because it all matters when it’s time to go voting. If Placeholder Joe really did net his 81 million votes, or even if he didn’t but came close, we need to discuss this a whole lot more. Because that would mean, once it became apparent that Donald Trump is scary to bad people, more Americans voted against him over that than for him. They didn’t put America first, and now we have a mess. We’ve been here before. A few times.

The ninnies will never acknowledge this, of course. It would make them culpable. Well, apart from finger pointing, we have reasons for wanting to explore this. America’s leadership, in theory at least, is something under our control. Russia’s leadership is not.

Trump at one point called Putin’s move savvy and genius, which set off the ninnies into an apoplectic fit. I find this telling. Apparently they live in a world in which you’re not supposed to appreciate an enemy’s positive attributes, even if doing so is the only way you can avoid underestimating your antagonist at some critical moment in forming your strategy. You’re supposed to hate, hate, hate, all the time, and when it’s time to assess your enemy’s battle acumen or some other type of wisdom, you should be calling him a dummy or poo poo head or something.

Well wait, aren’t I being what I call others? Shouldn’t I be presuming a greater sense of realism and practicality on the part of those who disagree with me politically?

Perhaps. But, I’ve already tried that. And I found out the hard way that these are people who will just let Putin do — whatever. They’ll pull him out of a utility closet as a prop to be used against Republicans at campaign time, they’ll make up a bunch of fiction about Trump being in cahoots or whatever…whenever Putin’s not useful for them, they’ll gloss over him again, making snarky one-liners about 1980’s history. And then Putin will actually do something and it’s surprise, surprise, surprise.

So I’ve tried respecting them; I’m ready for some disrespect now. I see them as political creatures who will anticipate things for the sake of political victory, and if there’s no prospect of political victory, anticipate nothing.

One can hardly blame them. If we acknowledge the simple truism that America’s enemies are acting in their own interests, and can therefore be motivated, and controlled on some level provided we think as pragmatically as they do…then, after evaluating what is under our control and what isn’t, we’d have no choice but to support doctrines of Peace through Strength. And then the ninnies who are professionals at the game of being a ninny, would be out of a job. Good for the country, bad for them.

Or maybe I’m wrong. But the only way to find out for sure would be to start discussing this: Can bad guys be intimidated into inaction? Or are they purely random events, like hurricanes? Would the ensuing discussion yield good points worth thinking about, on both sides? Only one way to find out that one. We should explore it. Shift the focus away from Tiger King and The COVID for just a little while.

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Too Frightening to Contemplate
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022

I have seen lots of lists of “logical fallacies,” both formal and informal. But I have not seen an entry for what I would call, for lack of a better name, a fallacy of “the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.” There should be one. Someone should write one if no one has written one already.

The China Bioweapon must not be a bioweapon…must not have been a lab leak…must have escaped from a “wet market” or a Canadian postage stamp. Lots of people think that even though there’s no hard evidence to substantiate it. Because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

All these people bossing us around telling us to wear masks and take vaccines and stay home etc….they must have our best interests and our collective health at heart. They must. Not because we have reason to think they do, but because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

And they must have a plan. They must be competent. Because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate. I noticed this over the weekend while Mrs. Freeberg and I were out of town, with all these recaps of the Ukraine situation. Each and every expert interviewed, and there were plenty, talked up a storm about this might happen, that might happen, Putin may be doing this, or that, or thinking this or that…everything is up in the air. Except for one thing. Those who are managing the crisis, are doing whatever it is that should be done, and they’re not doing anything that shouldn’t be done. That one you could take to the bank…because the alternative was far too frightening to contemplate. Anybody with a brain in their heads they were interested in using, had to notice these absolutely-sure conclusions were entirely dependent on observations that loaded up chock full of questions and doubts, which should have been a problem. It’s not a problem for the ABC News audience though.

The people who are vaccine hesitant must be stupid, crazy, Cuckoo for cocoa puffs, believing in “conspiracy theories,” incapable of carrying coherent thoughts around in their heads…because if they have actually been paying attention and forming logical conclusions off things they know that others don’t know, well, that’s far too frightening to contemplate.

This isn’t just a persuasive logical fallacy. it is a deeply polarizing one. I think if you lined up everybody and sorted them according to how ready they are to dismiss credible possibilities, just because the ramifications are too frightening and for no other reason, you’d find the 0% and 100% ends of that spectrum densely populated, and the halfway point very sparse. In other words, people, generally, do it or they don’t do it. People do, or else they don’t, say “I’m ready to eliminate that as a possibility, not because the evidence compels me to eliminate it, but because my fears compel me.”

We should define this fallacy and learn to spot it.

It’s really everywhere.

Especially lately with this debacle with the China bioweapon.

Yeah, it’s probably a bioweapon…I know, I know…that’s too frightening to contemplate. So it must not be so.

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Leadership
Sunday, February 13th, 2022

I’ve lately been thinking about leadership. That President’s Day is approaching, may at first blush look like the cause, but if you have been reading about what’s going on in the world you understand that that’s not it, P-Day is just a coincidence. A trolley has come off the tacks somewhere, and it’s costing us big-time. Just a casual glance at our “leaders” today confirms this, and it’s not a United States thing. It’s a First World thing. Somewhere, somehow, a pricey sweet vintage of Riesling has turned to vinegar. Our history is swollen thick with legends of leaders, born with their gifts and then chosen by destiny, who pulled victory from the jaws of defeat. It happened both within and outside of the military. They showed by their various words and deeds that they weren’t replaceable. They rode their horses into musket fire and cannon fire without flinching. Their opinions were not all popular; sometimes they swam against the tide. They refused to segregate their troops by skin color or to disregard the advice of females, during times when it would have been accepted and popular to do such things. They had courage and they had principles. So we know what good leaders are, and we have had some.

Nowadays they’re all buffoons. It’s more than a pattern. It’s setting in as an ironclad rule. The most lightweight stuff is floating to the top. Listing examples would be futile, and far more time consuming than listing exceptions. Somewhere we’ve lost our way.

I’m talking about what, exactly? We could start with the resume, distinguishing past employment that involves actually building something that works, from “make work” jobs, “no show” jobs, “being in the right place at the right time.” Making decisions that change the course of cause-and-effect. Getting your hands dirty. This is enough to substantiate, although not necessarily prove, that I’m calling out something tangible here, that it isn’t all in my head. We’re looking for something and not finding it. We’re finding lots of things that try hard to look like it, but the goods aren’t making it to our doorstep, as if we’re bringing empty grocery bags home from the market.

G-7 I think it started when people began to associate leadership with certain mannerisms. Public school “education” got us started on this. In the 1970’s it became fashionable to “let the kids choose their own leaders,” and the kids would respond by anticipating which ones among them would be chosen by everybody else. And then this Captain of the Football Team, Class ASB President, would saunter up to the head of the class in his name-brand clothes and speak from behind the podium with great bumptiousness and confidence…desperately pretending to know what he was doing. Which would have been an act he had been performing from an early age. It was all about the swagger. Inspiring people to say “There’s just something about him I can’t explain it!”

But, nothing that came out of his mouth changed the course of anything. It was all a bunch of bromides.

Okay so that’s one thing; a real leader says things that are merely manifestations of the weighty thoughts he’s been having, a fake leader’s “weighty thoughts” consist mostly-to-entirely of how to word his speech to make himself look good. How does one distinguish? We must be looking for something apart from the default, something people are not born doing. This much we know, because we stopped finding it when we merely stopped looking for it. We didn’t engage in a drive to forcefully extirpate it. Except maybe for manhood, I suppose. Our current social climate frowns on carelessly intertwining rugged manly mannerisms with any notion of “leadership,” arguing this would potentially deny us the benefits of good leaders who are female. I think that’s correct. But, here there is a clue: If it’s something that’s been happening ever since my childhood, I remember certain things about my childhood. On television, good leaders were still manly. At school, where we selected our leaders from among ourselves, or where our teachers took it upon themselves to show what leadership should look like, they were all female or effeminate males. Looking back, it’s easy to see what was happening: Progressives were retooling our cultural framework, as they are wont to do, as they can’t stop doing.

The truth is, though, that the testosterone eruption possesses neither a superset nor subset relation to genuine leadership. But it isn’t mutually exclusive either. The progressives, once again, steered us wrong.

A real leader is engaged in cause-and-effect, and autonomously invokes if-then thinking. “If we don’t guarantee the right to vote to persons of all races, there won’t be much point to the prior guarantees we have made about banning slavery and equal representation under the law.” “If we don’t seize such-and-such a hill, or beachhead, the enemy can launch attacks and counterattacks on us without warning.” Fake leaders have thoughts about not having thoughts: “Who am I, to say marriage is between one man and one woman?” “How do we have any more right to be out here, exploring, than this Crystalline Entity that’s floating around killing people?”

Perhaps if we could thaw out someone who got frozen a century or two ago, this change in prevailing zeitgeist would become more apparent. “It’s a good thing he’s in charge, otherwise something worse would have happened…” has fallen off the table. We have a President of the United States who has done nothing good — and yet, he’s the right guy for the times. He speaks with great force, and creepy whispers, and if he knew where he was he’d be like a Terminator robot — can’t be reasoned with, won’t show pity, remorse or fear. That’s today’s “leader” for you, there’s no point discussing anything with him. There’s an impulse to just knuckle under and do what he says, like in times of old. But back then you did what the leader said because that was your best hope of coming through the battle in one piece. Nowadays, it’s more like a depressed sort of resignation. “Oh well, one year down, three to go.” And this is what we have accepted as leadership.

It isn’t just Placeholder Joe. You heard his partner in crime: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.” There it is again, the grand flourish before the nonsense, the swaggering confidence, the “pretend to have a thought in my head when I really don’t have one.” We have accepted this as a sort of new-normal in leadership. If we want to do what these people say, it’s no longer because that’s our best shot at coming out of something alive. It’s more like it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to argue with them. How did we get here?

I think we got here when we decided leadership had something to do with personality, and if someone was fit to lead us, they should be fun to watch. Maybe that was it. I’ve heard a lot of people say a lot of things about George Washington, but I’ve never heard of a contemporary say he was fun to watch. Super duper tall, commanding presence, persevered in the face of near-certain defeat, made good decisions, etc., yeah. But not fun to watch.

I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the cosmetics, though. Our obsession with appearances has refocused our attention onto characteristics that aren’t just irrelevant to the search for real leadership, but deleterious to our objective of finding some of it. This part is particularly hard to define. Real leaders move a certain way. It isn’t a swagger. It’s an ease with physical labor that reflects past activities and attempts. President Obama digging a ditch with His fanny sticking way out, was a good pictorial representation of it not being there. I recall participating in a lengthy online inspection into our male movie stars, wondering what had happened over there. How come thirty year old men today don’t speak, move and act like Sean Connery back when he was thirty? What’s different? Someone came up with the bit of trivia that young Connery, the man of a zillion jobs including pugilist and milkman, had actually been routinely punched in the face and maybe we’re seeing some of that. Yes; that could be it.

The change reeks of a bad trade, a “birthright for pottage” exchange, as if we’ve given up something irreplaceable, imbued with a value that escaped our understanding when we traded it away, for sake of something left on the table, that we didn’t even get. Placeholder Joe and Kneepads Kamala make dreadful decisions, and they’re not even fun to watch. I look at a picture of the G-7, and I feel like a huge reservoir of oxygen has been sucked directly out of my bloodstream, or I’ve lost a week or two out of my life just by laying my eyes on the spectacle.

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Don’t Look Up
Saturday, January 29th, 2022

Lefty loosey streaming service Netflix comes up with a what-if movie about the world ending, conceived, written, produced and broadcast to make liberals feel good about themselves, giving it a title that ends in a “phrasal verb” dangling preposition.

Professional critics, and members of the audience, give feedback on what they thought of it.

Smug lefty actor Ron Perlman offers his thoughts about the critics.

“Fuck you and your self-importance and this self-perpetuating need to say everything bad about something just so that you can get some attention for something that you had no idea about creating,” said the actor. “It’s corrupt. And it’s sick. And it’s twisted.”

He said that he “understands that it’s part of how the internet has almost killed journalism. And now journalism is trying to do everything they can to co-opt and maintain their importance.”

Later in the interview, Perlman delivered his opinion on Fox News hosts.

“I really don’t give a fuck [about them]. I’ve given up on those people,” he told The Independent. “They’re all vaccinated and telling you not to be. They know everything they say is a lie but they’re doing it anyway. They’re all fucking pieces of shit that can go fuck themselves.”

On the subject of Trump, the left-wing actor once again expressed his unconditional loathing of the 45th president.

“The heartbreaking thing is 74 million people voted for a man who has been impeached twice, groped 26 women, inflated his personal wealth and then deflated it when he needed to. I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who have exploited others’ vulnerability,” he said.

For the record, Trump was impeached twice because he was uncovering crimes, no one else elevated to that high office before or since had even been making the effort, and Washington is a swamp. That’s just my opinion, shared by others, but the evidence supports it strongly. Much more strongly than anything about the world ending due to a climate crisis anytime soon.

I really don’t see what his problem is. Somewhere-in-fifties from critics, somewhere-in-seventies from the audience. Four more percentage points and the movie would have achieved the sixty-percent threshold, “fresh” across the board. So the audience of liberals tuned in and it made them feel smug and good about being liberals. It did what it was supposed to do. Critics rated it according to whether it was an enjoyable viewing experience — for all of us, not just smug lefty libs — and, as one would expect, they were divided. But they didn’t pan the movie. Those among them who down-voted it acted within reason; it’s a little on the long side, and there’s not an awful lot happening.

Perlman talks about self-importance. Monologuing away for 138 minutes about a problem with no solution and getting all pissy when some subset of the audience, or critics, gets bored with it seems rather self-important to me.

And therein lies the dirty little secret about “Don’t Look Up.” If you take the time to actually watch the movie, you’ll notice this comet that is hurtling toward Earth, serving as an allegorical device standing in for Climate Change, is going to kill us all. It’s a certainty. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. The movie itself is a critique against our social milieu, or it’s supposed to be, but it’s really a critique against people who don’t panic when the liberals tell everyone to panic. It’s about how frustrating it is to the liberals when we don’t act like panicky puppets, dancing the right way when they pull our strings. “Don’t look up” indeed. The frustration that occurs when the puppetmaster can’t control all the puppets, achieves a high zenith somewhere during the second half, when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character goes on national television and suffers a meltdown. The liberals who want us to dance like panicky puppets liked that part a lot. So did I. I found it revealing.

Liberals, and Hollywood liberals in particular, can’t come to grips with the basics of activism: You state your case, and between the ears of each and every person who is on the receiving end, there’s going to be a tiny courtroom. They’ll conclude what they want to conclude about it. The case they’ve made is “It looks like our species is affecting the global climate a tiny bit even as the climate affects our species, isn’t that scary?” That’s it. We’re supposed to freak out and go into a Leonardo Meltdown because we may be having an effect on our environment…as most-to-all species have an effect on their respective environments. In a lot of cases, the answer is no, that’s not scary. There are reasons for this. It is how nature works, after all. And we’re still waiting on the evidence that is scientifically meritorious, and portending comet-of-death-like doom. That’s the reality. Leonardo can shriek about that as much as he likes.

Well…can we stop pretending?

It’s not really that big of a mystery to me why Perlman, and others, are disappointed. It’s not the disapproval. When you say F.U. you’re entering a world, and likely building it yourself, in which disapproval doesn’t mean anything. I mean, that’s the sentiment behind the expletive, is it not? The movie is a shout-out to fellow liberals about “Isn’t it frustrating when the puppets don’t dance?” and it was wildly successful. Liberals, famous and otherwise, joined together and shouted in unison “Hell yes!! Grrrr!! Me so mad!!” It did what it was supposed to do.

But it’s a mediocre, self-satisfied, self-gratifying project. Here it is the end of January, and we’re pretty much all done talking about it. There’s no reverberation. It’s not going to change the calculus of the issue, or the public’s perception of it.

And frankly, if that’s what it was supposed to do, it deserves more negative ratings. As an effort toward that, it didn’t even achieve basic competence. If the movie had a message for the malcontents like me who aren’t panicking properly on demand, that message was “This is what you look like to us.” It was a tantrum. How persuasive is it when a toddler throws a tantrum, and then in the middle of it stops and says “This is what you look like to me”? Not very.

If you develop the project with input from others who don’t think exactly like you, maybe you’ll see that. If you build it in an echo chamber, you won’t. This one was built in an echo chamber and it shows.

So…there was a bit of not-all-positive feedback, where there was a deficiency of competence. There was hope that we’d spend 2022 talking about the movie, and it’s not gonna happen…where there was a deficiency of competence.

Seriously Mr. Perlman, how surprising is that? You’re an entertainer, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you do? It’s all about gelling with the audience, anticipating their reactions. And you’re exceptionally experienced at it.

Maybe you should be a little less worried about your feelings of surprise and disappointment, and be putting a bit more thought into how & why you’re surprised. You and others.

You’re not inspiring me to look to you for prognostications about what’s going to be happening to us, our planet, each other, etc. Picking up the impression you’re not that intelligent about such things.

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Truth
Tuesday, January 11th, 2022

So over the holidays, or shortly after, I joined the swelling ranks of those who received notice their Facebook accounts had been restricted. I have been caught, so goes the tale, repeatedly spreading misinformation. The process of reviewing my sins is comical and sad at the same time. My assertion that such-and-such a link represented true information, is often missing, and in many cases my assertion is something very different — in one of them I’m specifically saying “OMG someone please tell me this isn’t real” or words to that effect. So the admins, or their algorithms, really don’t want anyone posting the contraband, at all, in any context. They’ve digitally-fingerprinted the links and they don’t want ’em anywhere. Good to know!

It goes without saying that we don’t all do things this way. If I ran the system and “caught” someone posting something I thought was untrue, my solution to the problem would be to discuss it rather than censor it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Facebook takes the opposite view. This doesn’t prove the truth is on my side, of course, but it raises serious doubts against it being on theirs.

A lot of people would like to keep the discussions about these things limited to “Do they have the right?” I imagine such discussions are consistently short, and not very enlightening, because of course they do. In a free society in which people have rights, among these must be the right to do dumb things; and if you have the right to do dumb things, a conclusion of “Do they have the right?” can never be final, for it must necessarily lead into subsequent questions of “But is it smart?” Or, if you want to consider different and competing interests, “What is the likely result?”

I see a result in which we, as a society, at least within the culture of things that are affected by social media — which is a lot — are becoming detached from the fundamental concept of truth.

This word “misinformation” is supposed to be applied to untrue things. If there’s one example of it that guides our current understanding, upon which I can look with the greatest sympathy, it is “Barack Obama was born in Kenya.” When that controversy was aroused years ago, and then re-aroused by Obama’s friend as a publicity stunt a short time later, I reviewed both sides, couldn’t see proof one way or another, and at some point became convinced it wasn’t plausible for Obama’s mother to have given birth in Africa because her known whereabouts didn’t place her there during this time. So today I believe He was born in Hawaii, but I’ll stop short of calling other people loony tunes if they believe otherwise. Then, as now, I concluded that questioning the Hawaii-birth narrative, and skeptically, is what reasonable people should be doing; the controversy exists because Obama created it. He acted sketchy. It worked to His advantage. But back to the claim…Obama born in Kenya…misinformation, therefore, false. Okay, I’ll buy that.

There has been a campaign to reduce “In the 1970’s, they were trying to scare us about a new Ice Age” as misinformation. Well, that would depend on who “they” is. As I understand it, the argument was “Hold up, that was a bunch of raggedy old magazines you read while you’re waiting in dentist’s offices, not scientists. This climate change stuff today is much more scienc-y, or something.” See the slippage? We’re going from…”Misinformation is something false, that I can prove as false, or at least bring some industrial-grade doubt against” — like Obama being born in Africa — to, “Misinformation is me going back in time to these old claims, and selling you on the idea that it was those people making them, not these people.” Already, we’ve slipped down a few notches and we’re not talking about false stuff anymore.

“The polar bear population has actually increased” is something else we often see identified as misinformation. As you peruse the various debunkings, you see we really don’t know what’s been happening to the polar bear population. We slip another peg. Now we’re applying the M-word to things that aren’t known.

Gender is the same as sex, and there are only two sexes — that’s supposed to be misinformation. Here we slip yet again. Now we’re applying the word to things we know are true, but that make certain people feel not very good. The intent of the movement is to reserve the word “sex” for the biological configuration, whereas “gender” is supposed to be how a person identifies. And, we must be ready for the situations in which these two are different. Well if misinformation is supposed to have something to do with deceptive things, the word should be affixed to that effort, because this is deceptive. “Sex” is measurement of, and “gender” is feelings about, a common attribute. Sex vs. gender is thought vs. feeling. It’s not like “hair color vs. height.”

Now that we’ve crossed the Rubicon of attaching the word “misinformation” to true things, anything is possible. And we’ve seen lots of topsy-turvy twisty-bendy nonsense take place before our eyes. It’s misinformation that George Floyd was strung out on Fentanyl when he died; that the resulting Black Lives Matter protests were coordinated, with plans deliberately put in place to wreck things and damage businesses; that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self defense. That COVID came from China; that Joe Biden, or his campaign, cheated in the 2020 elections; that Antifa members were involved in the Capitol Penetration event of January 6, 2021. All of these things are either proven true, or if not proven, at least highly probable.

Let’s stop pretending now. “Misinformation” means, if you define “truth” according to what’s not going to tick off people who have power over you, this stuff is in conflict with that. But deep down I think we all know, it’s wrong to define truth that way.

The M-word, now, means that we — some undefined “we” — have mobilized a campaign to make people doubt it, even though it might very well be true. Because people believing in it would be inconvenient to…someone.

Who is that “someone”? That’s the question people should be asking now that we’ve essentially re-defined what “misinformation” is.

This is an old issue. Ayn Rand pointed out,

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

It’s a lot like that. Where we’re obliged to pretend true things are false because they’re not approved…or known things are unknown because they’re unapproved… someone, somewhere must be doing this approving.

And where this approval is being withheld from known, true things… someone, somewhere is lying.

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Seven Checkmarks
Monday, December 20th, 2021

Before giving me your latest so called “public health order” first answer these questions:

[ ] Do you have the authority? I mean, really? You won’t have to play these games of “take things away from you until you do it”? You can enforce because it’s really under your jurisdiction?

[ ] Are you taking ownership of the end results, like a Captain obliged to go down with his ship?

[ ] Does the current science support it?

[ ] Is it free of adverse/side effects?

[ ] Is it free of risk?

[ ] Is it clean of conflicts of interest, in appearance as well as in substance?

[ ] Are you doing this yourself?

I need to see seven check marks, otherwise stick a cork in it. That’s really the way everyone should be doing it; everyone else should be insisting on the same. Things have gone this far out of kilter because people haven’t been asking these questions. They just comply.

Like Zuby says…

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Intellectual Acumen
Friday, December 10th, 2021

I’m noticing with AOC and Jen Psaki running around, and Placeholder Joe in charge…or holding the place at least…this left-wing drumbeat of “Our guy is so smart that only a tiny portion of the populace can understand him” is in remission. Barack and Michelle are out of the spotlight. No one is taking their place. It’s weird because liberals are still swaggering around with their monotone about “You’re stupid if you don’t agree with us.”

But if you say “Like AOC?” they’ll go…”Who?” Their champions stop being their champions whenever it’s no longer convenient for them to be that. Until their profile is suddenly lowered in this way, they’re representing lots of things but intellectual horsepower is not one of those things, either in substance or in packaging. They don’t even try to pretend. I’m not entirely sure what this means. But it’s new. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, it’s in motion.

I’m thinking back and I see this idea of having an intellectual representative has been like a faulty flashlight, flickering on and off. It seems to have started off as a way to explain their losses, beginning maybe with Adlai Stevenson. “He’s too smart, the public didn’t get it.” Carter and Mondale used this excuse against Reagan, to lick their wounds after the “likeable dunce” decisively defeated them.

And then Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. In the aftermath, we remember Clinton for just one thing, and it wasn’t that, but at the time we got that Rhodes thing rubbed in our faces over and over again. You must be dumber if you don’t agree with Bill, he’s a Rhodes Scholar.

John Kerry had “nuance” and could “see things in shades of gray.” This was an unusually well defined critique against the evil others; implication being, if you weren’t on their side, you were like a Sith, dealing in absolutes. But it was projection, of course, because read that sentence again. If you’re not with them, you’re terrible. An absolute.

After Kerry there was Obama…the Lightworker. Obama often applied the Kerry pattern, speaking often of “false choices.” The guiding narrative had something to do with a splendid, capable mind dealing with delicate things, and until He came along we were struggling in the darkness coping with 21st century challenges with 12th century techniques or something. Lightworker was constantly intoning His higher wisdom to us about what we could and could not do, blowing our minds with His newfound wisdom that had never dawned on us before…usually followed by lots of “uh” sounds to make sure He got it absolutely, positively, right. It became quite tiresome, I think even to the people on His side, although they’d never admit it.

Hillary Clinton, of course, was the smartest woman on the planet.

Things are not now the way they were before. Since 2016, the democrats are just…not Donald Trump. That’s it. They don’t have to be smart. People used to make fun of John Kerry for not being George W. Bush, but you know, in addition to that he had to be this nuanced deep-thinker guy. Now the “not Donald Trump” guy is…Placeholder Joe. Kneepads Kamala. Gray Goose Nancy. “The Squad.” You can plausibly accuse these weirdos of lots of unsavory things, but overthinking something is not one of those things.

It may be the manifestation of a new generation with a bad attitude. Many’s the journeyman or master who took on an apprentice from this new “Apple Ear Buds” crowd, and come away with the observation that it’s so hard to tell them anything. They seem to have the attitude of, If it’s really worth knowing, they must know it already. Their hero is Rey from Star Wars, who instinctively knows all about everything in the galaxy, both technological and spiritual. People wonder why she doesn’t capture the imagination like her predecessor, Luke Skywalker. The obvious answer is that we got to see Luke learn. He made mistakes, sulked like a loser, banged his head against things. Then he learned. Rey just knows everything, so she’s learned nothing. She’s failed as a successor-character who captures passions, but never forget she’s also supposed to be an emblem of this new generation. And there, evidently, she’s a success. They generally don’t value the process of learning.

Of course, as the democrats market themselves to this crowd with this mantra of “Who cares if I think on anything deeply, I’m not that other guy” — they have yet to find real success. They had to cheat to get Joe in there, and their rebuttal against anyone who noticed the cheating is to forbid us from talking about it. The discussion seems to be limited to “Who cares what you say, we’ll just remove your post.”

This is not good. Are they resorting to censorship because of what they’re able to do? Or…because of what they’re not able to do? They want to be thought of as intellectual titans, but their champion is the bug-eyed Brooklyn bartender, and others like her…and whether they realize it or not, the rest of us get to form whatever opinions about it we like, nevermind whether our posts can survive any length of time on Facebook or YouTube.

I have to predict the youngsters are in for a series of unpleasant surprises. Not any great variety of them. Just a lengthy series of similar, unpleasant surprises. It’s just not realistic to force people to respect your intellectual acumen, by clamping down on, obfuscating and altogether prohibiting any discussion of your intellectual shortcomings. That doesn’t make people respect you as some kind of a genius. It’s not how it works.

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Wrong-Person’s Rage
Tuesday, December 7th, 2021

Everybody likes to be on “the right side of history.” A lot of times in life though, you can be very sure of your position going into a situation, but then when it’s all over you find out you were wrong. What do you do then? Some people try to deny it, but when that’s no longer an available option, they get angry, and they focus this anger on the people who weren’t wrong.

There is rage and resentment against people like me, who supported Trump’s re-election, and lost that bid. I’ve noticed this antipathy is more intense, and more widespread, now that we’ve been proven to be right, than it would be if we weren’t proven right.

There is rage and resentment against people like me, who opined that the pandemic was a “plandemic” or “scamdemic,” a naked power grab by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. Here, too, we’ve been proven right, and the antipathy is more widespread and intense than it would be if it had yet to emerge how right we were.

The antipathy against those of us who correctly perceived “Black Lives Matter” as a Marxist organization that doesn’t care about black lives, is more widespread and intense now that we’ve been proven right, than it would be if we had yet to be proven right.

People who were snookered by all this stuff are avoiding us, regardless of how cheerful, pleasant, courteous, trustworthy, thrifty brave clean & reverent we may be. It’s as if they feel obliged to admit they were wrong next time we see each other, and cannot bear the thought of it. But we wouldn’t even insist on bringing up these topics. Not like they did, back when it had yet to be established we were right and they were wrong, and they were so sure they were the ones who were right. Back then, they were in our faces, all the time, chanting their mantras and their talking points. Now their positions have become indefensible and so they’ve scattered. Maybe they think this looks stoic, wise, or macho. It looks petulant and childish. Cockroach-like and cowardly.

They’re making one error into two.

It isn’t right, or just, but it’s the way people operate. So often you have to choose between being in the in-crowd, versus having the right ideas.

The real tragedy is that they think they’re alone in enduring these stinging, unpleasant learning experiences. Not so. “I Told You So” situations like these, are painful for both sides, not just the side that’s on the business end. We’ve all been learning. It’s a good time to do some learning, even if you were right about the important things. I’m learning too, and it’s not fun.

My trust in authority figures has cratered now. My respect for organizational hierarchies at this point is subterranean.

I no longer believe in flawed humans who have “the best” ideas. Best I can manage, post-pandemic, is a grudging acknowledgment that someone might be least-wrong. And if I’m looking at whoever’s managed to draw in the highest esteem from others, most votes, etc…he’s probably not the guy.

The Chinese Bioweapon has taught me some things about how people behave, when they make important decisions in groups while they worry about social uplift and altitude, that I will never forget if I live to be a thousand. My confidence in group-think and committee decisions was already lower than a rattlesnake’s belly before this started. Now it’s tunneled into the bedrock.

I think I’m not alone.

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But What Is the Process?
Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Here and there I have blogged and Facebook’d about “Process People” and “Outcome People.” Like my late Uncle Wally told me (somewhere), quoting one of his editors from the olden days: The world is divided into two groups of people, the kind that go around dividing everyone into two groups, and everyone else…

Point is, although we all want credit for showing fidelity to the proper process and generating good results from it, we distinguish ourselves from one another when the time comes for us to make a choice. Which we inevitably have to do, because no process is perfect. There comes a time where you realize you have to blaze a new trail, even on an unnoticed, low-altitude micro level, to get things to come out right. Do you want good results? Or do you want to follow the process? Which?

Biden’s President, Kamala is in the second spot and Grey Goose Nancy is House Speaker. No one is proud of any of this. Their ascendancies do not speak well for the process we’re following. They are a blight upon the system. Parts of it may be good, but the detritus that’s rising to the top definitively proves there must be flaws in the rule book, because we followed it and here we are.

Liberals run everything. They have no good results to offer anywhere and they don’t care. That’s because they’re “Process People”; you can tell because when the time comes for them to list their achievements, they talk about the steps they’ve taken which are supposed to be above reproach. MASK UP REGARDLESS OF YOUR VACCINATION STATUS!! I’m running out of patience! Black Lives Matter! Woman’s Right to Choose! WE’RE GONNA FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!! But the results stink on ice. Unemployment up, stock prices down, prices up, production down, plywood in the windows, smash-n-grab, etc…you notice any of this stuff, they just stop speaking to you, as you’ve selected yourself out of their intended audience. “Process People” don’t give a shit about results, they just worry about following the “right” steps. After that, everything should fall into place. If it doesn’t it doesn’t matter, because they’re not paying attention, and they expect you shouldn’t pay attention either. I’ve gone over all this before.

Today though, I’m thinking more about how they see things. Process People neglect the outcome because they’re focused on the process. But what’s the process? It’s not like they’re following some intricate detail-saturated flow chart that covers a wall, full of decision-boxes. No…

Process People neglect the result to focus on the process — and the process, very quickly, degrades into a bunch of nothing.

Nothing but an endless series of empty, genuflecting gestures. Such gestures, by the lower classes, continually reassure the upper classes that their subordinates are still paying attention to what they have to say. The lowers have to constantly reassure the uppers that the uppers are still in charge. That’s all that really happens, and the job of reassurance is never quite all the way done. That could be because, deep down, the uppers know they’re not really where they should be, that there’s a bunch of post turtles. And so both the lowers and the uppers repeat circular laps on a silly-go-round. Wear your mask. Take your vax. Salute properly. Use “Dr.” when referring to First Lady Jill. No leather jacket for you. No deadnaming. Tune in to listen to Mr. Thompson’s speech as he addresses the crisis…

This is, I think, why after a hundred years we’re still waiting for communism to take over the world. It’s not going to happen. Throughout that century it has always been the same: Process People selecting process over outcome, neglecting ramifications, neglecting results, sacrificing everything else to follow the process, and the process devolves like a melting snowman, into just obeisance, supplication and pandering. Eventually that’s all that’s left, and no one anywhere appreciates it because they’re starving.

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Guardrailing Me Into the Right Opinions
Thursday, December 2nd, 2021

I don’t like being manipulated. I’m old enough to remember when that was true of most people. Nowadays it seems that’s a fringe-kooky desire, and the more mainstream desire is to just love love love being manipulated.

Twitter has a new boss and he’s going to be the same, or worse, than the old one. Here is a key difference between conservatives and liberals: If a powerful and influential conservative stepped down from his position, the liberal narrative would be “ding dong the witch is dead” and it would reverberate before we even knew who his replacement was. Jack Dorsey steps down, his replacement is worse than he was, and conservatives are unfazed. By & large, they were pessimistic from the get-go. And realistic.

Silicon Valley won’t ever change, unless it is forced to change by some larger event. I’m still waiting to see how that ultimately goes. History doesn’t guide me. Henry Ford had political opinions, many of them quite unsavory, but political opinions did not altogether guide the modern industrial revolution. In 2021, we have a left-wing truth and a right-wing truth. It’s gotten philosophical, piercing the fabric of “truth,” as we perceive it, itself. One cannot help but wonder what cars would look like today if the earlier revolution had been like this. Powered by hamsters, maybe.

People aren’t saying this because to a lot of us, it’s self evident. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear a lot of other people can’t see it so someone’s gotta say it.

When you monopolize mass communication and then start “fact checking” things, it doesn’t look like real fact checking. It looks like what it really is: A last resort. That is to say, the persons responsible would prefer the matter not come up at all. Their preference would be to keep the statement away from me entirely. I don’t know what they’re successfully keeping from me, because if they’re succeeding at it, I’m not finding out about it. And so I have to wonder what else they’re keeping from me.

I know they think my opinion is important enough to be manipulated. But I also know they don’t trust me to form it on my own. I know they think it proper and fitting to “guardrail” me into having the opinion they want me to have, like a dumb cow being guided within the lines on a cattle drive. It comes back to that ancient question, how much do you trust someone who doesn’t trust you?

Furthermore: Because this all has to be explained to them, or if it is explained it has no impact upon their decisions, I know they must exist and work within an echo chamber populated by others upon whom it has no impact. The whole overlaying/guardrailing value system exists within a cloister of limited thinkers, who can’t be trusted because they don’t trust others. They’re a bunch of Ernst Stavro Blofelds, a bunch of puppetmasters. They have made this decision because it makes sense to them, because they’ve reached their decision without conversing seriously with anyone outside their bubble.

That means they likely make all other decisions the same way.

And this gels with common sense. Am I really supposed to believe they were in Hawaii in August 1961 watching Barack Obama being born, when they tell me He was born there? Am I really supposed to believe they personally watched the vote counting in Georgia, when they tell me the vote counting in Georgia was on the up-and-up? No. They might be making the right decision about things, but they’re making it the wrong way, by passing on what someone else has told them, and then strutting around, peacock-like, as if they personally know it, when they don’t. I mean, look at all the other judgment calls they made, that turned out to be wrong. They were surprised Jussie Smollet turned out to be lying. They were surprised there was “vaccine hesitancy.” They were surprised Dan Rather’s Texas Air National Guard memos turned out to be a fraud. They were surprised Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self defense, and that the “mostly peaceful protests” weren’t peaceful. They were surprised Joe Biden is a bad President. They were surprised the Mueller Report turned out to be a boondoggle. But none of these things surprised anyone who had a working brain and chose to actually use it.

I’m better off following the counsel of a Magic 8-ball than following the counsel of these limited thinkers.

History isn’t going to remember any of this fondly.

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No Consequences
Sunday, November 28th, 2021

We are living in an era that is uncomfortable for a reason. During the middle ages, with Divine Right of Kings and so forth, the privileges of aristocracy were mostly pure privilege. We had liege lords and the law recognized everything underneath them, people included, as their personal property. The outstanding concerns were limited to famine and conquest. So if you were nobility, you were all good with the liege above you, you weren’t starving and nobody was coming to take your land by force, your jurisdiction was essentially your plaything and you could do as you pleased. With The Enlightenment, we began to fasten power to accountability. Eventually, people could be born poor, earn for themselves a little bit of money, and become customers. After hundreds of years of little people bossing around big people, empowered to say “I’m canceling this contract unless…” we’ve taken the blessings for granted, and have started to let it go. We’ve been shifting power on to people who can’t, or won’t, assume any responsibility for the end results of the commands they give out, and the decisions they make.

Dr. Fauci says he thinks it would be a great idea if we did X and it would be just terrible if we did Y. He does not say whether he has these opinions because science backs them, or because he’d like to hang on to power and get rid of Trump. There is no reason for him to so declare. No one asks. He labors under no responsibility whatsoever for the ultimate outcome.

Elected officials appoint people who don’t even know what sex they are, to be public health officials. Their responsibility for such appointments is limited to the negative effect such appointments might do against their electoral prospects…which is nil.

The dysphoria patients elevated to these lofty positions, shut down billion dollar industries, unilaterally, ostensibly because of the China Bioweapon threat. The responsibility they assume in making these decisions is zero.

The People’s Republic of China — come to think of it — assumes zero responsibility for their weapon. We know they did it because the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else. But all across the world, we have to be very, very careful about where we mention it. We labor under the responsibility of choosing and muting our words, with real consequences looming for us. They labor under none, for having built the damn thing.

Black Lives Matter and Antifa have “demonstrated” for “racial justice,” spending all last year and a good part of this year setting crowded cities on fire and smashing windows. There generally are no consequences for them for having done this.

There dang sure are some consequences for the “January 6 insurrectionists.” Many falsehoods have been presented to the rest of us, and then solidly debunked…but there are no consequences for those who fabricating these falsehoods. Even the ones who got caught fabricating them.

Hipsters want us to use heavy grocery bags, which we’re supposed to reuse to help save the environment. It turned out to be the wrong plan because the China Bioweapon made it impractical and unsafe to reuse bags. There is no responsibility assumed by anybody for having made the wrong call. The hipsters want us to use paper straws, and are cool with forcing us to do so by denying consumer choice. They assume no responsibility to go along with this power.

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has signed an order for us to be “all electric,” as in electric cars, by 2035. The numbers say it is unlikely, to impossible, for the grid to support such a demand. He assumes no responsibility for this. There are no consequences looming for him over this.

Quite to the contrary, his presidential prospects, dead as a doornail since he was caught dining in a fancy French restaurant sans mask right after ordering us to stay home…have been revived through puppetry schemes like this one. No consequences. Oh, a recall petition surfaced against him because of the French Laundry scandal. Which he survived. No consequences.

And President Biden? Well, what is there to say. He makes the wrong move on everything. I don’t need to make a list. No one disagrees except his Psectretary Psaki, who fakes everything. No consequences for Biden. And Psaki is repeatedly caught lying…again, it’s redundant to put together a list. No consequences for Psaki.

Florida is reporting the lowest number of daily PRC Bioweapon cases in the entire nation. This, taken together with prior indicators that Florida’s doing at least alright, proves the other states with “tougher measures,” lived a lie. Now the officials of those other states have been caught. No responsibility, no consequences.

Labor union concessions, and rules, and antiquated regulations, have conjured up an acute “supply chain crisis” that is threatening Christmas, and in some cases, lives. The crisis came from nothing, just bad judgment. Now it is enmeshed within a many-layers deep finger-pointing melee among elected officials, the port authorities, longshoremen, truck drivers, appointed officials, etc…no responsibility, no consequences.

Hillary Clinton STILL isn’t in prison. No one knows why.

Dan Rather lied. No consequences.

Brian Williams lied. No consequences.

The news lied over and over again about Trump. Then they lied some more. No consequences.

I could go on and on…at this point, if I pause to merely point out that I think I’m seeing a pattern emerge, if you’ve got a brain in your head, you’ll get it.

But there are consequences to this no-consequences thing.

As Professor Frankfurt pointed out in his book On Bullshit, the difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that the liar has to care about what’s true, so he can make his effort to deviate from it, whereas the bullshitter doesn’t care. We’re buried up to our armpits in both of those.

Also, we’re buried up to our eyeballs in strutting martinets seeking power. Not just authority, which implies an indelible record of the fact that such-and-such a person made such-and-such a decision. But power, like a beach bully stomping sandcastles. And there is conflict because such power cannot be shared, but so many are pursuing it. And why in the world shouldn’t they? There’s no responsibility to go with it. No consequences.

If we’re buried up to our armpits in bullshitters and up to our eyeballs in these Little Napoleons seeking power…we’re over our heads with mistakes. Mistakes come from making the wrong call. The determination to avoid making the wrong call, and try to make the right call, comes from…consequences.

And there aren’t any.

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Just Who, Exactly, is Requiring Me to Take This Shot?
Saturday, November 27th, 2021

Okay so that’s two. Two liberals who have been haranguing me about my obligation to believe everything the government tells me about vaccines and the Chinese Bioweapon, with all sorts of disparaging remarks to be made about my moral decay and deficiency when they find I don’t obey & believe everything. Take that shot, darn it. Oh sure, I have the right not to take it; but also, the moral imperative to go ahead and take it.

And they both want to bitch about the government’s incompetence, laziness…and, when circumstances warrant, its corruption and dishonesty.

How to reconcile this? See, this is why I think libs just want to be unhappy and angry. They want to complain about the problems. But they don’t want to solve them. They want to scold people, and act like they’re trying to scold them into doing something. But they’re not.

Lefties believe in a strong central government that is such an important aspect of our lives, that it can say what’s morally right and wrong, even on topics in which it lacks legal authority. it is in the nature of left wing to obliterate personal religious faith, and then replace it with the state. They talk about “separation of church and state,” but what they’re talking about is kind of like separation between a first wife and a second wife. Never the two shall meet, because one is replacing the other. That’s the dirty secret of leftism.

So now these government officials have defined what the right thing is for me to do — today. Not from here on out, although the government officials, big-government advocates, and lefties act like that’s what they mean. But they really just mean today. That’s another thing about lefties, the concept of time. It escapes them. They think like the mayfly, which lives for just a few days. It’s all no past, no future. The science said fifteen days to flatten the curve. Then it said otherwise — biggest betrayal of our lives. The science said get your vaccine you can take off your mask. Then it said otherwise — second biggest betrayal of our lives. Lefties don’t remember any of it because they live in snapshot mode, history always began this morning.

Their rebuttal to this is that science is all about learning, and as such must change. If we don’t get that, we don’t get science. Well, that’s all true. This is why we don’t form policy around “the science says.” That’s the part they don’t get about science. We have buffers. We have tests. We hear from dissenting viewpoints. It’s not a matter of “Find out what Dr. Fauci says and then do it.” The problem with that is much bigger than the problem that he hasn’t been elected to anything (although yes, there is that).

The House of Representatives has passed the monstrosity bill. We don’t really know how much it costs because, let’s face it, we can’t count that high. Once it goes into the trillions, all our news sources just sort of make up numbers. Our alleged President says it won’t cost anything. No one can defend this lie. His most ardent supporters simply change the subject.

The problem with our model of government is, this is the rule and not an exception to it. Government is run by people who have built up seniority and have been in it their whole lives. If they’ve been in it their whole lives, they don’t have experience in anything else, and it shows. Their solution to every little thing is to throw money at the whatever. Yeah we have that outside the government too. “But could you meet this arbitrary deadline if we provided you with a staff of junior programmers to help you?” That’s what you hear when the wrong people are in charge. With what we call “government,” that’s how everything is done, because the people at the top just churn money that represents wealth they did not create.

It seems to me like conservatives and liberals both recognize incompetency in government, but the liberals don’t have any idea what to do when you recognize incompetency. I guess they just get huffy about it so they can complain, and a minute later they forget all about it and are back to tut-tutting people like me for not obeying & believing.

Conservatives look at incompetence as a weak, rotten, creaky floorboard: Don’t put your weight on this, and if your weight is already on it you better get the fuck off of it. Because that’s what incompetence really is. Liberals, just like with everything else, are clueless. They see the incompetence. They’re clueless about what to do.

But the biggest problem lefties have with reality, and with this ongoing attempt to impose their vaccine lust on the rest of us, is that they think in passive voice. You have an obligation to take the shot because they said to take it. They want a government that can say “Here stupid, drink this” and we’re obliged to do it…so, government owns our bodies. No rights left for us at all, whatsoever. But who’s saying this? Elected officials? Appointed officials? “Science”? Point is, the lefties don’t care. That’s what I mean by thinking in passive voice — there’s no subject of the sentence.

If they could be compelled to think in active voice, and specify who has this authority, and why, they wouldn’t be so fond of their governmental model. They’re heaping so much authority on these strangers that they can’t even keep track of how much authority they’re heaping on them — literally forfeiting ownership of their own bodies — because, and only because, the trustees are not known to them. Because, and only because, they’re strangers.

Summarizing all the above: They simply don’t think like grown-ups. It’s not any more complicated than that. They haven’t accepted responsibility for making their own medical decisions, beyond the decision to be scared of things. So they don’t want anyone else accepting it either.

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CRT Is Not Taught, and Other Talking Points
Saturday, November 27th, 2021

“Jussie Smollett got mugged” was disproven. No lefties anywhere, as far as I can see, ever acknowledged the error.

“Critical race theory is not taught” has been disproven. If it were in fact true, it would be unprovable. Lefties are still running around saying it as if they confirmed it firsthand, which is impossible.

“Kyle Rittenhouse traveled across state lines” is entirely irrelevant.

The Left says The Right lies, The Right says The Left lies, but the situation is not symmetrical. The Left has no idea what truth is. They are in a rubber dingy adrift in an ocean of talking points. Someone somewhere concocts them and disseminates them, the lefties swagger around relaying them as if they know what they’re talking about when they don’t know anything.

Then they recite statistics to make it look like they know something.

The statistics are also talking points.

A lot of these talking points, though, carry with them a tacit admission that talking points is all they are. The thing about CRT-isn’t-taught, for example. That’s black-swan stuff. As I pointed out above, there is no observation you can make that would prove such a thing, only observations you could make that would disprove it. You can’t inspect school curricula and come away with a validated observation that CRT doesn’t exist, just like you can’t study birds and prove black swans don’t exist.

What you can do is dial in to a zoom meeting or a podcast, or receive an e-mail, enumerating a collection of talking points. And one of those talking points could be “CRT doesn’t exist.” That’s the only way you could “learn” such a thing, taking your place in a command chain of puppeteers.

If that’s what “news” has become, in my opinion they should come clean about it. Maybe consumers of news really do want to just be told stories. But I would speculate a lot of them want actual news. You know, information.

They don’t want to go to Thanksgiving dinners, getting in arguments with their Republican Uncles, telling them “I watched the news and CRT doesn’t exist” only to be embarrassed when the Republican Uncle says “Here’s some.” When you send them in with a short lance like that, you’re doing them a disservice. And I think they look at it that way.

I honestly don’t understand why we hear that particular talking point so much. I don’t understand a lot of them, but in particular, I don’t understand that one. I can’t explain it. At least, not without starting with an assumption that there are people walking around, with influence over the process of coming up with and promulgating these talking points, who lack self respect.

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My Exile
Saturday, November 27th, 2021

So I had another one of those dreams. I don’t get these very often. Last time I had one like this it was thirteen years ago, back before Emperor Barack The First, and it had something to do with people ostracizing other people and losing track of the fact they were ostracizing themselves. Since then, recent events have made it known to me that this is essentially all of human history, after you strip away the inconsequential bits of it.

This time, I’m standing out in the middle of nowhere just looking off into the distance. I have been exiled from civilization due to my general coarseness, my inflexibility…I keep “deadnaming” transgenders, wishing people a “Merry Christmas,” calling illegal aliens illegal aliens, referring to riots as riots, and the powers-that-be have decided it’s better for everyone if I just go away.

So there I am.

I hear a noise behind me, so I turn around and see…

…a flatbelly hottie girl in a weird hairdo handing me a lightsaber.

Ha! No, not her. But some sort of coalition sent out from mainstream society to find me. A couple guys, maybe three. Or a diverse committee. It doesn’t matter. They ask me — Why didn’t it all work? How did I know?

Civilization, in the aftermath of my forced exit from it, didn’t work out so hot. A few, or some, perhaps most, have figured out I must know something that all the smart people didn’t know. The coalition has been dispatched to seek me out, and figure out what exactly it is that was kept hidden from them, or that they failed to see.

How did I foresee that Biden/Harris really lost the 2020 election after all? That Slow Joe never won Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania or Georgia?

That the beltway crowd played up the Chinese Bioweapon as a way to get rid of Trump?

That mail-in voting would invite fraud?

That Fauci has a “God complex” a mile wide and isn’t the right professional for the role in which he was placed, because he can’t handle dissenting opinions?

That masks are useless?

That the efficacy of the vaccines was overstated? And the side effects were understated?

That Obama’s “Infrastructure Repair” was a boondoggle and a money grab; and a decade later, we’d be doing it all over again?

How did I know Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self defense?

That Jussie Smollett was lying?

That most-to-all “hate crimes” are hoaxes?

That the zillion-and-one-genders movement was just a big scam?

That monitoring of transactions over $600 had nothing whatsoever to do with national security?

That the whole concept of “microagressions” was, and is, a dangerous shitshow?

That “Critical Race Theory” is mostly to all mythical, a toxic mythology?

That when you load up a whole generation with potential reasons to get “triggered” and turn them into human landmines, you end up with a generation of neurotics who require medication and “fidget spinners” to focus on anything?

How did I know that all the Charlie’s Angels remakes would crash and burn? That Marvel Phase 4 would implode?

That Joss Whedon and James Cameron aren’t “feminists” who respect women?

That Hollywood is filled with perverts and pederasts?

That all the most popular non-anthology shows on cable and streaming, ever since X-Files, are only pretending to advance the plot throughout the season, or seasons…and the episodes are, in fact, entirely interchangeable just like back in the olden days?

That Hillary Clinton is not the smartest woman in the whole world?

That “Caitlyn Jenner” is a man after all?

That all the militant feminists would live unhappy lives all alone in their big houses, to keel over, die, and have their faces eaten off by dozens of cats?

That women are happiest when their men are happy?

That nobody, but nobody, likes James Bond any better when he drinks fewer alcoholic beverages, smokes fewer cigarettes and sleeps with fewer women?

How did I know that when social media platform providers flag material as “misinformation,” it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it’s true or false?

That the “Black Lives Matter” protests of 2020 were coordinated, after all? How did I know they weren’t “peaceful protests” after all?

That “Defund the Police” would turn into such a dangerous disgrace?

That Pope Francis I is an imposter and a tool of Satan?

That democrats don’t want “equality”? That they want poor people to starve some more so they’ll keep voting democrat?

That China is not a neighbor in good standing? That they’re out for world domination and will stop at nothing? That they’re not nearly done infecting us and reinfecting us with deadly strains?

Princess Leia Convention How did I know that all the girls want to dress up as Slave Leia and not Rey Palpatine Skywalker or Jyn Erso? How did I know all the drab, rag-wearing, high-kicking “badass” StrongWilledWomen would fail to achieve a fraction of the currency of Baby Yoda?

That printing and spending all this money on bogus stimulus programs, would cause inflation?

That paying people not to work, is not the way to go?

That spending millions or billions of dollars to “fight the homelessness problem” would not end homelessness, but make it worse?

That when you hire based on gender, skin color, religion or sex preference instead of who’s bringing the best & most appropriate skills to the job, you don’t get the best?

How did I know that remote learning would turn out to be so ineffective?

That removing selected persons from rice, margarine and syrup packages wouldn’t promote peace or racial healing?

How did I figure out that our cable channel programming is designed to turn our sons into prison bitches and our daughters into whores?

That it would be good, after all, for little kids to learn how to drive stick shift cars, and to read cursive?

That radicalized Shiite and Sunnis are still intent on taking over the world just like they were thirteen centuries ago?

That, if “science” practitioners enjoy a built-in excuse when they get it wrong, because it’s inexact and we should show we understand by accepting that — that means, they don’t get to tell us how to live our lives, and they need to pick a damn lane?

That “climate change” is just a big swindle, and the people telling us it’s a serious problem don’t think it’s a serious problem?

People have been wondering how I got so much right when all the people they respected and trusted got it so wrong.

They have been searching for me far and wide because they need my help. They’re just so confused and baffled that all these things took them by surprise. There must have been signs. After all, I’m not that bright.

And I say, in response to their inquiry…you’re right, I’m not.

I just avoided emotional reasoning.

I didn’t surrender power and authority to people who can’t, or won’t, accept the associated responsibility.

I never accepted second-class citizenship, of any kind. I will not make that bargain of “You can eat lunch with the cool kids today, but you have to sit at the far end of the table.” Will. Not. Do. It. Live as sheep among sheep, or as a man by himself, you see which one I chose.

I didn’t think things just because large numbers of others already thought them. I sought, as Dennis Prager says, clarity over agreement.

Please come back with us!, they said. You have to help us!, they said.

I said no, you don’t need me. Stop forming foolish opinions, stop thinking like fools. Act like things matter. Think like they matter.

Then I walked past them to go get some green milk.

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We’re Really Flying Blind
Monday, November 15th, 2021

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Andrew Sullivan notes the mainstream media “got every single one wrong,” in his list of news boondoggles from the last few years.

Brit Hume retweets it, adding a list of his own. In my recollection, few to none of these are facts-on-the-ground type things, like “We previously reported the man bit the dog, but it turns out it was the other way around” stuff. I remember the news media waded into these stories, and others, and specifically did what it isn’t supposed to be doing. “Some say this and some say that, and we’re here to tell you don’t listen to these people listen to those people instead, because these people are a bunch of poo poo heads.”

To all this, we can add — striking out any duplicates after we have done so — each item on Sharyl Attkison’s Definitive List from the Trump Era, now standing at 156.

Something is changing. There must be a common cause. What is it?

A lot of this trouble could have been avoided had the news whatever ya call it…industry…institution…”free press.” If it had simply stuck to what it was supposed to have been doing all along. But they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Lewis Wallace said it first & best: Objectivity is dead and I’m okay with it, from Trump Day #8. He kicked off the era, or his commentary manifested an effect already underway, that kicked off the era. Perhaps there were problems in existence long predating Trump, which were intensified when Hillary lost against him — something that “wasn’t supposed” to happen.

The mainstream news media, so goes the theory, saw this upset as a failure on their part to properly educate us, and resolved to do “better.” Since then, we’ve been watching the medicine bring about a sickness worse than the disease it’s supposed to treat. With the arrival of “fact checkers” the prescriptions reached a second stage, even more harmful than the first. They didn’t treat the root cause of the problem. They didn’t get the news media out of the business of telling us what opinions we’re supposed to have. Instead, they ensconced it further therein.

All the “sensible moderates” out there, watching their morning/evening news, dutifully taking their vaccines and many boosters and wearing their masks, wondering about the various trust issues harbored by people like me…have no idea.

Maybe we can blame youth worship? It takes a certain number of years on the planet to be able to distinguish a fact from an opinion. It shouldn’t, but it does. Fact checkers, I’ve often observed, are younger than much of my selection of socks and underwear. People find that amusing because it’s ambiguous; you could take it as a commentary against the fact checkers, or my underwear. Perhaps both. It becomes only half-funny when you figure out “both” is likely the right answer. These kids think they know it all because they haven’t reached that stage of life where you figure out maybe you don’t. Separating out facts from opinions? That comes much later…and here they are, checking our “facts” for us, bringing us our “news.”

We have to rely on critical “tweets” for our record of how much & how often they need to correct things. Whatever the cause may be, kids, you’re not doing so hot. Might be time to reboot & recheck. The patchwork is replacing the quilt.

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Happiness
Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

The one thing people are not talking about is the one thing everybody says they want: Happiness.

I myself can find happiness in a cup of dark, rich, hot coffee watching a sunrise, the farther away from civilization, the better. Within my age bracket, in this way I represent many. But I recognize that’s because I/we are experienced in dealing with problems that are not present in the coffee+sunrise setting. If, say for example, a six-year-old grandson were to join me he might get joy out of sharing something with his grandfather for a few minutes, and then he’d get bored, and likely leave the scene wondering what the appeal could possibly be. He, too, within his age bracket, in this other way would also represent many. The appeal is the absence of unpleasant things, which saturate the experiences of people our age, but are not known to six-year-olds. Happiness can be one or several things that affect us negatively, and have gone missing; there’s nothing wrong with that.

I doubt very much that you can find happiness by simply thinking about it. However, I do think we should spend more of our time and energy thinking about it as a concept, because we spend so much of our time and energy with things the way they are, making other people happy. This is a mistake when we’re laboring for the pleasure of people who will never know pleasure this way. When we try to make people happy who will never be happy. If this is indeed a mistake, it’s a mistake we make often. That’s why I think we should think about it more than we do.

If someone wants to be unhappy, we should recognize it, and let them. Somehow, it’s become our default course of action to make other people unhappy on purpose, who would be quite willing to be happy if they were given an occasion to be that way, for the sole purpose of making other people happy who are never going to be happy. How do we go about doing this pigeonholing? Must make this person unhappy, to make that other person happy. That, too, should be getting more thought out of us.

I would be remiss in closing this without including something my Dad said, that I thought was poignant, profound and wise. It’s also pretty darn simple: The purpose of life, is not to be happy. This made an impact on me because I notice, when people live life making it a high priority to be happy, they very seldom end up doing anything positive for anybody else.

Also, like the people who don’t want to be happy, they seem to have a greater influence on our cultural mores than the average. It’s like we’re in an oxcart pulled along by those two: The people who want to be happy and think that’s the whole point to living, and the people who go around demanding things to make them happy, who actually will never be happy.

Other than the foregoing, I don’t have much of an opinion about it.

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Dumb Movie Noble Sacrifices
Sunday, October 24th, 2021

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. — John 15:13.

In 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out in theaters and shocked everybody when Spock sacrificed himself to restore warp drive in the Enterprise, saving everyone aboard from the exploding Genesis device. It was the most shocking demise of a central character since Old Yeller.

The following year, Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader, laid down his life to save his son in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. Gotta tie up those loose ends.

And then Mayday sacrificed herself in A View To A Kill. Sybok sacrificed himself in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Miles Dawson blew himself up in Terminator II: Judgment Day. Dillon and Ripley offed themselves in Alien 3. Léon, the Professional, blew himself up in Léon: The Professional. Russell Casse famously yelled out “Hello, boys! I’m back!” and blew himself up in Independence Day to save the world. Jack Dawson sank like a stone to save Rose in Titanic. Harry Stamper blew himself up to save the world in Armageddon. Don Diego de la Vega received a mortal wound, sometime somewhere…? In The Mask Of Zorro. Jericho Kane sacrificed himself to save the world in End of Days. Qui-Gon Jinn received a mortal wound in Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace and Maximus received a mortal wound in Gladiator. Also, Maximus received permission from a female to go ahead and die…how touching. Hawk Hawkins sacrificed himself to send the deadly nuclear warheads into deep space in Space Cowboys.

Data replicated Spock’s feat, blowing himself up to save the Enterprise and Earth as well in Star Trek X: Nemesis. Jean Grey buried herself under a lethal mass of water so the X-Men could get away in X-Men 2: X-Men United. The titular Bill did was he was titularly supposed to do, in Kill Bill Vol. 2, and momma and child lived happily ever after without the dumb ol’ dad. Tarantino repeated this momma plus child minus dad formula in Planet Terror with the death of El Wray. Neville blew himself up to kill the zombies in I Am Legend. Walt Kowalski got himself all shot up with machine gun fire to send the murderous gang members to prison in Gran Torino. Rorschach said “do it” to Doctor Manhattan, who then obliged, obliterating him in Watchmen. Flynn sacrificed himself to take out Clu in Tron: Legacy. Captain America took down the plane in Captain America: The First Avenger. Ella blew herself up to take out the aliens in Cowboys and Aliens. Batman seemingly atomized himself hauling the nuclear bomb out of Gotham in the Batwing in The Dark Knight Rises.

Superman: The Man of Steel offered a triple play of white males sacrificing themselves for the greater good: Colonel Hardy, Emil Hamilton and Jonathan “Pa” Kent. Groot sacrificed himself to save his fellow Guardians in Guardians of the Galaxy. Nux sacrificed himself in Mad Max: Fury Road. Pietra Maximoff used his body as a shield to save a small child along with Clint Barton in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Superman offed himself to save all of humanity, lancing Doomsday with a Kryptonite spear in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Barbossa allowed himself to be consumed by the ocean to save his daughter, and others, in Pirates of the Caribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Yondu froze himself to death to save Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. Steve Trevor blew himself up to destroy the poison gas bombs in Wonder Woman. Merlin blew himself up to save his fellow Kingsmen in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Silas Stone sacrificed himself so that his son, Victor, could track down the Mother Box and save humanity in Justice League: Snyder Cut…and, presumably, in the theatrical cut as well, we just weren’t able to see it happen. Some guy named Toshi and some guy named Heller sacrificed themselves in The Meg. Vice Admiral Holdo engaged hyperdrive at point blank range, a suicide move, in Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, and then later on Luke Skywalker did a cool thing with Force projection and then…just kinda vanished just because. Natasha Romanov sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone in Avengers: Endgame and then later on Tony Stark did himself in with The Snap. He, like Maximus, received permission to die from a female, how sweet. Granting permission to die. Just makes your heart melt.

And then…spoilers, those who have not yet see No Time To Die might want to skip this…highlight to read…James Bond blew himself up by engaging the blow-up-bad-guy’s-base trope one more time, but skipping the escape-with-moments-to-spare trope, because his body was irreversibly infected with nanobots that would have killed his estranged wife and daughter if he ever came in contact with them again.

To say that a pattern has emerged would be understating the issue. Those who are sufficiently interested to track the years by what I’ve listed above, will notice there’s been an acceleration; the self-sacrifice started out as a rarity, and nowadays it’s a rarity if it isn’t there. To say I find it offensive, as a straight white male, would be engaging in a falsehood. I was never offended by it. I skipped straight from blithely ignoring the pattern, failing to notice that what in my childhood was an exception had now become a rule — to — pure and sincere boredom. Yesterday, Saturday, I was staying home enjoying a marathon streaming session with Mrs. Freeberg and it came time to pick the third movie. Noticing the previous two movies (I shall not say what they were) were just build-ups to dumb-noble-sacrifices from straight-white-males, I made the request that we find something that doesn’t have that.

It’s not a matter of offense. And it really isn’t purely a matter of boredom. A lot of these movies, when they have a dumb-noble-sacrifice from a straight-white-male at the end — all that comes before that, is relegated to being merely a lead-up to that. Well, that’s a solid block of at least two hours. Movies used to be a hodge-podge of beautiful things, and genuine surprises, non-tropey ones. They were a delight. You never knew what you were gonna get. Now you kinda do. Some hackneyed noble sacrifice, usually, and invariably from a straight white male. The observation I’m making here is about shifting norms. A sort of death-worship has crept in and gone mainstream.

I imagine I should be more concerned about the suicide rate among white boys. I really don’t know how that shakes out over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if suicide is as high, or higher, in non-whites, but males have been leading the suicide statistics for awhile. It’s the worldview that really concerns me the most, whether it leads to suicide or not. It’s the unwritten rule. Save the world, fornicate like a happy tomcat over it, live to fight another day, leave the audience wondering what exciting adventure you’re going to have next — it seems, now, that that just can’t happen. Someone’s banned it. It’s slightly less intrusive than banning happy endings altogether.

The idea of younger generations filing into movie theaters conditioned to ask themselves: “I wonder who’s going to off himself?” is troubling. Back in my day, we used to wonder what to wonder. Death worship of some kind might happen, but so could anything else. It was a real smorgasbord, if the movie was any good. A real grab bag.

The concept of remembering the sacrifice is a solid swing-and-a-miss. There’s always some subtext about the importance of remembering the fallen. Seems the build-up is always there, and the payoff never is. The other cast members, and the audience, will make darn good & sure to celebrate the life of the decedent, and never, ever forget them and the sacrifice they made. For about ten, fifteen minutes. After which, they’ll be replaced by a more diverse cast, and never mentioned again.

Well, if you’re a Christian, you belong to a religion that does not, and cannot, see martyrdom as something trivial. That’s another concern we should have. It’s being trivialized. When Spock did it, it was sacred. Now it’s like an empty box to be checked as the script makes its way through various drafts.

Some of this has to do with natural attrition. Actors get tired of roles, and part of a writer’s job is to find some coherent believable way to make the necessary cast change happen. Where it’s the white males biting the bullet, oftentimes it’s a planned scrubbing. This is why the “we’ll always remember your sacrifice forever and ever for the next five minutes” bait-and-switch comes to pass. The remembrance is what’s promised, but the forgetfulness is what’s planned. That’s the real social norm that is crystallizing before our eyes: The scrubbing of people, from existence and from remembrance. More often than not, because of their sex and their skin color.

We’re paying for creativity and we’re not getting it. The field of available plot elements should be expanding over time, and instead it’s being narrowed, sharpened like a pencil. Central characters, particularly white male central characters, off themselves simply because the scriptwriters don’t know any other way to do it anymore, and maybe the audience doesn’t know how to watch anything else anymore. Perhaps the mindset now is one of all-or-nothing: The thing you’re doing is so much bigger and more important than you are — and we require a suicide to make it obvious, this being a movie & all — or else, it’s not worth anything at all, and why are we bothering to watch? So there’s an expansive middle ground between the two extremes that’s gone missing. That’s very rarely any kind of good thing.

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Is the Science Tinged with Politics, or the Politics Tinged with Science?
Sunday, October 10th, 2021

One liberal has acknowledged that the science of COVID has been infused with a “tinge” of politics…but just a tinge. Another liberal has refused to concede even that much. Most liberals don’t talk to me, so my sampling here is limited. But based on interactions like these and other things I’ve seen, I think this to be the big disconnect between emotionally-invested, self-identifying liberals vs. normal people.

What is all this fuss about the ‘Vid? Science, or politics? I think most people who are thinking on it with some clarity, would acknowledge it’s a mixture of both. The question then must arise: How much of each? What is it — predominantly?

People like me might be inclined to ask: Can science and politics co-exist anywhere, without the latter dominating the former?

Well, as we look into that, first we have the masks. In theory they ought to be at least partially effective. But we just haven’t seen a correlation between mask mandates versus slowing the spread, and that’s after…what, a year and seven months? So nineteen months. That could be because mandating masks is not the same as actually wearing the masks. But there’s been so much nanny-nanny-boo-boo and tut-tutting about masks, and so little science. Masks are elevated above other remedies because they’re visible. I think everyone who’s been watching what’s gone down, understands this, or should. We pivoted away awfully quickly from “wash your damn hands like your mama should’ve taught you,” even though COVID did wonderful things to educate us on how many people hadn’t been doing this. Some of whom work in food service. Yuck. Anyway. I would hope everyone with a brain still undamaged, would concede there’s been very little actual science overlapping with these masks.

Next we have the fired health care workers. Science would say…hey wait a minute, these are health care professionals. They’d rather suspend their careers than get the shot. What do they know that we don’t know? But also…if this is so serious, how can we afford to fire so many of them? The only explanation that makes sense is that this is about control, not about a real pandemic. Politics, not science.

The third thing is the natural immunity. There is such a thing. It’s science. How come the powers-that-be are playing it down the way they are? It’s got something to do with being powers-that-be, obviously. That’s politics. It isn’t science.

And then there is Tony the Tyrant. Perhaps it’s escaped everyone’s notice, but we don’t need “The Nation’s Top Epidemiologist” to tell us the things he’s telling us. Let’s review: Don’t doubt the statistics, even though we were caught red-handed counting a motorcycle crash fatality as a COVID death. Believe everything. Stay home, wear two masks, wash your hands, Rand Paul doesn’t know what he’s talking about, socially distance, wear masks even if you’re vaxxed, I’m so glad I don’t work for Trump anymore, if you attack me you’re attacking science, the droplets are how it’s spread so wear your masks…and gee, I dunno about this “vaccine mandate applies to people who already had COVID” thing so I’ll take a pass on that. Wear your masks. That pretty much covers it, right? Now a lot of these are opinions, that are reasonable, but conflict with other opinions that are also reasonable. We could have discussions about these. As far as being science, they’re not advanced science so there’s no reason to pick out our “top expert” and forget about what everyone else says. That’s not how you do science. That’s how you do bureaucracy and phony-consensus-building.

And then, fifth thing, is China. We’re not allowed to say, or even recall, that it’s a China Virus. It’s just like O.J. Simpson murdering his wife, the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else. Except that analogy breaks down because we were allowed to say “O.J. killed Nicole.” There we go again with those powers-that-be. When they’re telling us what not to say and what not to think, how in the world could that not be politics?

This is not the first time China has infected us with a deadly strain. If we were really into using science to protect ourselves from this, the scientific questions to be asking might include: Say, what’s China working on right now? Getting ready to hit us again? I think that might be the fifth or sixth deadly infection, I’ve lost count…

Another thing is our attitude toward the “vaccine hesitant.” It’s just weird, and I’m in a position to know because I’m one of them. I’m not anti-vax, but I’m definitely hesitating, waiting to see how this whole thing plays out before I go injecting something into my system I can’t pump out again. Discussing this has made me tired…ah, ha ha! That’s not true. We haven’t discussed it even a tiny bit. Which is weird and strange, given that vax-hesitancy has taken everybody by complete surprise. They did Nazi it coming! Well, whether we discuss it or not, I can monologue about it so allow me to expound on this one…

Accountability used to be a real thing, and no longer is. Think on this: Our alleged President likes to throw out numbers, dates and ultimatums. So maybe slip this one into his hopper…”If we can get the vaccination rate up past ninety percent we’ll get rid of the COVID. If we do that and it doesn’t happen, I will resign as President at noon Eastern Time, November 30th.”

No, I don’t really want that. There’s no such thing as getting rid of COVID, and I wouldn’t want that giggling whore running so much as a lemonade stand let alone the executive branch. But apart from those problems, you know I know you know you’re never going to hear him say something like that. It would involve accountability.

We The People are supposed to perform, and provide our “I’ve been vaxxed” cards if we want to eat, work, travel or associate with anybody. The people telling us to do this performing, keep their jobs no matter what happens. In fact, for him to say anything even vaguely resembling what’s above, he would have to define a goal. “Daily new cases” or “positive per 100,000” or something like that. We receive those reports. So we know they can be measured. But we don’t hear about any goals. All we get is “keep wearing your masks,” “get vaccinated” and “we think we’ve turned a corner.”

For, closing in on two years now. Strange, innit? Real science would be intrigued and want to know more. What we’re dealing with here, doesn’t want to know anything. It’s got this –>||<– much curiosity about why people are hesitant, what it might take to make them not-hesitant, what exactly it is we’re trying to do…etc…

As a side-point: People who are oriented toward specific goals, shouldn’t take direction from people who aren’t.

But anyway, I just don’t see very much science in this. I see people with degrees wearing white coats and using science-buzzwords as they appear on teevee. Did you know, politics can look like science? It’s like the metaphorical wolf wearing a sheep costume. This particular costume, up close, when you take the time to inspect it, isn’t very convincing. It only looks like a sheep from a distance. It looks like real science if, and only if, you refuse to ask any questions…

…you know, the way the powers-that-be want. Believe everything, don’t ask questions, get your shot or you’re fired. Seems political…but, that’s just my initial impression. My temporary, fleeting, nineteen-month opinion.

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Process and Outcome
Saturday, September 25th, 2021

Way way back in the olden days, back when going to a movie or dinner at a restaurant was simple, I had comments to make about process vs. outcome. Since then, the Trump Era has come & gone…for now…and we’ve been battling the China Virus. I’m reminded of what my Uncle Wally told me about what one of his editors used to say to him: “The world is divided into two groups of people, the ones who go around dividing everyone into two groups, and everyone else…”

There are “process people” and there are “outcome people.” How do you tell them apart? Remember that old saying that insanity is repeating a consistent behavior with the expectation of an inconsistent result; that’s how.

Process people engaged in a bad process headed toward a bad outcome, won’t care about the outcome. They’ll defend their adherence to the details of the process, nevermind the fact that the process, also, is bad. Their defense is that there’s some authority or weight invested in this bad process, and they’re adhering to it. Their hope is that whoever is in a position to adjudicate, will put all the emphasis on following process and ignore outcome, the way they did. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t work, they just appeal to a higher authority. So they never learn they did it the wrong way, because there’s no reason for them to learn this.

If you listen to them carefully, you can hear them ‘fessing up that this is how it works. “Our response was/is in line with guidance from the CDC.” It’s an answer to a question no one was asking.

No-on-recall, keep Gavin Newsom, was all about process versus outcome. Who in their right mind is going to defend the outcome of having Newsom in charge? Taxpaying residents heading for the hills, shit on the sidewalk, the place is literally in flames…but our guy in charge does have a defense. It’s all about “gonna follow the science!” — not about what’s supposed to be the whole point of leadership, leaving things in a condition better than how you found them.

When process people defend themselves this way, things get awkward fast because they’re bolstering a claim of premiere excellence, atop an accumulation of evidence that supports nothing better than adequacy. You can’t do an excellent job of following a process; that’s strictly pass-fail. But this doesn’t stop them from trying. Lookit me following the science! I’m following the CDC! They yell jump, I say how high? Clearly, I’m irreplaceable!

Everybody likes to be thought of as intelligent, but intelligence is the ability and the willingness to learn. Learning is a non-instinctive behavioral change. You have to screw up and admit you did it wrong. Only outcome people can do this, because only they monitor the outcome, with a genuine potential for saying to themselves, if the situation calls for it: “Well, that sucks. Let’s do it differently next time.”

When we debate taxing businesses, we’re actually debating destroying businesses. Outcome people tend to be pro-business, because you really can’t run a business while ignoring outcomes, unless your “business” is some government agency that never runs out of money. Conversely, you aren’t going to fit into any of those “businesses” in any capacity, unless you’re a process person.

The China Virus has polarized us deeply, because we’ve responded with a thorny thicket of rules rules and more rules, which are refined day-to-day by process people. You’ll notice this refinement, back to the very beginning, has had very little to do with results. That’s why. Meanwhile, the people who are fixated on these rules rules and more rules, and obliged to live under them, are outcome people. We care about the results. “But my shelter in place order was the approved method at the time” doesn’t mean an awful lot to us.

“Masks are how we keep each other safe!” is fraud, not because it’s demonstrably untrue (although certainly, support for it is lacking). It’s a deceitful statement because it’s what process people say when they’re pretending to be outcome people. They don’t care about keeping each other safe. They’d prefer people be safe versus not safe…maybe….but they really care about following and enforcing rules.

“I’m following the guidance from the CDC” is, at least, honest. It’s a process person presenting himself or herself as a process person. The final outcome which is on everybody’s mind, is a mere afterthought to such a person, but at least there’s no effort spent to pretend otherwise.

When people are forced to give up one thing for another thing, and thereby make clear what their priorities really are, the thing that rates highest to everyone with a working brain is a good outcome. When push comes to shove, no one with functioning intellect really cares about process, except as a means to an end. We’d sacrifice it in a heartbeat for the other, because we’re rational. But we’re not letting outcome-people actually make any decisions about anything. From the beginning, we have invested all the authority in process people. Here we are a year and a half into it, wondering what we did wrong. That’s what.

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Someone We Forgot to Bribe!Wednesday, May 18th, 2022

Don’t Scold MeSaturday, April 30th, 2022

Free Speech and TruthFriday, April 15th, 2022

No Apology, No Note of Contrition or Regret…NothingSunday, April 10th, 2022

I Will Never ForgetSunday, April 10th, 2022

Liberals Have Stopped DiscussingSunday, April 3rd, 2022

When Liberals Don’t KnowThursday, March 24th, 2022

Liberalism is a CultMonday, March 21st, 2022

Where Are the Regretful Voters?Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

Things Happen Because of Other ThingsTuesday, March 8th, 2022

Shiny and Sweet Under the HoodMonday, March 7th, 2022

Intimidated Into InactionMonday, February 28th, 2022

Too Frightening to ContemplateTuesday, February 22nd, 2022

LeadershipSunday, February 13th, 2022

Don’t Look UpSaturday, January 29th, 2022

TruthTuesday, January 11th, 2022

Seven CheckmarksMonday, December 20th, 2021

Intellectual AcumenFriday, December 10th, 2021

Wrong-Person’s RageTuesday, December 7th, 2021

But What Is the Process?Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Guardrailing Me Into the Right OpinionsThursday, December 2nd, 2021

No ConsequencesSunday, November 28th, 2021

Just Who, Exactly, is Requiring Me to Take This Shot?Saturday, November 27th, 2021

CRT Is Not Taught, and Other Talking PointsSaturday, November 27th, 2021

My ExileSaturday, November 27th, 2021

We’re Really Flying BlindMonday, November 15th, 2021

HappinessWednesday, October 27th, 2021

Dumb Movie Noble SacrificesSunday, October 24th, 2021

Is the Science Tinged with Politics, or the Politics Tinged with Science?Sunday, October 10th, 2021

Process and OutcomeSaturday, September 25th, 2021

Someone We Forgot to Bribe!
Wednesday, May 18th, 2022

Don’t Scold Me
Saturday, April 30th, 2022

Free Speech and Truth
Friday, April 15th, 2022

No Apology, No Note of Contrition or Regret…Nothing
Sunday, April 10th, 2022

I Will Never Forget
Sunday, April 10th, 2022

Liberals Have Stopped Discussing
Sunday, April 3rd, 2022

When Liberals Don’t Know
Thursday, March 24th, 2022

Liberalism is a Cult
Monday, March 21st, 2022

Where Are the Regretful Voters?
Wednesday, March 9th, 2022

Things Happen Because of Other Things
Tuesday, March 8th, 2022

Shiny and Sweet Under the Hood
Monday, March 7th, 2022

Intimidated Into Inaction
Monday, February 28th, 2022

Too Frightening to Contemplate
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022

Leadership
Sunday, February 13th, 2022

Don’t Look Up
Saturday, January 29th, 2022

Truth
Tuesday, January 11th, 2022

Seven Checkmarks
Monday, December 20th, 2021

Intellectual Acumen
Friday, December 10th, 2021

Wrong-Person’s Rage
Tuesday, December 7th, 2021

But What Is the Process?
Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Guardrailing Me Into the Right Opinions
Thursday, December 2nd, 2021

No Consequences
Sunday, November 28th, 2021

Just Who, Exactly, is Requiring Me to Take This Shot?
Saturday, November 27th, 2021

CRT Is Not Taught, and Other Talking Points
Saturday, November 27th, 2021

My Exile
Saturday, November 27th, 2021

We’re Really Flying Blind
Monday, November 15th, 2021

Happiness
Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

Dumb Movie Noble Sacrifices
Sunday, October 24th, 2021

Is the Science Tinged with Politics, or the Politics Tinged with Science?
Sunday, October 10th, 2021

Process and Outcome
Saturday, September 25th, 2021