House of Eratosthenes

Oppression — or more accurately, anything that could plausibly be presented under that enticing moniker — is more an asset than a liability, and it is in greater demand than its supply. Jussie Smollett proved that. He had to hire people to assault him so he could play victim.

“Global warming” actually is the same thing as “climate change”; it is the Jussie Smollett game for over-privileged, straight, white, guilty-feeling liberal people. Women can play like they can’t get dates because too many men are intimidated by strong, smart, self-assertive women; blacks can carry on like they’re owed reparations because they’re descended from slaves, which they may or may not be. Gays can pretend they’re still fighting for the right to marry, even though they’ve been over & done with that for awhile; they have the option of appealing to a broader audience capable of noticing this, by transforming the fight into transgender issues.

For everybody else, there is the climate change boogeyman. The fake-oppression for people who are having a tougher time than anybody else faking their oppression.

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Veterans Day 2019
Monday, November 11th, 2019

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Happy Birthday Marine Corps 2019
Sunday, November 10th, 2019

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The Iconics
Thursday, October 31st, 2019

I don’t know about this Colonel Vindman guy. I have noticed online that discussions about anything connected to him, are pretty short: Someone says “war hero” and then there are gasps of righteous indignation against anybody who would dare question this or that…

And this is something I’ve seen before. Every now and then The Left will trot out someone who says something The Left wants said. And if the person was in the right place at the right time, and maybe holds some position that would run contrary to the ugliest stereotypes about The Left, then he or she becomes a hero. From the moment we first learn their names, they’re elevated by their democrat-party handlers to iconic status. We aren’t allowed to question what they do or say. Anyone with a heartbeat who so much as suggests anything short of glowingly positive, faces an onslaught of Internet mockery and derision.

One of them, back in the day, was lionized by a prestigious columnist as holding “absolute moral authority.”

And I have come to a conclusion about them: I don’t trust them. No actually it’s worse than that: They tell me something is so, I immediately disbelieve it. I have doubts if they say water is wet.

It’s not an anti-democrat-party thing. Okay so it is, but only partly. Mostly it’s based on the past track record. These megastars don’t tell the truth very often, and when they do, after all the chips are down you come to find it’s only a half-truth. Sure there are teeming throngs of Internet denizens ready to circle wagons around them, and that’s important because the Internet is fairly reliable as a tell-tale about where the national discourse is, and where it’s going. But it suffers from a horrible reputation when it comes to figuring out what is & isn’t true, and it deserves that horrible reputation. With me, The Iconics have a less than desirable reputation as well. I’d sooner trust a salt-lick canoe.

So say what you want about me. No, I don’t think your Autistic Swedish brat can see carbon dioxide in the air. The Iconics, and their unscrupulous handlers, bore me.

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Thinking Like a Grown-Up
Sunday, October 27th, 2019

In my third-of-a-century arguing with liberals on the Internet, I have occasionally used the phrase “think(ing) like a grown-up” and I’m sure it comes off looking like I’m hurling an insult. Some of those on the receiving end have come back and shown their understanding of logical fallacies, by accusing me of an “ad hom(inem) attack,” which is an elaborate way of demonstrating they’ve missed the point on multiple levels. Since I’m not completely socially inept and stupid, I do reserve use of this phrase for situations where I don’t care about the ensuing person-to-person relationship too much, but that’s different from an actual insult. As an insult, it wouldn’t work very well. We all start out life forming opinions like children, because we start forming them as children. But that doesn’t mean, in adulthood, we should still be doing it the same way.

Persons who think it is uncalled-for need to reconsider their view. We do live in an age in which people tend to be very proud of the conclusions they reach, but not proud at all of the way they got to them. And so they want to talk to excess of the former but not inspect the latter. They cause strife and contention, and then they blame others. But it is true that, in order for this to be a useful observation, I should take more & better responsibility for my definitions. What do I mean by this?

1. First and foremost, you have to release “it makes me feel bad” from its anchoring at center-stage. There are other things to consider. Respect reality. It doesn’t care about your feelings.

2. When you argue with people, do your arguing to discover & disseminate truth. Recognize you can “win” an argument, and be wrong. It logically follows that you can lose, and be right.

3. Use active voice. Word selection and sentence composition influence thinking. “Don’t leave your car unlocked, it will get broken into” encourages desultory thinking, obliterating the subject of the sentence, the vagrant who would be breaking into the car. If something is to be done, someone is doing it, and the root of the problem being discussed is there.

Your Opinion 4. Deal with specifics in your critiques. “Your response is full of logical fallacies” is not specific. It conveys your own disapproval, but nothing else, no justification for dismissal. You may discover, if you go looking for a specific objection, that when all’s said & done you don’t really have one.

5. Recognize cause and effect. This must necessarily mean distinguishing intent from ultimate outcome. “Straw man! I never said to throw the baby over the cliff, I just said to wheel the carriage up to the brink, and then give it a mighty shove.” There are other metaphors we could use. “I never said to blow up the truck, I just said to check the gas level with this cigarette lighter.” “I never said to eliminate jobs by making it hard to hire people, I just said to put the employer on the hook for all sorts of unfunded new expenses.” Your own ignorance of what-causes-what shouldn’t excuse you from the deleterious effects of the bad policies you support. Not unless hurting people is what we’re trying to do.

6. Think about the “lurker variable” when noticing correlations. If two changes seem to be connected with each other, there are four possibilities: A causes B; B causes A; there is an unseen C causing both B and A; or, it could be a coincidence. Four is a lot, so picking out just one of the four as “proof” of your thesis, without something to eliminate one or all of the other three logically, is child-like thinking.

7. Respect your enemies’ successes, talents and skills, and be careful about condemning others who do this. It is one of the thresholds of adult thinking. I don’t agree with Barack Obama on very much of anything, but I can respect His many talents. A general leading a charge against a resourceful and determined adversary, is more likely to prevail if he can appreciate the strengths of the other side even as he tries to make the most of their weaknesses.

8. You don’t get to play the “If this doesn’t convince you nothing ever will” card, if you haven’t yet brought a compelling “this.” People who apply this note of resignation, to terminate the discussion when they haven’t yet made their case, are arguing like children and almost certainly doing their thinking like children.

9. Since the argument is supposed to be about the true nature of things & what to do about it, not a duel to show who’s wonderful & who sucks — it doesn’t do achieve anything constructive to get lost in “Trivial Pursuit” games and show your opponent doesn’t know something. Even if the nugget of trivia he doesn’t know is strongly related to the topic, there’s a good chance he could still be supporting the right answer and you could be supporting the wrong one. So when the nugget is only weakly related this becomes even more of a likelihood. There’s nothing disgraceful about ignorance in & of itself. We’re all born ignorant.

10. In the same way it doesn’t ensure victory showing your opponent doesn’t know how many angels fit on the head of a pin, it also doesn’t ensure victory to highlight your own intransigence. It’s a common game on the Internet: “Nothing you can say will ever change my mind!” This actually works backwards. It shows your position is embraced by at least one person, and likely others, who can’t be told anything and thus are likely uninformed.

11. Recognize when & where your current problems developed from your past errors. If you want to go through life as a smug egotist, that’s okay, you don’t have to admit this to anyone. But it is necessary to at least acknowledge it for yourself, if you want to be credited with greater wisdom at, say, age 35 compared to what you had at age 25, because that’s what it takes to get it done. Without the ability to try things, fail at them, and recognize where you went wrong so you can improve, you don’t learn things from one year to the next. Part of thinking like an adult is anticipating how well your thinking is going to function for you, when you’re an older adult, and nobody wants to be an old fool.

12. Self-restrain. A lot of people rankle at the slippery-slope rebuttal, protesting “I don’t want to do this, I just want to do that.” They want to be given credit for stopping at some point. So, self-stop. If your argument is that a speed limit should be raised from 25 to 35, you should be the first to reckon with the consequences of raising it to 45 or 55. If you want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, you should be able to say why we’re not raising it to $30 — and why we won’t. Why should the line be drawn there? What’s to stop it from being moved?

It could be truthfully said that many, and perhaps all, of the above twelve have to do with preferring light over darkness; could be distilled into a simple “don’t conceal/obfuscate.” It really comes down to that. “I’ve decided this and that’s final” has become a popular structuring of the most passionate (Internet) arguments, in no small part because, as I said above, people are proud of the conclusions they reached but not proud of how they came to them. If that’s a problem, we would all do well to attack it directly, because as a problem it’s been getting bigger and bigger, for quite awhile now.

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“Big Mother”
Sunday, October 27th, 2019

It’s been quite a week. I can’t spare a sufficient block of time to get it all captured, but it has not been lost on me that all of the significant events have to do with a socially accepted set of observations going in one direction, while the truth lies in the opposite direction. We as human beings can do this. We possess an ability, unique within the animal kingdom, to lie to ourselves. I did manage to make a list. It isn’t short. It makes me wonder if we’re becoming so estranged from truth and so anesthetized to even the most blatant attempts to deceive us, we may be losing the whole distinction between truth and falsehood.

1. Mitt Romney was embarrassed by the exposure of his nom de plume, “Pierre Delecto.”

2. ABC News got busted for airing phony war footage.

3. Greta Thornberg, as myself and others have observed before, is not in any position to be commended for giving a wonderful speech, or even to give the wonderful speech in the first place. She’s a child with learning disabilities, and people who recognize her as some source of wisdom or good decision do a disservice to their own reputations. If she’s to be given extra laudatory praise for her Autism-spectrum diagnosis, then she can be criticized for that as well. That’s why it’s a betrayal of trust to be exposing her to this level of discourse. Furthermore, singling out predominantly-white societies and nations for “how dare you” climate-criticism while turning a blind eye to India and China, is racist.

4. Elijah Cummings was subject to a bunch of high-profile hagiography as some kind of big swaggering hero who did all sorts of things to help the less fortunate…and a whole bunch of suddenly-indignant people in all sorts of places, were unable to name those things. Cummings, you’ll recall, was lately the subject of a spat with President Trump over the ramshackle state of his own home district, and seemed to be just fine with large numbers of his own constituents being forced to live with rats.

5. Elizabeth Warren has been working extra hard to get herself established as some kind of a victim, which has led to a pattern involving her getting busted for falsehoods over and over again — since the truth is she’s been quite privileged. And I notice she never backs down after she gets busted. Once it’s definitively established the facts are not on her side, she plays the “I’m still going to win the argument” game.

6. Speaking of democrats running for President. All of these promises they’re making, which they aren’t going to be able to keep anyway, would cost big money. I’m talking play-weird-games-just-to-understand-the-magnitude money. “If I spent such-and-such dollars every minute since the assassination of Julius Caesar” type money. We’re supposed to consider them over Republicans because the Republicans aren’t minding the store on the public debt issue…which has some truth to it. The case is that their tax cuts “cost” money, which is at best a strange way of looking at it, and at worst an out-and-out falsehood. But let’s accept it as truth for sake of argument. If democrats are the answer, what’s up with this “Christmas all 365 days” thing? You have to do so much pretending and so much self-contradiction to consider supporting them. And yet here they are. A major political party.

7. PG&E is pulling the plug on nearly a million ratepayers this weekend…which must translate to millions of people with heartbeats, or more, struggling to figure out how to cope without power. That’s because there’s a lot of dry brush, we just finished up with a hot summer, and there’s wind. There is an established cause-and-effect between PG&E’s equipment and some deadly wildfires we’ve been having, so that’s all on the up-and-up…but…what about all the unasked questions? We have a wind event, then ten days or so without power. What’s to be said of other places with dry hot summers, lots of dead brush, and when there’s a “wind event” — nothing. The power keeps flowing. There are no wildfires. People don’t have to throw out freezers full of meat, kids can keep going to school. We don’t have PG&E, we have SMUD. So, there’s high wind for us, too, this weekend…we get to have power. One doesn’t automatically flow into the other. I mean, if I were a PG&E ratepayer I’d be getting ticked that the most obvious questions don’t seem to be getting much inspection.

8. Politicians and their mansions. A lot of the ink spilled on this is pure-jealousy-stuff, not having much to do with logic and common sense apart from wondering pointedly how our representatives can effectively represent the rest of the nation. The real cause for wonder that doesn’t receive much wondering, though, is the congressperson whose real-livelihood is under a big fat question mark. We don’t actually pay these people mansion-money. So people may get irked over Darrel Issa’s entrepreneurial success, or Jay Rockefeller’s inheritance, but at least we have a rough idea of what’s going on there. With someone like Maxine Waters, we don’t. We only know something’s amiss. We don’t know what.

9. The hate crime hoaxes are pretty much out of control. The Jussie Smollett case was only the most famous example, although that’s a good one, because on hearing it for the very first time anyone with some common sense could see things weren’t fitting into place there. Nevertheless, we were obliged to “believe” it. And all the others. The running-tally of true-ones versus false-ones, in hindsight, seems to be kinda…lopsided. The ones that are blasted all over the place before anyone knows what they are, and thus cannot be cherry-picked by anyone with an agenda, almost always turn out to be hoaxes.

10. Fake families at the border. This one is particularly sultry and seductive. We have a great many fellow citizens among us who, it would appear, simply cannot process the thought that the content of a package may be different from its labeling. MigrantsAndTheirChildren!! It flows out of their mouth like one word. Well…how do you know they’re their children?

My list doesn’t stop there. California’s gas tax for fixing the roads…the bullet train…our wildfires being caused by “global” warming…Trump investigating Joe Biden as a “political rival“…the so-called “impeachment inquiry.” Hillary Clinton calling everybody she doesn’t like a “Russian asset.” The nonsense about “betraying our allies” in Syria, the risibility of the Transgender movement, the leakers being called “whistleblowers,” Caitlyn Jenner being a woman, Kavanaugh’s accusers…

What they all have in common is that they’re lies. But that’s not overly concerning to me, because people have been lying for a long time. What causes distress is the brazenness, the “How’d they ever think they’d get away with it.” And then I realize they’re getting away with it because the people being deceived, are aiding in their own deception. It’s on par with the little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar, insisting that he was actually putting it back into the jar. Except…it’s more like, while he’s offering up this excuse, he continues to take the cookie, remove it from the jar, chew off a piece of it and continue bullshitting you with his ramshackle excuse around the mouthful.

Something is happening. Uh no don’t go there, this pre-dates Trump. But it doesn’t pre-date…let’s say…the first George Bush? Sometime in the last twenty years or so. The lies have deteriorated in quality, to the point where they wouldn’t work if the person being fooled didn’t want to be fooled. And yet they keep working.

As willing as I may be to indulge in political incorrectness — perhaps even with a sense of glee over ticking off the right people, that’s not entirely in good taste — I wouldn’t stoop to blaming girls for it. I don’t like doing that, and that’s in no small part because of the consideration that boys are acting a lot more like girls lately, and vice versa. Sexual stereotypes have moved from being merely needlessly alienating, to being poorly advised, because even if people belonged in their pigeonholes they’re not staying there.

But look what someone else managed to do. Okay, that’s certainly a provocative headline…but I’m keeping an open mind…

“Big Mother”: the Decline of Men and…Truth-telling
Guillaume Durocher • October 27, 2019

The speed of social change in the modern era, and in particular in the contemporary West, is so rapid that we all are liable to feel a bit lost.

A recent example of this was provided by none other than Hillary Clinton, that most “progressive” representative of global oligarchy. You see, the 71-year-old Clinton, whose presidential campaign was premised on making history as the first female presidency, still believes in biological sex:

In an interview with The Sunday Times, journalist Decca Aitkenhead asked the Clintons if someone with a beard and a penis can ever be a woman, to which Chelsea replied emphatically, ‘Yes.’

However, as Aitkenhead describes it, Hillary looked ‘uneasy’, and blamed generational gaps for being less accepting.

‘Errr. I’m just learning about this,’ Hillary responded. ‘It’s a very big generational discussion, because this is not something I grew up with or ever saw. It’s going to take a lot more time and effort to understand what it means to be defining yourself differently.’

…There’s something truly surreal about these kinds of developments. One wonders where to start.

The article then runs through the factual foundation, familiar to many of us already, supporting the trend of shrinking maleness. We’ve made it very cool and socially-uplifting to identify areas of life where women don’t yet have a fair shot at things, and we’ve made it cool to offer them increased, even unfair, opportunities. Once they catch up to men, or even pass them, it’s still cool to notice it’s happened. It’s decidedly not cool to conclude from that, that it’s time for the unfair advantages to go away. The skewed worldview seems to have had a direct effect on our physiology. Testosterone levels are on the decline.

But how is this to blame for our weakening attachment to reality? It’s true the two trends have taken place at roughly the same time, but that’s the very definition of a post hoc fallacy. We need something better.

Well…

The predominance of women is not without consequence for liberty and excellence. A 2015 Pew poll found that women were almost 50% more likely to support government censorship of “statements that are offensive to minority groups” than were men. Women, particularly left-wing women, are more politically intolerant: one survey found that 30% of Democratic women had blocked, unfriended or stopped following someone online for their politics, as against only 8% of Republican men. The London Times reported in May 2016 that female students overwhelmingly supported censorship of university publications if these were “considered offensive to certain groups.”

Naturally, any number of truthful statements may be painful or “considered offensive to certain groups.” Most pointedly, any suggestion that men and women have meaningful biological and psychological differences, and therefore to some degree should have different social roles, will be considered “offensive.”

This highlights the self-reinforcing nature of the Western societies’ feminization.

Among the people I know, the ones who are most likely to remain open to initially-unwelcome ideas, and in so doing are likely to expand their horizons and learn something new, are slightly more likely to be female so this doesn’t jive with my personal experience. But I know the sample pool is tainted because there are some small-minded bitches out there and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. I happen to live in California, and it’s pretty easy to spot them from a good distance away. And I know from my past experiences, from back before I learned how to stay away from small-minded women, how much damage they can do. The “I refuse to listen” men are just as dangerous. But I haven’t been marrying or dating those, so again, I know my perspective is skewed.

On the other hand, though…

While men have historically controlled the priesthoods and the media, it is women who nag their menfolk to live up to the society’s established social norms and be respectable…

As we have become comfortable, so our societies and culture have become feminized and infantilized. Today, it seems that women project their mothering instincts upon all the approved “victim groups” of the world: homosexuals, migrants, and minorities all are their symbolic substitute children. [emphasis mine]

There certainly is an impulse, outside of the women I personally know, to reach out with a suffocating variant of “motherhood.” And to cause some damage. Certainly it’s a valid argument to be considered that men do it too, but that’s not the issue here because there is no concerted, energized agenda to pack high influential offices and committees with men. But we do want to pack them with women. And, what kind of women? The ones i know? Or the ones I seek to avoid?

The answer is the same as it is for any other movement. You make a point of placing a woman in an office of influence, she’ll end up being the screechy, unpleasant, destructive, child-thinking kind. If you make a point of just placing the best and most competent person…it just might end up being a woman. A much better one, who creates, and defends and preserves, and thinks like a grown-up. As you move up into the occupations that involve greater power and trust, and are more widely visible, it seems the effect intensifies. Had Hillary Clinton won the election of 2016, she would have stood as the most extreme example.

With the argument now made, I can see the link between that, and this new strain of “shut up and take my money” fraud that requires sanction of the defrauded. The fraud that requires a sanction of “Okay, you’re lying, I know you’re lying, you know I know, now…aw fuck it let’s just get this thing done.”

Who-to-blame, of course, is always less important than how-fix-it. When a popular notion is an obvious lie, and there are loud angry people surrounding you and prevailing upon you to accept the lie, ready to heckle you mercilessly if you reject it as a lie…it really doesn’t matter if they’re men or women. The fix, I think, is to re-evaluate this unstated but successfully-proliferated idea that some lies are good lies if they hurt & help the right people. It’s easier to do that if we keep in mind that a lot of lies that appear at first blush to hurt no one at all, if you take the time to inspect more closely, you’ll find there are indeed some people being hurt and quite badly.

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My Favorite Die Hard Movie Line
Sunday, October 13th, 2019

It’s not “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” and it isn’t “Welcome to the party, pal.”

It’s “Oh, you’re in charge? Well, I got some bad news for you Dwayne, from up here it doesn’t look like you’re in charge of jack shit.” There is deep meaning here. There is social commentary here that is important.

Putting the Breakfast Club guy here was brilliant casting. He was born for this.

How many Deputy Police Chief Robinsons do we know in real life…you run into them pretty much constantly. They’re “in charge” in the sense that they have an official title and they’re ready to take credit for anything that happens to go right. But they’re not at all attached to the moment-by-moment condition of the overall situation. They aren’t committed. If something goes wrong, they’ll just blame someone else. They are Seagull Managers. They are Grenade People.

My state has a new governor who’s trying to be the anti-Donald-Trump. It is tragic watching this contrast play out every week. He hasn’t got a clue. He’s got the “I never apologize for or regret anything ever” thing down cold…he thinks that’s all there is to it. But Trump is not a grenade-person. He’s a salesman, which is about as annoying…but if you find something wrong with the situation under Trump’s control, and get in an argument with him about it, sure he’s going to insist on having the last word like a little kid. But he’ll still remain attached to, and committed to, the situation. He has plans. If the plans go wrong, he adjusts. Quietly, maybe. He probably won’t admit to it. But he doesn’t abandon. He doesn’t take large fast strides away from it, like a man who just lobbed a grenade, retreating behind some rehearsed lines about “Well you’ll just have to go talk to those other guys, it’s all their fault” or socially browbeat you to change the subject to something else. If he doesn’t like your opinion, he’ll just call you a loser. But he’ll continue to work the problem.

Watching my Governor try to be the democrats’ answer to Trump, is like watching Dwayne Robinson try to be John McClane. It’s just a pathetic sight to see.

Gov. Newsom, from down here it doesn’t look like you’re in charge of jack shit.

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I Made a New Word LXXVII
Sunday, October 13th, 2019

Grenade Person (n.)

A grenade is the furthest you can get from any kind of precision instrument. There’s no scope-sighting, no aiming, no plan to adjust for wind, downgrade, muzzle velocity, bullet weight in grains…just an explosive projectile lobbed in at an approximate Grenade location. Such people demand and require uncontested control over whatever is happening. Everything in earshot or line-of-site has to be exposed and subject to their frag. They are the last to compromise on anything and the first to ostracize any dissenters who show too much recalcitrance or hesitation to “get with the program.” If you continue with your not-getting-on-board bad behavior, you will find yourself subject to some passionate gossip while your back is turned, sure as the sun rises in the East.

But they take no responsibility whatsoever for the ultimate outcome. Just like the grenade tosser. In fact, after they’ve run things for awhile there is a perceptible similarity between the aftermath, and the wreckage left by a live grenade. That’s what they do, they just pull the pin and walk away. Power and responsibility; they want all of the former, none of the latter.

You run into them at work, you want to go home as soon as you can. You run into them at home, you want to go on a long vacation. Maybe fake your own death and move to another continent. They make life short, but seem long.

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Take Your “Investigating His Political Opponents” and Cram It
Saturday, October 5th, 2019

The overall thrust of the piece by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel is anti-impeachment, which is the correct opinion. But even the obligatory disclaimer that makes up the first paragraph, with its status as essentially throwaway, get-this-out-of-the-way ballast, is too much for me to take.

Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent, Joe Biden. Some Republicans are trying, but there’s no way to spin this as a good idea. Like a lot of things Trump does, it was pretty over-the-top. Our leaders’ official actions should not be about politics. Those two things need to remain separate. Once those in control of our government use it to advance their political goals, we become just another of the world’s many corrupt countries. America is better than that.

I cut it off after those last five words, they were enough to make me reach for a bucket. This is propaganda of the enemy. I know that for sure; I get their fund-raising and petition-soliciting e-mails. The communication from the democrats, to the lightly-informed, is that we have to have impeachment because of foreign interference in our elections. Trump, supposedly, was “digging up dirt on his political opponents.” It’s a good sound bite because it sounds like Watergate Part II. There’s just one problem. It’s poppycock.

Biden is a very odd case. Common sense, only a dash of it, will confirm he’s not going to be President. I realize the Hollywood A-listers were saying that about Trump 3 years ago and that didn’t age well, but in Biden’s case it’s really true. He can’t even be nominated. And yet the polls have been putting him out in front, by a large margin, so to those who are eager to have opinions but are OmgWayTooBusy to actually follow the news, Trump must have hatched a plan to clear the playing field of Joe-Freakin’-Biden, after that his second term would be assured. Yeah. Um…it’s actually not possible for it to have happened that way.

The polls might be reporting correct raw data about Biden’s double-digit leads, but it’s only raw data. He’s not really a front-runner. He’s not even a contender. Trump doesn’t need a plan to deal with him, and if ever he does need a plan to deal with him it will be something far, far simpler, something along the lines of “just let him talk.” So spare me, please, your hyperventilating about how this must be Trump dealing with political opponents the only way he knows how. Anybody who knows anything knows that’s not what is happening here, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know anything so why should I care what you say?

But there’s an impeachment inquiry, so he must have done something wrong! Well, the first fifty percent of that is true. And you’ll note the “inquiry” is not really what it is being made out to be. It’s all packaging, no substance. But understand this: The packaging has to be there.

It’s important to the beltway crowd that impeachment, or something that looks like it, happens for five reasons:

1. It doesn’t protect Biden. If anything, it pushes his misdeeds out into the limelight which makes it easier to get rid of him. And by the way, this is working just fine so far. Obviously a lot of people want that, and not because of any likelihood he has to win. The man’s a constant embarrassment.

2. The democrats don’t have anything else. Unemployment is at an historic low now. The picture is crystal clear that if we want some actual positive results they shouldn’t run anything, exactly what I’ve been saying for years and years.

3. The democrats’ base will eat them alive if they don’t get something that at least resembles impeachment.

4. They need to establish a precedent that looking into these kinds of transactions potentially carries repercussions, since Biden is far from the only one who’s been playing this game.

5. Rightly or wrongly, they see Vice-President Pence as another Romney. They can withstand a bloodless revolution every four years and they can tolerate these unwelcome opinions about lower taxes and strong defense and abortion-is-murder, but they cannot abide this “punch back twice as hard” thing and they hate being mocked. They want their lose-with-a-smile Republicans back, the ones who look good in a suit and babble away about this thing or that thing being “deeply troubling” before they disappear.

But the go-along-to-get-along, know-nothing, “Please give me an opinion for me to have at the Thanksgiving table” voters think it’s all about Trump going after his political enemies, starting with the most threatening one: Joe Biden.

Bull squeeze. Biden’s filthy-dirty and guilty as hell. Our government has three branches, the legislative, the executive and the judicial. Now, which one investigates? Who manages that? This is Civics 101 stuff.

So with all due respect: Cram it. Take your deeply-troubling, your spooky Watergate-redux language about digging up dirt on political opponents, wad it up into a little ball with your “we’re better than that,” and stick it where the sun don’t shine. Seriously, in what universe does that make sense? You run for President one time, and from that point until whenever the sun burns out you’re a “political opponent” and so you’re immune, no one can ever speak of starting an investigation on you? We want that precedent set? That’s what it takes to make us better than something? Better noodle that one over a bit more there, Tex.

It would be funny if it weren’t dangerous and sad.

3 Comments »

The White, Middle-Age Males Calling Out the Swedish Brat
Tuesday, October 1st, 2019

Isn’t this a rather odd headline?

White, middle-aged Christian private school principal slams climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, 16, as a ‘little girl with mental problems’ – and urges students not to believe her ‘doomsday waffle talk’

A Christian private school principal has savaged 16-year-old climate campaigner Greta Thunb[e]rg and called her a ‘little girl with mental problems’.

Rodney Lynn, head of Coffs Harbour Christian Community School, wrote a letter to pupils and parents on September 26.

He did not mention Greta by name but told pupils not to pay attention to her impassioned speech at the UN which went viral last week.

In the speech, the Swedish activist tearfully urged politicians to take action on climate change to stop the planet from being destroyed.

But Mr Lynn dismissed her as ‘a little girl from Scandinavia’ who was full of ‘doomsday waffle talk’.

In the letter seen by the ABC, he said she was a ‘little girl with self declared various emotional and mental problems that she thinks give her a special insight into a pending doom’.

‘My life experience has taught me that the doomsday predictors are just attention getters.’

In a message to his pupils, he added: ‘Do not be afraid. Your world’s future is in the hands of God, not in the predictions of a little girl and false prophets.’

It seems like this isn’t anything to worry about over on that side of the Atlantic, and I know I’m not one to talk, but that headline seems really…bloated. It looks like there might have been a prior version with just-the-facts, and an editor looked at it and said “That’s not going to make our readers angry enough at this guy, you need to put in his quotes so they get properly ticked.” And don’t forget to mention you…know…what.

Speaking at the United nations last Monday Greta broke down in tears while furiously scolding international delegates for not taking responsibility for fixing the planet’s warming climate.

A host of Australian celebrities lined up to criticise Greta after her speech. Her supporters said most of the criticism came from white, middle-aged men. [emphasis mine]

Hmmm…I’ve seen this somewhere before. Where? Ah…here.

Jeremy Clarkson’s daughter has slammed middle-aged men for criticising Greta Thunberg – as the Grand Tour star branded the climate change activist a ‘spoilt brat’. Emily Clarkson made her feelings known on Twitter, referring to a tweet by John Bishop in which the comedian praised the 16-year-old for being an inspiration and ‘breathing life’ into the debate surrounding climate change.’ Quoting his post, she wrote: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if all middle aged blokes could talk to and about Greta, the ballsy af teenager out there changing the world, like this.’ She makes a good point…

++blink++ She does? And what would that be? That looks to this “middle aged bloke” like nothing more than emotional reasoning and lusting.

Hey do you people even know what “a good point” is? I could try to explain, but I’m sure I’ll be kinder to your own workload and time allocation, along with my own, if I just provide an example.

How dare we? No. How dare you sail to America on a carbon fibre yacht that you didn’t build which cost £15million, that you didn’t earn, and which has a back-up diesel engine that you didn’t mention.

I’m sorry Ms Thunberg, but if you’re going to lay into my generation, you must accept it when I lay into you and yours.

What about the pills you take when you have a headache?

What about the clean water that comes out of your tap? What about the food you can buy at any time of the day and night?

No 16-year-old was responsible for any of that.

What about the aid missions currently being run in some of the poorest countries of the world, or the drugs that help keep Aids at bay?

Think about all the movies you’ve enjoyed. Movies made by grown-ups. And all those comedians who’ve made you laugh.

And then pause for a moment to consider how soundly you sleep at night, knowing that adults are building and servicing and flying Sweden’s fighter planes. To keep you safe.

We gave you mobile phones and laptops and the internet. We created the social media you use every day and we run the banks that pay for it all.

So how dare you stand there and lecture us, you spoilt brat.

And yes, you are spoilt because when you told your mum and dad to stop using planes and give up meat, they didn’t behave like sane parents and ignore you. They actually said, “Yes, dear.” And did.

It’s the difference between emotional reasoning and logical reasoning. The difference between closing one’s eyes to things, versus opening them, looking, and pondering what things mean. Emily Clarkson does it one way, her father does it the other way. His way is better.

But back to this “white, middle-aged men” thing. I thought it was a bit odd when I myself was on the receiving end of some criticism after setting my phone ringtone to Ms Thunberg’s polished-thespian professional-warbling “How Dare You!” — which makes me very happy, by the way. My critic called me a white middle-aged male, which is something I can’t change, but also he happens to be one of those guilty-white-liberal males who actually has half a year on me. Still, I thought little of it at the time. Just liberals pigeonholing people by race and sex, which is what they do.

But with these three examples, and some others, we have an established pattern. It is clear a talking-point has been circulated from some central point somewhere, to marginalize anybody who has objections to the spoiled child’s rantings and make sure, should they qualify, to call them out as a “white, middle-aged male.”

Seems like a fragile public relations strategy. It’s not the optimal time. White is negotiable now, right? We’re still debating whether Elizabeth Warren is or isn’t, even after she had that expensive DNA test done. Middle-age is always open for discussion. And although science says otherwise, our culture has decided “male” is an open question too.

Still & all, there’s something to their observation. With their implication that this means an opinion should be bulldozed to the gutter just because of the demographic of those who hold it, those who promulgate the talking point have branded themselves as racists, sexists and ageists. But they’re not wrong, even a blind squirrel can find a nut. How come so few people are identifying a problem with the world accepting orders and scoldings from a mentally ill teenager? And how come we’re almost all “middle-aged white males”? Is it because, as they imply, there’s something about us that is inherently indecent?

I can dismiss that as a possibility with my own limited experience. I know lots of minorities who can see what’s wrong with exploiting this girl; young people see what’s wrong with it, old people see what’s wrong with it, women see what’s wrong with it. This kind of common sense is not exclusively a white middle-age male thing. The not-white not-male old-n-young just aren’t as vocal, they don’t say it out loud. It seems speaking out about it is the thing.

Well isn’t it obvious?

White middle-age males have nothing to lose. This new-world-order of sorts rejects us by default; we could be accepted if we say a bunch of woke-stuff some of us aren’t willing to say. We already threw out our Gillette crap after that dumb ad, so we’re not going to go chasing our maze-cheese by signaling away with “I hate 4x4s!“. Non-white non-middle-age non-male people, not subject to the verdict of guilty-til-proven-innocent, can achieve this level of acceptance merely by being quiet. Therefore they have something to lose. So because our liberals are sexist and racist, and they’ve had influence in forming and reforming this new culture, the playing field is a bit uneven. We, the white middle-aged males our liberals detest — nevermind that many among them are themselves white middle-aged males of the self-loathing sort — are left to consider invocation of The Morgan Rule: “If I’m gonna be accused, I wanna be guilty.” There’s no reason not to so invoke. For the better and more desirable demographic segments, the situation doesn’t exist. Well anyway, that’s one explanation.

White middle age males are not worse than everybody else. We’re not better either. What’s happened is that your blatant discrimination against us as had the exact opposite effect on us from what it was supposed to have: It’s liberated us. To say the obvious things everybody else is thinking. In fact, in a funny kind of way, it has obliged this segment of the population to point out what we, uniquely, can say without losing anything we haven’t already lost:

To throw her into the public eye is unforgivable. It’s clear she is not pretending to be terrified about an eco-Armageddon, an emotion likely compounded by her conditions. Has anyone who supposedly cares about her thought this through? She really believes this garbage. She thinks we’re all going to die, horribly and soon. She doesn’t get that this is a grift, a scam, a political ploy…But when faced with the reality that people aren’t willing to surrender their money and freedom simply because she demands it, she may lose hope. What happens if this precious child hurts herself?

That’s obvious. Her backers would cynically morph her from living demigod to martyr and blame you for what happened, you awful, selfish people who refused to submit to the emotional blackmail that underlies the whole Greta of Arc campaign.

Let go of this kid, you creeps.

Yes racist-sexist-ageist liberals, you’re seeing different behaviors from different demographic portions. That’s because you’ve constructed the dynamic that confronts those different portions with different situations and different ramifications for speaking out on true-but-forbidden things, like the above.

But you know, that might be changing. Basic human decency is not an exclusively white-male middle-age thing either, and exploiting children for your climate-change scare-mongering, for the reasons Colonel Schlichter offers, is a truly low blow. So you’ve got a strategy to marginalize anyone who objects based on our race? Well enjoy that clean simple breakdown while you still can, and maintain awareness of the passage of time; the battleground will shift, as it always does. Women, in particular, don’t like seeing children thrust into situations inappropriate for them.

Your racist, sexist, ageist talking point is milk. Note the sell-by date carefully, it’s bound to curdle quickly.

3 Comments »

The Scariest Prognostication
Sunday, September 29th, 2019

I see it has become trendy to prognosticate. We’re supposed to speak of future events with all the certainty we’d have if we were recalling something from the past. These are supposed to be meaningful but simplistic, staccato things, like exclamation marks you find at the end of sentences. The equivalent of “You’re going to fall off that ladder and bust your ass.” Except missing the implied “unless you fix the ladder.”

These aren’t real expressions of future events the speaker actually finds to be likely, although they’re supposed to be; they’re more like attention-getting devices. The prognostications are supposed to be scary.

Well, brace yourself, I’ve got a doozy. Several of them. They’re so scary, many among the people you see every day and talk to every day can’t handle them!

Scary Trump will not be impeached, or if he is impeached he will not be removed. Republicans and democrats will think back on it in entirely different ways, just like they do now with Bill Clinton’s impeachment. The 2020 elections will proceed and Trump will be re-elected if he deserves it, and not if he doesn’t…he’ll probably win it. History will therefore record it as a rather meaningless election compared to the others before & afterward.

Alternative fuel sources will continue to refine and evolve, becoming more and more affordable, but we have about 100-150 years before they can actually replace fossil fuels. Until then they’ll be less reliable and more expensive so people will keep burning oil, and coal.

We’re going to continue to emit more and more carbon. China and India will be given lots of fake credit for their “plans” to get cleaner, but they won’t. We’re going to read lots of reports about “hottest [month]/[day] in [city] ON RECORD” and it won’t mean a thing. The planet will cope just fine.

We won’t learn a thing from kids. How could we? They’re kids. The kids won’t be the first generation ever to be poorer than their parents…unless they choose to be, by being lazy. And then if they end up lazy and poor and wanting to blame others for it, they won’t break any ground there either. Many, many others who came along earlier have been uninspired, unambitious, slothful, dilatory, and ended up in bleak circumstances, wanting to blame others for their plight, or for their lack of options. There’s nothing novel about this. And they didn’t learn from the examples of those who worked harder and gave up more so they could earn more, to the contrary they elected candidates and promoted policies for “equality,” so they could plunder the assets from those who had earned them. There’s nothing novel about that either. “Bernie bros” have existed before and they’re going to exist some more.

In short, we’re going to struggle away, working, playing, sleeping, fornicating, eating, defecating — and prognosticating — womb to tomb, just like our grandparents and great-great-grandparents, nothing really remarkable about us on a generational scale. Whatever makes us extraordinary will be confined to our individual deeds, by which we’ll show our priorities, our trustworthiness, and our levels of commitment to things. After that’s all done, we’ll be buried or cremated and then life will go on for others who, if we’re exceptionally fortunate, and exceptionally accomplished, and worthy, might very occasionally speak of us in a positive way.

And that’s it.

Scary, huh?

1 Comment »

Impeach Adam Schiff
Friday, September 27th, 2019

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

As Scott noted earlier, during a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee earlier today, committee chairman Adam Schiff purported to quote from the transcript of President Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelensky…

Schiff simply lied. Not a word of his tirade came from the transcript of the president’s conversation with Zelensky. Schiff made it all up, and it didn’t resemble the actual transcript in any respect.

Apart from the fact that it shows once again what a disgusting liar Adam Schiff is, why is his “parody” important? Because it shows the baselessness of the Democrats’ case against Trump. If Trump had actually said anything objectionable–let alone impeachable!–in his conversation with Zelensky, Schiff would have quoted it. But because the conversation was entirely innocent, Schiff couldn’t quote a line of it.

Chairman Schiff, caught spinning his web of falsehood, went full-teenager with the “it was a joke doncha get it” defense. I would expect this from a typical leftist, but I’m surprised to see a supposedly accomplished former prosecutor using this. Prosecution is supposed to have something to do with, you know, real facts.

Host Wolf Blitzer asked, “Well, do you regret what you called the parody, the use of those phrases during the course of your opening statement?”

Schiff responded, “No. I think everyone understood, and my GOP colleagues may feign otherwise, that…I was mocking the president’s conduct.”

It does seem like we’ve seen a lot of this lately. It’s a way of accusing-the-accuser: “Everyone gets it. Except this one guy who’s pointing a finger at me. Well watch out everybody, here is a weirdo who doesn’t understand humor.” And then we’re all obliged to pretend for a moment or two that not-having-humor is like, I dunno, the worst thing you can do or something.

Fellow congressman Trey Gowdy wasn’t having it.

“Adam Schiff has one of the worst senses of humor of anyone I’ve ever met[.]…So, he doesn’t need to try parody.”

…Gowdy said Schiff is essentially doing what he did during the Russia collusion allegations, although this time he is making up evidence.

“This is the same show; they said he had evidence of collusion. He’s not making that mistake this time…He’s just gonna make it up and he made it up on national television,” Gowdy said.

There are people who don’t consider themselves to lean left, but they don’t see anything at all wrong with what Schiff did.

You could think of them as the example-patients of the mental illness that has enshrouded our modern culture. They’ll acknowledge the rudimentary framework of competent adulthood, that we make decisions about what to do based on our opinions, and we form those opinions from facts. But it’s okay to rewrite things at your leisure when you determine what those so-called “facts” are. Truth is whatever makes you feel good when you think about it. Or whatever you can sell to others. How did Joe Biden put it? “We choose truth over facts.”

Since ignoring the gap between your perceptions and reality is okay, it follows that it’s okay to contribute to that gap yourself. If you get caught, just say it’s a joke.

If you don’t get caught, make your opinions and your decisions based on it. Aw heck, go ahead and do that whether you get caught or not.

Supposedly, I’m demonstrating the lack of civility that is troubling us all when I say things like “These people are caricatures of the kind we don’t want making meaningful decisions.” Well they are, and we don’t. Look at what they’re doing here. Trump is supposed to be guilty and punished, ditto Mike Flynn, Scooter Libby, that cop who shot the “hands up don’t shoot” thug, Kavanaugh, the Convington kids; and then meanwhile it goes the other way for Comey, Hillary, Al Sharpton, Strzok, Page, all of whom were demonstrably guilty and by rights should’ve ended up wearing stripes and making license plates.

This errant thinking brings real consequences.

We culturally require a correction to our coordinates and a correction to our bearing. We’re way past the point where Oprah Winfrey felt she was on safe ground babbling away with her gibberish about “your truth.” We’re way past the point of convicting people without solid evidence and acquitting people we know are guilty. That’s too far.

An example would be good. It’s not like I’m calling for his bloody decapitated head to fall in a basket or anything. But he should certainly lose his position for this stunt. It shouldn’t even fall to anyone ideologically opposed to him to say so; those who are aligned with him, should be the first ones clamoring for him to resign or to be forcibly removed.

3 Comments »

Greta Thunberg
Tuesday, September 24th, 2019

Deanna Fisher writes at Victory Girls:

Malena Ernman and Svante Thunberg – you have failed your daughter in almost every way imaginable. My pity for her is laced with my contempt for you.

You allowed an impressionable young girl with autism and depression to work herself into an obsessive state over something she cannot control. I hate to break it to you, but no one person on this earth can control the climate any more than they can control the weather.

When Greta began obsessing over climate change and by her own admission, fell into a depression so deep that she couldn’t eat, what did you do?

SVANTE THUNBERG: Yeah. She made us realize that we were these parents, you know, standing up for human rights and refugees and right and wrong and all these things. And we were really fighting for that. And then she said, you know, “Whose human rights are you standing up for?” You know, when my wife, for instance, went to Japan to make concerts and being on Japanese TV—you know, very important. You know, it was a good reason to travel across the world to do that. But when she got home, you know, Greta sort of worked out how much—how many tons of carbon dioxide she had spent on that and how many people’s carbon budget that was living in West Africa, for instance. So, she basically, you know, confronted us with that. You know, “Whose human rights are you standing up for, when you are draining the world’s resources, the functioning atmosphere, for instance?” And so we basically realized, in the end, after a couple of years of her going on about it, that we had to change. You know, we had to stop doing these things. And that really had an enormous effect. She made her much more happy. And she changed a lot with that. So, yeah.”

You allowed a child to become a dictator in your own home. You are fools.

The alwarmists are convinced young Ms. Thunberg is a new face for their movement. They’re right. That’s not a good thing.

There are people who lose patience with people like me because I put liberals in a special little pigeonhole. I don’t see them as fully competent adults who are laboring away at a goal common with the rest of us, who just have a different method in mind for getting there. I see them as suffering from development problems, people who aren’t thinking with their whole brains, high-drama, easily distracted types who are doing net harm. Stuff like this, is why I see them that way. Even the most ardent Thunberg fan, would never go so far as to assert this sixteen-year-old with special needs has some actual knowledge to impart to us. Just as even the most ardent Obama fan wouldn’t have gone so far as to assert our 44th President knew something special about how to re-tool our health care system.

In their special little world, it’s all about the rhetoric. The word choice, the delivery, the agent…the story. And unlike here in the real world where adults do productive things, in their little pocket universe there is zero room for doubt about any of it.

Fisher continues…

And did you know Greta has a sister, Beata? My heart hurts for her, because their parents have been cowed by one child to the detriment of the other.

So, here we are, with Greta Thunberg standing in front of the cameras, proclaiming that her dreams and her childhood have been “stolen” from her.

I’m sorry, WE didn’t do that, Greta. Your parents, in failing their first duty as a parent, stole your childhood. In not setting boundaries, they let you become a tiny tyrant. In not getting you appropriate therapy, they let you fall victim to your own depression and anxiety. By not appropriately redirecting your autism-focused obsession, they have let you become this – a child who is shunning a full education because you think you know everything there is to know about your chosen subject. They have failed you as parents, and are now unleashing you on the rest of us.

It’s time for everyone to say the word that Greta Thunberg never heard from her own parents: NO.

Well…hate to say it, but that isn’t going to happen. So let’s consider what’s really being taught here.

Ms. Thunberg is not spurring any particular legislative body into meaningful action. There’s nothing the U.N. is going to do, nothing that the U.S. Congress is going to do, that will make her happy. She’s just going to keep scowling, forever, just like that other little twerp. It will become her identity, and her identity will become her whole livelihood. She has learned that messages sell. The planet is not in peril, it will be here for a good long time, but the thing that really makes it spin on its axis is guilt. So what you need to do is lie about how you think the planet is going to die, to make people feel guilty…and that’s the whole point to life now.

Thunberg sailed to New York on a boat. Her 15-day voyage has its own Wikipedia entry…because starry-eyed New York Times readers like to think of her as Moana. Well…no. That’s the romantic fantasy. It’s also a romantic fantasy that the sailboat came into play because air travel is filthy and Gretta doesn’t want to do it, but there’s all sorts of air travel connected with this so-called “voyage” so — ONCE AGAIN — it becomes a symbolic thing, something that doesn’t make logical sense when scrutinized and measured, just like our plastic straw ban.

Follow the money. Everybody wants their own industry to become more important. If the public at large is interested in these ecological efforts, even temporarily, with their heads full of all sorts of wrong ideas, then at least they’re interested and the people working those efforts who get to make a profit, make a bigger one.

But that doesn’t mean anyone is making anything better.

And now we know harm can be done, without the most impassioned advocates reconsidering anything, indeed without having any of them so much as skip a beat. Quite to the contrary: Doing harm, knowing they’re doing harm, they’ll charge full steam ahead.

We don’t need to speculate on this or wonder about it. We know for sure.

2 Comments »

Memo For File CCXIII
Tuesday, September 24th, 2019

I notice as I’ve gone through life, the kids who got the good grades in school have been met by the same challenges as the kids who were, uh, like me. Everyone gets knocked on their ass sometime or another. Everyone gets told at some point or another, by life itself, “Sorry…great job, wonderful natural talent…it isn’t needed here.”

It must be deflating for the ones who went Kindergarten through graduation, having never been told that. It’s a very special kind of pain. It isn’t like “Sorry, your skills aren’t sharp enough, practice some more.” To be told you’re practicing at the wrong thing, that you need to work an entirely different set of skills, and until you do you can forget all about making any kind of special impact that you thought for sure you were going to make.

It would seem humans are not hard wired to deal with this. We don’t inwardly understand the concept of a snipe hunt. Once we’ve convinced ourselves there is a snipe, we will chase it forever. This is where the fantasizing about the imminent extinction of the human race is given birth. People start to think “Well if I’m not extra special that way, then I must be extra special in the sense that I’ll be around for the final curtain call, closing credits, my story is written in the very last pages of the book.”

Snipe Hunt This is why climate change alwarmists vacillate so effortlessly between “It’s way too late now, you should have listened to us” and “We still have one last chance, we have to act within 10-20 years.” The rest of us are supposed to assume, because some of it is based on science — “CO2 is a greenhouse gas” — it’s all science. No that’s not true. The important parts of it are based on human psychology, depression, mental enfeeblement and spiritual impoverishment. It’s entire generations of motivated, ambitious, potentially accomplished prodigies being reduced to living, breathing solutions in search of problems.

Life has told them they’ll never be special unless they change the bearing of their course, and develop a different suite of skills. It’s a tough, tough message. I know. I had to learn to listen to it; it isn’t easy. Most people choose not to listen to it.

That’s why the scam works so well. We are technologically advanced — you’ll notice the doom-saying resonates best in the First World. The important work, by & large, is done. Here in the First World, where we have to re-define the word “poverty” in order to have something we can measure at all, the work that really has to get done, work that’s survival-related, is mostly done in our sparsely-populated farm country.

Where the population density is much higher, we like to think of ourselves as irreplaceable. And within a narrow stretch of time, a few people may be. But just a few, and for only that narrow stretch. The office isn’t forced to close if we call in sick for the day. In our absence, people are inconvenienced maybe but they won’t starve. After we’re gone, the people who depend on us will learn to cope. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we wouldn’t want it any other way, right?

When people talk up the perils of climate change, you’re listening to someone who can’t swallow the bitter pill. Guilty white liberals lecturing other guilty white liberals, not anybody in India or anybody in China. You’re listening to people coping with the unwelcome realization that they’re not irreplaceable. You’re listening to someone who’s having trouble with it. Lots and lots of trouble.

Call it an Al-Gore-Rhythm, maybe.

That’s the really cool thing about developing new technology: If I’m in the middle of building something and aliens abduct me or I get hit by a bus, you know what happens? Nothing! An effort to develop something new, stops. Or, we have to find another guy. It’s lost capital, and that’s worst-case. So with that uncomfortable realization out of the way, let’s see what we can do to build something that was not there before; what we can do to make other people’s lives easier and better. There is a certain level of sanity reached in it: I believe in what I do, but I’m not going to pretend I’m the one guy on the planet who has a truly irreplaceable job. So I don’t have to go chasing off after snipes or jackalopes trying to convince myself I’m somehow irreplaceable.

That’s me though. Why do other software people lean left? You’ll have to ask them. But I can offer that it’s easy in our line of work to form visions about how users will be using the systems we build — it’s necessary to get the job done — and a lot of the time, most of the time, those visions get a little bit…I’m sure you’ve seen this from running the apps…too well-formed. Too crystallized.

The guy who wrote it, knew what he knew, but he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

Just like your average climate-change zealot.

Oh and nine times out of ten, he was convinced that if he took a walk or ceased to exist, the project would come to a complete stop. And he was wrong.

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An Honest Sales Pitch for Climate Change
Wednesday, September 18th, 2019

As much as I talk about “believing in science,” and “what science has shown us,” I’m not going to want you to be thinking about that when I issue my prognostications of imminent doom for the planet because scientific findings do not portend imminent doom for the planet. You know it and I know it.

I find it awful that Trump has withdrawn us from the climate change talks, and I will support candidates who pledge to reinsert us into those talks, because I know this is about a shift of power and money. I like the idea of pushing nations into a socialist economic model, I like the burdens and obligations that are being heaped upon developed nations and I like the perks and the exemptions and the benefits that are being directed to developing nations. I think developed nations are bad and developing nations are good. That’s because I think of developed nations as western evil rich white people and I think of developing nations as third-world good poor non-white people. I will not even pause to consider any real-life disruptions in these clean binary divisions, won’t think about spillage or overlap, you can’t bother me with your impure thoughts about good people living in developed nations or bad people living in developing nations. I like my cartoonish pigeonholing and my simple narratives. I apply emotional reasoning to everything, which is ironic given that I’m ready to mock you mercilessly if you so much as hesitate to accept the non-scientific prophesies of doom that I call “the science.”

I just don’t trust businesses. They impact the lives of others with their decisions, and I don’t know the names of these people so I’d rather have this “unchecked and unfettered capitalism” properly regulated, and checked by clipboard-carrying bossy people who’ve never produced anything in their entire lives…whose names I also don’t know. I think the former can do nothing right and the latter can do nothing wrong because, again, emotional reasoning.

This would be an honest sales pitch for climate change.

But no one would buy that…so we have to pretend the planet is in crisis.

2 Comments »

Three Orgies
Sunday, September 15th, 2019

It’s a trip to Crazytown, USA because each one of the three of these orgies is in full swing, and each one is just as dangerous for the country as the other two:

1. No borders
2. Unproductive/uncommitted people voting themselves gifts from the public treasury
3. Ban all the things!!

This much-discussed, seven-hours-at-a-throw imbroglio about “climate change” is merely a subset of #3, an excuse for banning-all-things. From nuclear power to drinking straws…it’s all silly but maybe viewed through this lens it doesn’t look quite so silly.

My Saturday-beerfest-guest, of whom I think highly, was asking me why I’m a conservative and not a liberal. Not wishing to offend, I gave the whole subject a cursory but respectful brush-off claiming that Jimmy Carter taught me their answers simply don’t and cannot work. Which is true. But if I wanted to be a bit more abrasive about it I would have cited #2 above. We can’t survive over the long haul this way. No republic can. If history has taught us anything, it’s that any association of people has a certain level of health about it, which rises and falls according to the health of the habits of its congregants. If you have healthy habits and can provide for yourself, you’re not going to be voting yourself alms from the coffers because there won’t be any need. So this must proliferate and empower unhealthy habits. It must. There’s no getting around it.

#1 and #3 reveal the political gamesmanship that threatens to tear our country apart: The democrats wish to rebel against a law, while at the same time come up with some more laws against things that in this moment are perfectly lawful? They conflict with each other. And they reveal this side to be nothing more than an agent of lasting chaos. A feel-good, fix-nothing movement to be participated in & enjoyed by those who are missing, or failing to make use of, any functional understanding of the fundamental concept of time. Snapshot-mode people. The ones who perceive their surroundings like a Mayfly, with its flash-in-the-pan lifespan.

So this isn’t going to work. Unfortunately The Left is filled with anarchists and malcontents who know what they’re doing — they can see this isn’t going to work, and for them that’s a feature and not a bug.

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People Are Missing Out on the American Dream, and the Climate is Going to Kill Everybody
Friday, September 13th, 2019

Yeah we watched it to the end last night. Caught it too late to absorb the entire three hours, but we were able to pick up the vibe pretty quickly.

Every four years their message is the same, doesn’t matter if their guy is in the White House already or not:

The American Dream isn’t working for everybody. Lots of people are being left behind.

It offers the appearance that there is a vital function for the democrat party to perform. That we’ve got this singular economic status that rises and falls, but we need someone around the periphery, like a piston ring upon an engine’s combustion chamber, to make sure no one is “left behind.” But who wants to depend on government and a robust economy that comes & goes as the years go by…for their American Dream?

The democrats represent fear, depression, hopelessness, defeatism — perfectly. Every four years they win the presidency if enough people feel they’re being left behind, and they lose if not enough people do. Every four years that is the dynamic. Without exception.

Ponder the ramifications. We shouldn’t be at all surprised when their policies bring about economic ruin…leaving more people with the impression democrats want & need voters to have.

As far as the climate change thing goes, it’s really scary but not for the reason the democrats say.

In their assertion that this is something under our control, they politicize against science while accusing others of doing that. But as a thought exercise, let’s do what they can’t do and make a presumption in their favor, for sake of argument, just to see where it goes. Suppose technology can deliver us control over the global climate, but we’re still lacking the understanding needed to achieve a reliably beneficial effect? You know, in that zone where we know just enough to do damage…where we’ve been with everything else, for awhile, that technology’s ever put under our control. Everything. Can you think of any exceptions? I can’t.

You’ll notice from the debates last night that democrats aren’t considering this as a possibility, not even in the slightest. They have zero healthy uncertainty about what to do with the carbon level…zero doubts…unlike responsible adults, with everything they/we do. So what if the global climate is just the latest plaything of democrats, who are about to ruin it? Like Baltimore. Detroit. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Chicago. Atlanta, New Orleans, DC, Seattle, Sacramento.

Higher Education. Art. Torts. Bathrooms. History. Late night television. Boy Scouts. Star Wars.

Emma Watson.

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A Lady James Bond
Tuesday, September 10th, 2019

I think we need more good ideas and we’re currently already drowning in dumb stupid ideas. But it’s clear not everyone agrees with me about that.

Drowning the world in dumb stupid ideas, ironically enough, seems almost like an Ernst Stavro Blofeld plot from one of the old James Bond movies. Well…maybe there is one doing that very thing.

Pierce Brosnan was asked about his thoughts on the much-discussed idea of a Bond gender change. Here’s what he had to say.

“Yes! I think we’ve watched the guys do it for the last 40 years. Get out of the way, guys, and put a woman up there. I think it would be exhilarating, it would be exciting.”

Well…no, he’s wrong. It wouldn’t be exhilarating or exciting. It would be just another boondoggle. It just flat out wouldn’t work, for a number of reasons. A lady James Bond would have to sleep with between 2 and 4 guys every movie.

This would gross out audiences, even progressives, and effectively neutralize Bond’s mystique since women don’t have to have a lot of finesse or talent to seduce large numbers of men. Remember the Key Theory: a key that opens lots of locks would be extraordinarily valuable, but a lock opened by lots of keys would be junk.

Without a story to tell about an exceptionally talented and charismatic protagonist, the movie(s) would tank. 98% RT score critics, 38% score audience. The makers of the film would heap all sorts of insults on the audience for not being sufficiently accepting of it, just like Rian Johnson et al did after The Last Jedi.

And then they’d blame Trump.

I just saved everyone eight years of useless experimentation and $1.6 billion in production and marketing costs. Pierce Brosnan is an obsequious, showboating dope.

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Four Kinds
Friday, September 6th, 2019

Once people start arguing about politics I notice there are four kinds:

1. I don’t want anyone to get interrupted, it’s rude, besides of which it’s hard enough for me to figure out what people are really saying/supporting/opposing.

2. I don’t want to be interrupted. You, on the other hand, have already talked long enough that I know what my rebuttal is so let’s go ahead and cut you off right now.

3. I want people to be interrupted whenever they’re saying something stupid. No one should complete a sentence unless they’re saying good, smart things.

4. I want people to be interrupted if they’re about to show something else is stupid, especially if it is something I said.

Sadly it seems like that fourth one is most prevalent. If nothing is ever shown to be stupid or unworkable or inconsistent with its own premises, there is none of that inconvenient logic, and we can all just have whatever-opinions.

Back when I went to school, sometimes we would have to write essays that we would hand in to the teacher and sometimes we’d have to write essays we’d get up and read in front of the class. There was a lot of trepidation about the latter, and some kids felt it more keenly than other kids. We were expected to get over it. Well…I’m told these days schools are “zero tolerance for bullying” zones and so anything teachers did that might have made kids feel embarrassed, I can count on them to have eliminated it. That would have to include reading essays in front of the class, or the tried-and-true “Who can tell me the answer to…whatever…uh, YOU. Go.”

If that’s really all been shoved to the wayside, then the same must be true of any incentive to pay attention if you’re not so inclined. Looking back on it I can recognize teachers have always been poorly equipped to deal with the daydreamer who just wants to stare out the window. Depriving them of the very few tools they had to inspire a better incentive, can’t be good. It would have to result in a lot of people graduating from school unsure of how to handle a detailed, coherent, clearly stated idea. And then I look around and I see — that. Pretty much exactly that.

They argue about politics in person, it devolves into interruptions and conjecture about Trump’s personality, Pence’s personality, the democrat contenders’ personalities…a lot of useless supposing about the intelligence levels of people we/they don’t personally know. They argue about politics on the Internet, and it’s a bunch of “fact checking” that entirely misses the point. You get the impression, in a written forum, that if the option was available to interrupt, then a lot of it would be happening.

It’s not good for an advanced society such as ours, when the ideas can’t emerge intact for serious consideration unless they’re bite-sized. Bite-sized ideas don’t work, and that includes this one. The exceptions are important, the patterns of exceptions are important, and thinking about what really makes society go is the most important thing of all. That’s supposed to be the whole point.

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Can We Please Knock it Off With These Dumb Excuses
Monday, September 2nd, 2019

Psychology, I maintain, is dead. And it isn’t because there’s nothing worth studying there; there is. There absolutely is.

The problem is the treatment of the science, not the science itself. They keep diagnosing things that aren’t really there. And then they fail to diagnose problems that are there. If this scientific discipline is to endure, I propose the following. Give it its own ICD-9 number. It is needed.

STANDARDS-A-PHOBIA. Or…something.

It is all around us. The “patients” who walk among us do not perform, will never perform, it’s always someone else’s turn to perform. All of the time.

Turn in your homework on time — Oh noes!! No can do! I has a learning disability. Participate in this meeting — I can’t!! I’m one of those individuals who are extremely sensitive to ambient noises blah blah blah…

Pay your bills. Earn a living. Put food in the fridge. Come have Christmas dinner with us. Study for this exam. Take out the garbage. Cut the front lawn. Change the oil in my car without stripping the threads on my drain plug. Cut up these cardboard boxes for recycling pickup without getting blood on my garage floor. Bring back the Ark of the Covenant. Pick up a gallon of milk on the way home. Figure out who Keyser Söze is. Trim the hedge. Sweep the walk. Change your kid’s diaper. Make the coffee. Repel the alien invasion. Apply the server hotfix. Redeem humanity of its sins. Chill the wine. Cook the roast. Peel the carrots. Blow up the Death Star.

In short…PERFORM TO EXPEC-FUCKING-TATIONS.

We have, walking around among us, poor sniveling wretches who have been raised to adulthood lacking the necessary vision. They don’t see themselves as worthy. To them, it’s always the other guy’s turn to perform. You’ve heard of people who are illiterate and have soldiered onward into their senior years, keeping everyone, even their spouses, in the dark about their inability to read or write. Well the same thing persists with the achievement of ALL tasks…the elaborate ones as well as the very basic ones. Lots of zombies staggering around in our midst, just faking it.

I don’t mean like I do, with laundry. I can shitcan a whole day and get just ONE load done, while my wife can do something crazy like nineteen loads or something. I mean COMPLETELY faking it, not even trying. “That’s for other, stronger, better people to do.”

Since it’s all around us, I say come up with an ICD code for that. And if you won’t do that then shut down the whole flippin’ thing. Because that is the disability at the root, the disability of unified common descent. It all comes from that, so diagnose it properly or treat the whole thing as Sigmund Freud’s failed experiment and scrape it into the trash.

I have this weird vision, that if the orthodoxy of behavioral health science can formally recognize this, then maybe, just maybe, it would follow that they can admit they had a hand in making the problem as grave and as big and as all-encompassing as it is today in the first place. Intentionally or not, these kids have been set up to live just a fraction of a real life. They can’t have all the things they want in life until the rest of us can count on them to get things done, and with things the way they are, we can’t count on them to get things done. We can count on them for the ol’ tried-n-true “I can’t do that [blank] until someone brings me a [blank]” — if that’s what we want, we’ll make a bee-line right for ’em — but we can’t count on them to deliver. Sometimes in life it’s the other guy who needs a blank to do a blank…to fetch a stepladder to saw off the tree limb, for example. And if all we get back is a bunch of excuses about how the ladder can’t be brought because of whatever…it’s dark and spooky in the basement, there’s spider webs, I’m one of the individuals who are extremely sensitive to whatever…then we’d just as soon get the ladder ourselves.

Society can’t work that way.

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Koch Derangement Syndrome
Sunday, August 25th, 2019

Derek Hunter writes at Townhall:

When billionaire industrialist and philanthropist David Koch died Friday, these people couldn’t contain their joy. He was a libertarian activist who gave to groups fighting (unsuccessfully) to advance the cause of individual liberty, but he also gave more the charitable causes and hospitals than all of the people cheering his death will ever collectively give to charity in their lifetimes.

What had to happen in someone’s life to cheer the passing of a man they’d never met and likely (and unknowingly) benefited from the largess of? It’s easy to say these people are stupid, but stupid people don’t commit stupid acts deliberately, they simply don’t know any better. These people know better.

They had these thoughts, then took it to the next step: the world must know!

He provides many examples, but in my mind Bill Maher takes the cake:

He and his brother have done more than anybody to fund climate science deniers for decades. So f— him, the Amazon is burning up, I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.

It’s revealing that the evident launch-point for all this hatred is the “fund[ing]” of “climate science deniers.” The other side had a platform? That’s the great evil that was done here?

To me, the big issue is why Bill Maher wanted David Koch to suffer. Liberals aren’t going to understand this. They’ll make excuses about how Maher is supposed to say shocking things, I’m confusing rules with exceptions, Not All Libs Are Like That, etc….and, it will get awkward. All liberals aren’t like that other guy either. Or that guy, or that guy, or that one over there…99% of the liberals are giving the remaining 1% a bad name…

How did Buckley put it: “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

If the libs were as open-minded as they claim to be, there’d be no anger because there would be no reason for it. Koch would have persisted in his supposedly wrong opinion, he’d fund these efforts to proliferate the wrong opinion, and “science” and “truth” and “evidence” and “facts” would show how wrong he is. The anger and resentment and petulance and teenage-mall-rat mean-girl attitude of “We’ll just HATE them for-EVER” proves, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that liberals simply cannot allow that process to play out to its natural conclusion.

They know the facts are not really on their side.

That is the main dish. The spectacle of Bill Maher being a spiritually tiny, wounded, angry little man is just garnish.

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“It’s Masculinity to the Rescue”
Saturday, August 17th, 2019

Anybody else noticing this about the #MeToo thing? Not about the thing itself; about the quote-unquote “men.”

Harvey Weinstein. Matt Lauer. Garrison Keillor, Kevin Spacey. Al Franken. Woody Allen. Ben Affleck. James Franco. Bill Clinton. Bill Cosby. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Les Moonves. R. Kelly. Louis CK. Bryan Singer. Cuba Gooding Jr. Jeffrey Epstein.

They’re not all complete wimps. Affleck did a great job bulking up as Batman and I’m sure he could bench press more than me on very his worst day. But like all the rest, he doesn’t quite carry himself as a complete man. None of these are exactly cigar-smoking, steak-and-potato-eating men, right? Not a single one among them has built any kind of public profile that’s proudly masculine…a great many in this list have built a profile that is the opposite. The most macho out of the whole lot display their masculinity only in muted tones. A great many, and I mean a GREAT many, as in a bone crushing majority, have been out-and-proud left-wing liberals. More than just liberal; wispy, chestless, slouching, “in touch with my feminine side,” sweater-wearing, Live-With-Regis-And-Whoever-Watching…

Not quite so much lipstick-and-earring-wearing. But they don’t speak in a man’s natural baritone. Lauer, who had a push button to lock the door in his office, is the primary example: Just like any predator in nature’s wild who has survived by scoring his share of good meals, he’s gone on years and years and years putting out this air of “gelded, woke and safe.” Turns out that was two-thirds true.

There is this residual controversy about #MeToo vis a vis does it involve overreach, has it been going too far. It’s the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is something like “Well what TF does this have to do with masculinity at all?” The profile of the predator has emerged, solidified, crystallized, and anybody who takes the time to inspect can see that the predator is not masculine. It is what we should have expected to see from he very beginning. Manly men don’t do these things.

Instead, the predator has taken the form we should expect the predator to take if he wants to catch prey. He looks more like Alan Alda than John Wayne. Just like the deep sea (female) Anglerfish with the forehead-protruding light lure, they give off all the right vibes of the woke, undeveloped not-quite-male man. So they can draw in the woke, wounded, incomplete women and girls who’ve made up their minds that the real-men are the real problem.

Masculinity is Not for Women to Define But when we take the time to look at real-world events and digest for ourselves what really happened, we see they have it perfectly backwards, as wounded-incomplete people often have it:

In every story of bloodshed and mayhem, it’s the same. Tales of selfless male heroism and chivalry emerge in the face of mortal danger.

These are men who rush toward danger, risking their lives and even dying in the noble cause of protecting women and children.
:
Call it the chivalry instinct, it is what inspires men to run toward danger to protect the weak.

This is the noble side of masculinity that we once would perpetuate in folklore and stories passed down from father to son about what it means to be a real man.

But in the new era of “toxic masculinity,” young men are taught to ignore their heroic instincts and learn to be weak. They are instructed always to be on guard against the monster within.
:
Evolutionary psychologists have found that women instinctively desire a mate who can protect her and their offspring. “Modern women” look for “ancestral cues of a man’s fighting ability,” in the words of a 2017 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

This is the very masculinity that is being damned as the toxic seed of the patriarchy. Courage and derring-do is the essence of maleness and is what has allowed western civilization to prosper.

This is a deep concept that affects many of our most pressing and attention-grabbing issues, and affects how we think about them: Is strength, in & of itself, sufficiently attached to the process of brutalization that we should call it out as a threat — even in the face of mounting evidence that the real harm is done by the obsequiously weak? Is it right that we associate mass shootings with having a gun, when in order to do so, we have to ignore the millions upon millions of skilled, practiced and dedicated law-abiding gun owners who don’t hurt anybody? Should we associate having a large amount of money, with being responsible for economic injury against those who have much less, when in order to imagine this we have to weave together elaborate fiction about cheating, embezzlement and other shenanigans we haven’t seen take place?

If we answer in the affirmative, we built a society in which no one is allowed to remain the way they are unless they’re either weak and oppressed, or aligning themselves politically with the weak and oppressed — systematically attacking those who have made themselves rugged and strong. Such a society must ultimately nosedive into the dirt, like a lawn dart, because it encourages no ambition in its young except an ambition toward nothingness.

The dirty little truth is that there’s no contradiction here. Young men don’t have to look for ways to build themselves up into good strong men while “be[ing] on guard against the monster within.” It’s more a matter of fixating on the right priorities. Thinking about outcome, ignoring concerns over mannerisms, foibles, “triggering” microaggressions…worry instead about cause and effect, like grown-ups have to do. That’s what a real man does.

And that goes for real women, too.

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Do Not Leave Politics Out Of It
Wednesday, August 7th, 2019

Politics is what’s changed.

I’m seeing so many people with good intentions say something along the lines of “When I was a kid everyone had guns, but nobody shot anybody. So we need to have a calm, rational discussion about what’s changed, and LEAVE POLITICS OUT OF IT.” Oh, I get what they mean and I understand what they’re trying to avoid. Trump haters say it’s all Trump’s fault, Trump’s fans say it’s all the fault of the Left Wing, so nothing gets solved.

So how come when I hear these calm, rational discussions started that way, I tend to tune out, confident that nothing’s going to get solved there, either?

Monsters These shooters have many things in common with each other, but the one thing that really stands out is isolation. They went to school, they put a little bit of effort into blending in, they learned the hard way that you have to be accepted, acceptance wasn’t coming their way. So rather than self-improve they gradually gave up on the whole process.

Which I did, too. And there was anger over it. But I’m one of the crusty old farts who had access to guns pretty much everywhere, and I never shot anyone. How many my age can say all that? Lots. Probably most of us.

But back in my day, “You are to be shunned” was an experimental thing. Let’s see if we can end racism through social stigma! Bigotry has no place here! Well that was then. Nowadays this is the one tool in the box. Look around, it is for the most part the only way anybody argues anything. There are exceptions. There are people who make the case, support their arguments, let the idea succeed or fail on its merits…they don’t exist on The Left. The Left likes to think they do this, because they throw deceptive, cherry-picked statistics at people, they throw links to Snopes at people. And they call these “facts.” But they’re not arguing their case with facts.

What they do is label as “hate” anything they don’t like, and then “boldly” pronounce that hate “has no home here” and “is not welcome here.” They exclude constantly, even if the situation is risible, when they don’t have the influence to exclude anybody at all. It is their Golden Hammer.

What do you think that’s like for a little kid growing up, going to school, not knowing how to deal with it?

Ah, but there must be evil there, you say. Freeberg you never shot anybody. True. Well, why’s that? Why did I never shoot anybody? Why do we not kill each other? Is it because I was afraid of going to jail? Maybe, but before that there was respect for human life. There was the acknowledgment that once someone is born and breathing and walking around among us, it isn’t my place to take a life away, there’s something bigger and more important than me at work here. Uh…what’s The Left been doing to promote that?

Don’t stop talking politics. Both sides are not equally “at fault” with what’s changed, and politics is what’s changed. Politics shows — all too clearly — that whatever capacity we once had to discuss things and find common ground, using our disparate perspectives to work toward a common goal, this seems to have slipped out of our grasp. These awful events are merely a horrible extension of this. As far as the mental health aspect of it goes…it’s really all of us who have the mental health problem. Yeah, a lot of these kids are on psychotropic drugs. Well why did our society see fit to put so many kids on those drugs? Is it really because they needed the drugs, or because the rest of us can’t deal with conflict?

Stop excluding people and stop de-valuing human life. Stop replacing camaraderie and sense of community with “self esteem.” They’re not the same thing. There are consequences to this mistake.

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Fork in the Road
Friday, July 26th, 2019

This new job has me commuting…lots. With Government contracting, being-there is the most important thing, which is a bit odd in these enlightened, greener, telecommuting times. It makes me wonder what kind of shake-up is over the horizon since this is an entire industry that views work ethics in a nineteenth-century context. People say “What about telecommuting?” and they’re right to wonder about it, but they also show they don’t get contracting.

It’s 120 miles a day round-trip. I just start out earlier, remind myself others have it tougher, strap in and enjoy the ride. The money’s good. I work to make money.

Now I haven’t driven that far for a job since…let’s see. Last century. Seattle, from one end of Lake Washington to the other. That was 48 miles one-way, 28 years ago. This time it’s a bit different, I don’t follow major thoroughfares start-to-finish in rush hour. What I do is squeeze through the Venturi tube that is the Yolo Causeway, before the journey is 1/3 of the way done and after that…well, I get to do whatever I want. I can take the advice of Google Maps and stay on Interstate 80 until the exit that’s closest to where I’m trying to go, which would be Leisure Town Road in Vacaville. And I did that, but I’d already ridden my bike through the surrounding farmland and I knew those roads well. The freeway traffic is pretty annoying, even early in the morning. And so as the days went by, I started leaving the freeway at Weber, then at Midway, then at Batavia…after all, those roads are clear. All these assholes cutting me off, boxing me in, they’re making me late. I started to realize something. The temptation to leave the freeway came to me in the impression that the traffic was making me late to work, and if I traveled over the farmland this factor would be removed. But I started timing it, and this resulted in a finding I should’ve seen coming: Negative. Not even close. It feels like the traffic is making me late when I’m going a good 65 or more, and driving faster than that in the farmland is dumb. Anything can happen. So the feelings are lying to me, as feelings often do. Relative to the farmland-travel, I’m actually zipping along at a good pace on the freeway, I’m just being fooled because other cars are going faster…which is something they shouldn’t be doing.

Also, the freeway approach is direct, from Northeast to Southwest in a more-or-less straight line, whereas the farmland works like a checkerboard. So the math says the distance on the freeway is roughly (1-(0.5^0.5)) shorter…about 28%…traveled faster.

I had to admit I’d been swayed by emotional reasoning.

This is something liberals are incapable of doing. They lack the requisite sense of humility. They don’t break out of emotional reasoning, because they don’t recognize what it is…because, at least in the realm of politics, they’ve never worked with or implemented or followed anything else. They can’t see how invested they are in it because they can’t contrast it with anything. To them, it’s all about the “gut” feeling. And that has the final word. You argue with them at the dinner table on Thanksgiving, or on Facebook the rest of the year, and you might be under the impression they’ve won the argument and you’ve lost, because they ensconce themselves into the judge’s seat and make it into a “Let’s see if you can change my mind” thing — even though they’re supposed to be the ones with the new idea. And they adjudicate your protests to be inadequate, because they’re under the impression that the rich people didn’t earn their money and managed to get it through shenanigans, or that Donald Trump is an idiot, or that Christians go around persecuting people, or that something called “climate change” will end the world in 12 years and it’s all our fault…feel feel feel. They think they’re thinking, but that too is just feeling. They feel like they’re thinking, just like I feel like the freeway is making me late for work. It’s all baloney.

So as I coped with all the eighteen-wheelers blocking the center lane, and the hot shots doing their double-lane changes without signaling, eventually I had another thought: This is stupid. There really is no deadline for getting to work, I’m just getting there early so I can get out again early. Avoiding stupid traffic is the whole point of getting in early. And if the freeway is saving me a few minutes, that number of minutes is, at the very most, something like six. That’s got to be a mere fraction of how much I’m shortening my lifespan each time, due to the stress of dealing with these idiots. Driving on farmland is dangerous. Driving on the freeway is also dangerous. That’s a wash…the freeway is faster…but I enjoy driving on the farmland, and I despise driving on the freeway. That’s all okay.

So these days I might stay on the freeway as far as Pitt School Road, if I’ve run out of water for the coffee and have to hit Safeway. Otherwise I get off at Mace. Or more often than that, County Road 32B. That means, I leave the causeway and I’m already coasting, getting ready for the off-ramp. I figure if I’m saving myself aggravation by getting away from these assholes, I’m saving them the aggravation of being around me. And I have no doubt in the world they’re calling me something similar. Morning commute traffic has a way of dehumanizing all of us. It’s the dark and unseemly part of what we call “civilization.” Many a cop would protest, with legitimacy, that there are darker parts of it, but of all the components that are supposed to be there and are required to keep things going, the morning-commute has to be the worst. You can feel the humanity slipping out of you every minute, and as I finish out the first hour of it I find I no longer like myself as a person. Every minute I can lop off of that is a good minute, so I’ll go ahead and cope with the checkerboard and the slow-moving tractors.

After all, it’s a beautiful day. Most every day is a beautiful day. I’ve reached the stage of life where I want to appreciate that.

This is naother thing liberals can’t do. They can’t keep track of the big picture. Just look at them right now…We gotta get rid of Trump! We gotta get rid of Trump! No, you don’t. I survived Obama, you’ll survive Trump.

This decision puts me in the farmland for…oh, quite awhile really. The traffic is very sparse. But occasionally you’ll see a pickup, or a tractor, or a big rig. Here and there, now and then, someone will pull out in front of you when you’re wanting to make some time. Passing is pretty easy since every road is a straightaway, the land is flat and you can see far. But every once in awhile you get something in front of you that you’d rather not have in front of you; passage could be made difficult by the vehicle’s wide rear end, or wide load, like a combine. Or maybe it’s an open bed full of particulate matter. Something you’d just as soon not have in front of you. And as you both slow for a tee intersection, you start to think…I can get where I’m going by turning right, or by going straight ahead, and my promise to God is I’m going whichever way this dumbass is not going. Right? Haven’t we all done that?

But, not everybody signals. Dumbass is going slow, so the drama is unfolding.

Fork in the Road So you do that thing where you peer under the bed of his truck, to try to get a look at all four wheels, see if they’ll betray his intentions. Look for some early clues about which way he’s going so you can make preparations to go the other way.

This is another thing liberals cannot do, and of the three I think this might be the most debilitating. Contingency plans. Forks-in-the-road. They can’t say to themselves, like all functional adults leading moderately complex lives must say, “If this happens I shall do this, but if that happens I shall do that instead.” Have you ever had a friend or relative who was seriously sick, perhaps had aged to the point where the final chapter had been started and everyone involved started wondering where it would end. What do you say to each other? “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”

Surely I cannot be the only one who has noticed: Liberals seem incapable of processing the fork in the road. The meaning of the word “if.” They “know” just a little bit too much about what’s going to happen, and when things don’t unfold that way, they learn nothing.

That’s what we saw happen this week with Mueller’s testimony. Intelligent and functional adults said to themselves “Gee, I wonder what’s going to happen?” Or not…I was among the ones wondering what I could do to make some money off this whole thing. After all, if there was a bombshell to be dropped that would unravel Trump’s presidency, for good this time, it would’ve been dropped. I’ll admit to having been surprised by the level of disappointment. I’m a bit taken aback that the whole country is now wondering who really wrote the report and who really ran the investigation.

But our friends, the liberals, were only prepared for one thing — strategically, and emotionally. The only saw one outcome. That’s the way the script in their heads was written, and now that things have gone differently they’re completely shell-shocked. Omigaw, what do we do now?

And things have been going this way for them, the whole time. Cohen was going to sing like a bird, and put Trump away. How’d that go? Stormy Daniels. Alicia Machado. Billy Bush.

This has been going on since the very beginning, since long before Trump was even nominated. “This will be the end of Trump’s campaign…There’s no way he’s coming back from this one.”

It even predates Trump. It’s bigger than Trump. It isn’t even about Trump.

It’s got to do with liberals, their lack of maturity, and their inability to wait for something to happen before figuring out what to do about it. Their inability to process that most simple of situations: “Nobody knows…yet.” They haven’t matured, in a way, since they were little kids sitting in the back seat demanding to know from their parents “Are we there yet?” and “How much longer?”

Sometimes, you have to make more than one plan. Sometimes you have to prepare more than one speech. Sometimes, you have to admit you don’t really know what’s going to happen. Sometimes, the “perfect” plan that has absorbed the very best of your enthusiasm and creative energies, has to have a little empty box in the middle with two arrows pointing out of it, not just one…and it’ll have to be filled in later. In the meantime, you don’t know which way the pig-shit carrying open flatbed in front of you is going to turn. You have to wait and see.

It’s a blessing and not a curse, a feature and not a bug. How boring would life be if you really knew as much about what’s going to happen, as liberals think they know, all the time. How tiring that would become, and how quickly. We’d be welcoming the sweet release of Death before our thirtieth birthdays, I daresay.

We should all be thankful for these empty, filled-in-later decision boxes with Y and N arrows coming out of them, in the vast flow-charts that our are lives. Even if we do happen to have a President we don’t particularly like at any given moment. It’s the kind of challenge that keeps our minds sharp. It is why we leave the freeway.

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If PDJT Were From Somalia…
Friday, July 19th, 2019

Word reached me that President Donald Trump said that the malcontent freshman socialist congresswomen “should go back where they came from,” and I was horrified. Such an outburst would fall well short of what the American public deserves and demands from the occupant of the highest office in our land; it is truly execrable.

I did my Internet research and was relieved to see there’s nothing to it. The President did not, repeat not, as has been repeatedly implied, end a sentence with a preposition. Whew!

He wrote: “So interesting to see ‘progressive’ Democrat congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”

I see he has also been accused of forgetting which “places from which they came” in the case of three of the four “Squad” members, those three of the four being natives of the United States, so ha ha! Dopey old Trump! But it looks to me like a successful trolling, since Trump never specifically named who he was…uh, I mean, the persons to whom he was referring. He never named them.

Ponder the implications of this. It’s like Hercule Poirot assembling all of the suspects in the drawing room at the end of a mystery and announcing, “I will in due course get to identifying the killer, but for this moment let me just announce this much: He puts ketchup on his steak.” And one of them stands up and protests “I do no such thing!” What a bunch of dimbulbs. They actually held a press conference to launch their self-incriminating protest.

So when the talking heads “inform” us that, given the premise Trump must have been talking about these four, he’s 75% in error…sorry, it just doesn’t fly. I don’t accept the premise. There’s no reason to so accept. Yeah, sure you might say it is the most reasonable assumption, and at first blush maybe it looks like that much is true. But it isn’t, for that ignores the possibility that Trump was trolling. Which is far more likely and far more reasonable.

As for this other flawed premise, that saying “Go back where you came from” is racist, that doesn’t fly either. It’s an equivocation. We’ve got way too much of that already. Stop equivocating, stop pretending entirely different things are the same when they’re not. And don’t accept it when others equivocate either. If bedraggled, frustrated parents are bamboozled to taking their ten-year-old to the beach about this time of year, and the little monster ruins the whole outing complaining about sand in his swimsuit, and I hate building sandcastles, and I’m getting a sunburn and I hate kite flying and I hate saltwater and the seagull crapped on my juicebox and I hate I hate I hate…momma looks up from her Hercule Poirot mystery to say something like “Why TF did you want to come here?” that is one thing.

The xenophobe who lives rent-free in liberals’ heads, finding out some one is from India and commanding him to go back to where he came from, is an entirely different thing. Trump told the targets of his criticism to go fix their shithole countries then come back and show us how it’s done — sarcastically. He’s more like the frazzled Mom wondering what what she/he/they are all doing there. And this is entirely reasonable.

Why are they here?

Bollocks too, on this idea that we here in the U.S. are a cut above this why-don’t-you-go-away stuff. That’s not beneath us at all, nor should it be. If we’re going to argue about this stuff then let’s do it honestly.

If Donald Trump were from Somalia, the #NeverTrump crowd would cry in unison for him to go back to that mudpuddle from which he came.

They would waste no time in doing it.

Wouldn’t skip a beat.

Better than even odds, teeming throngs of them on social media would excoriate all the rest of us for not joining them. If I bet money on it, would I lose it?

Uh, really? Someone’s really gonna argue that?

There’s an old saying about pissing on my shoes and telling me it’s raining…

So sorry, mainstream media, talking heads, oh-so-sensible Quisling RINO centrist types. I’m not buying any of it. I’m not buying your conclusions because I’m not buying the fragile premises on which they depend, and by thinking like a competent adult — clearly outside of your expectations as you try to include me in your intended audience — I have found your conclusions rely on these flawed premises completely, utterly, for every single dry ounce of support. It just doesn’t work.

Here’s what works for me. Here are my premises and here are my conclusions.

I think you “news” people have abandoned real news a long time ago and are just broadcasting talking points. I think you get these straight from the democrat party that wants to see Trump defeated by whatever means. I think, in this respect, you are an unfiltered pipeline. I think you don’t even edit. I think if it reaches us mostly free of any spelling or grammar issues, we have them to think for that and not you.

I think our country has been lurching toward an unreasonable and unworkable set of expectations about freedom of association that benefits the left wing and all its adherents, at an expense to everyone else. Liberals, you’ll notice, can retain all of their social stature and at the same time, exclude. They can say “Why don’t you get out of our restaurant.” They can banish people from whatever, quite freely. Moderates get to do that too. Hippies get to do that, persons of all different ethnic makeups can do that, our immigrants can do that, hell even our illegal aliens get to do that. You don’t belong here! Clear the way!

The social expectation is that Trump and his supporters don’t get to do that because it proves the racism which is there — a non-event, if you take all this stuff seriously, for supposedly it is “known” that the racism was always there. The whole thing is nonsense.

There’s no skin color in “Why are you in our Congress when you don’t even seem to want to be in our country?” It is just about as race-neutral as you can get. Sure it certainly isn’t very inclusive…but lots of things aren’t.

This whole scandal is phony, but it’s not the first phony scandal we’ve seen crop up with regard to this administration and it won’t be the last. Like all the others, it is a test of each individual’s ability to think like a competent adult, versus thinking like an overly-passionate, undisciplined, and inexperienced child.

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Speaker Amplified Too Much, Put Out of Commission
Wednesday, July 17th, 2019

That speaker was getting old anyhow, really just a relic from the hippie era, covered with dust, maybe we need to go buy a new one.

This was weird:

Escalating tensions on Capitol Hill erupted into a floor fight in the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke in favor of a resolution condemning “racist” comments by President Trump — and Pelosi’s words were eventually ruled out of order, as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat, announced the decision from the House parliamentarian.

“The words used by the gentlewoman from California contained an accusation of racist behavior on the part of the President,” Hoyer said, in a decision that technically banned Pelosi from speaking on the House floor for a brief period of time. “The words should not be used in debate.”

She ended up losing her speaking privileges for the day. Evidently the House of Representatives has rules against impugning someone’s character. I suppose an actual Representative would have much better knowledge of this rule and more experience defining the periphery of violation than the average person…since impugning someone’s character seems to be oh, roughly 90% or more of what democrats have to say about anything.

It’s awkward when you’re holding a vote to officially excoriate a political opponent for saying unseemly things, and in the course of doing so you lose your speaking privileges for saying unseemly things.

Then things got weirder:

The scene then became even more bizarre when the chair, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., told representatives after a lengthy huddle that he was trying to make a fair ruling as to whether Pelosi had broken House rules governing decorum, but people weren’t cooperating. Cleaver told Fox News he felt Pelosi was being singled out.

Cleaver simply declared, “I abandon the chair,” and left — a moment with no apparent precedent in modern congressional history.

democrat party Well the action does Cleaver no credit, but after watching the video I have to admit I agree with him.

In fact, there are those who say this whole thing is anything but an “oopsie” by Trump, or any impertinent kind of stepping-over-the-line, and is more of a calculated strategy and one well-executed.

Trump stated the obvious. And by his willingness to state the obvious, he has returned the obvious to the realm of public discourse. He has shifted the Overton window back to a more normal, common sense debate. It wasn’t a mistake of epic proportions. It was a brilliant insistence on having public debate occur in reality world, not in the Leftist’s dystopian fantasy world.

This makes more and more sense to me, the more aware I become of what’s going on under the capitol dome. Every time I watch these — what do I call them, I dunno, I certainly don’t want to impugn anyone’s character. But every time I watch them I’m happier and happier to be a small-government advocate. Who in their right mind would want important problems addressed by this crowd? And if they could ever run like a well-oiled machine, seriously what would you expect them to get done. Think like a grown-up not like a child, what would you expect. They’d make it easier to sell window installation services, tires, computer software, gasoline, sugar, life insurance? Easier? No. They wouldn’t. There’s no reason to think that. They’d make it harder. We should be celebrating when they’re dysfunctional.

And now that the House has held its vote and officially frowned on Trump’s shenanigans…what have we got here?

Nevermind the fact that this is a duly elected and seated House. Would you trust them with anything important? Putting party affiliations and oh-so-passionate #NeverTrump hatred aside, choosing between the President and the House of Representatives, who would you trust to produce positive results — with regard to your house, pet, your next business trip, or something of equal importance?

The media is still getting the vapors about these so-called “racist tweets,” theatrically horrified when Trump supporters say things like “that’s why I voted for him.” I was a Cruz supporter in 2016, but this is true of me as well. No one ever bothered to ask me if I support this craziness, this Salem Witch Trial logic of “You’re guilty of racism if your comments could be construed as racist.” That’s nuts, because I think all competent adults possessing any useful experience understand everything can be construed as anything. Who wants to live in a world where no one says anything that could be construed as something…by mentally infirm ankle-biters spoiling for a fight? I think the answer to that is nobody. So when Trump was ambushed at the last minute with this dumb fake “Miss Piggy” scandal, and the dumb fake “pussy grabbing” scandal, and managed to win anyway, I was thrilled. Still haven’t gotten over the euphoria after all this time. And it wasn’t for Trump.

Political correctness is the witch, innocent citizens saying harmless things are not the witch — it’s had water poured on it and is melting into the floorboards. This makes me very happy. Die faster you reprehensible parasite, and let’s entertain no delusions that you ever made anything better for anybody, ever motivated anybody to behave with better character, or ever kept anyone from feeling bad.

Next up, we’re going to have an election. It’s shaping up to be very much an either-or election; one side or the other is going to have to go. The case for keeping this House of Representatives and jettisoning Trump, as appealing as it may be for those who have been bitterly clinging to it the entire time, is tougher to make to any new recruits than it was a week ago. So if that’s what this whole thing’s been about, then Trump won. Yuge.

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Feelz Over Realz
Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

It occurs to me that obsessing over people’s feelings too much is at odds with respecting them for their potential. It seems, at first blush, like consideration and civilized sensitivity. Like you’re showing empathy to their plight. But it’s not. It’s smothering them and infantilizing them.

Think about this. Make a short list in your head of people who indisputably created a positive influence. Liberated others, defended others, did something to make it possible for others to do things for others…George Washington, George Patton, Black Jack Pershing, Chesty Puller, Ulysses Grant. Other military heroes. The itty bitty kids who weren’t old enough to drink yet, and dropped bombs on the Nazis. The heroes of D-Day. Our nation’s Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, all them guys. Fictional: Superman. Or, if you’re so inclined, Iron Man and the Avengers. James Bond. And then your savior Jesus Christ. Your parents. Somebody at work, your boss maybe, who had your back when something went ugly. Guy who offered you his seat on the bus when you were eight months pregnant. Driver of the other car who waved you on through the 4-way stop, when you had to have a bowel movement really, really bad.

How did THEY FEEL? In the running-up to the act of heroism. During. And after.

It’s not even part of the story!

Okay maybe except for Jesus who wanted to know why God had forsaken Him while He hung on the cross. But even then, you’ll see there was no answer. The lesson is that feelings, yes, are definitely real…but also we have to rise above them to get anything done that helps others. That’s just how it works.

It’s a terrible, terrible disservice we do to young people when we condition them to think their feelings matter. There’s a lot of human potential being spilled straight down the drain here, because whole generations of kids aren’t being asked that most important of questions: Yeah, but didja die?

They could be learning how to help others.

And they’re being systematically taught now not to do this. How to just wallow in the marinade of how they feel.

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Their Problem with Experience
Sunday, July 14th, 2019

So I’m making a list of things that mean something other than what they’re supposed to mean, and in a jolt I suddenly gain yet another new insight into something that’s been weighing on me for over thirty years: How come it is that liberals remain in steadfast disagreement with any competent adult who has common sense.

It’s got to do with the introduction.

I’ll explain by way of a hypothetical so I’m not including any of the items on the list: Let us say we have become generally aware of a vexing problem in our country, that it’s hot out and people can’t get ice cream cones whenever they want them. So the government sets up a Department of Frozen Confections…which of course is stupid. And our temptation is to get distracted by that, because people with common sense understand that if you really want a fudgesicle, you just need to pony up a couple of bucks and you can have one. And so we think the great divide between liberals and people with common sense is, liberals can’t form a vision of simply earning the $3 through honest labor, and then spending it. They want/need an agency to deliver them things.

That used to be the divide.

Things are changing though.

Think on this not in terms of conservatives and liberals, but in terms of conservatives, liberals and moderates. It’s important because most people self-identify as moderate. The department is created and the stalwart conservatives will write some blog posts about how terrible this is, taxpayer money is being wasted, kids are being taught how to go begging to Uncle Sam instead of how to do some hard work…these are all legitimate complaints. But most people don’t identify with them. Most people will say “Eh, that’s a stupid idea but who cares.” And they’ll agree with the liberals, ultimately. After all you can’t stop it, the department’s already created.

And the liberals will harass people in restaurants and spit in their food, if a single syllable is ever uttered against this new Department of Frozen Confections.

But then a funny thing happens.

The DFC doesn’t hand out any ice cream cones to anybody. It goes off on this wild tear, subsidizing “alternative milk product” development because cows are bad for the environment. Or they find some other excuse to harass people and get involved in all sorts of goofy projects that have nothing to do with fudsicles.

What then develops is this bizarre, crazy-quilt divide between promise vs. delivery, between labels vs. packaging, between expectation vs. fulfillment. This is where the support of liberal initiatives shrinks. See, the die-hard liberal is always going to go by the label. It’s the ice cream department! Because that’s what the announced intention was…you stupid idiot. But gradually the moderates who simply have some common sense, and didn’t identify as conservatives…come to swing over to the conservative side, after years and years of paying cable and telephone bills with “Department of Frozen Confection” surcharges at the bottom.

Bottom-lining it, liberals have a real problem with learning from experience. They can’t grasp that a symbol of something might be different from the actual thing. “Education,” to a liberal, is exactly that and it can’t mean anything different…”ANTIFA” must be anti-fascist, they’re entirely unswayed by the accumulated evidence that the group is, in fact, fascist. And it’s not just because they sympathize with them ideologically, although there is that. The big problem is that the name says anti-fascist. That it might actually mean something different from that, doesn’t register.

“This undocumented migrant’s ‘child’ might actually not be his child” — they can’t even comprehend the possibility.

Some of this is by definition, since a lot of liberals are young. You can’t have much experience when you’re young, that’s what being young is. That’s why liberals want to lower the voting age. They must.

They haven’t come up with a cogent answer to the question “What’s the difference between socialism and ‘democratic socialism’?” Because there isn’t one. D.S. is a label invented by left-wing power-brokers to bamboozle left-wing acolytes.

They think “journalists” actually do journalism, and “climate scientists” actually do climate science. This is why the divide exists, is so wide & deep, and is getting worse. You can explain to them until you’re blue in the face, your own personal story of how you came to suspect “climate change” might have more to do with politics than science. And you won’t get through, not because they’re disagreeing with you, but because they cannot understand how something might possibly be different from what it represents itself to be.

They didn’t read Little Red Riding Hood, or if they did, it was lost on them that the big bad wolf pretended to be L.L.R.H.’s bedridden grandmother. They may have watched Fargo, but if they did, they missed the significance of Mike Yamagita fibbing to Marge Gunderson about being married to Linda Cooksey, how before that surprise Margie had never earnestly dealt before with prevarication. Didn’t pick up that the whole story is about her world getting a little bit bigger, how she had to change her worldview to solve the crime.

This is the problem liberals have. It’s not all caused by inexperience. There are some old liberals out there. You’ll notice they all have that weird, mean look about them. It is the look that comes from having given up on untangling the mysteries of deceptive labeling, chalking up all detected contradictions in life to the sinister machinations of “George W. Bush and his oil buddies.” It is the look of realizing you’ve been deceived, again and again and again, and then failing to anticipate or untangle the deception, and eventually resolving to join the deceivers.

They’re confused, and angry because they can’t see a way through their confusion. They rely too much on the verity of labels, and not enough on their own experiences.

This is connected, I’m convinced, to their obsession with leaving it up to government to handle everything and forcing all their fellow citizens to do likewise. “Don’t need a gun, call nine one one”; it’s connected to all that.

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Don’t Have to Remember
Saturday, July 13th, 2019

Yes, movies are important. All too often, we don’t even consciously realize it at the time.

In 1981 Indiana Jones said “I dunno, I’ll make it up as I go.” And since what followed was a “truck chase” that made action movie history, I didn’t attribute a lot of importance to that line. None at all, really. But then in the aftermath, ten years later, twenty, thirty, I discovered that was me. Often the hard way. Here and there, now and then, I’d be hired into “code monkey” jobs that were all about following proper procedure and doing it exactly the same way some other guy would’ve done it…who cares whether it works or not. And I learned I do not belong in those jobs. I received praise for my careful designs, but the ones that drew the most praise came from little sparks of the imagination…that won’t work, or it’ll work but I don’t want to maintain that, let’s do it this way instead. And then I went back and re-did it with a careful design and some good documentation. But first I made it up as I went.

But then.

Eight years after that line, his Dad said: “I wrote it down in my diary show I wouldn’t have to remember!”

And now it’s thirty years after that. ++sigh++

Once again…I assigned little importance to that line. But again, give it a decade or two and I’m looking around seeing just a few words back then have all too neatly defined my reality now. Taking notes on a laptop in a meeting is rude, I’ve come to understand, and so I grasp the notebook with its creamy-white last-century pages, and my trusty ball-point, like a dehydrated desert traveler clutching a canteen. And when the pen shows signs of running out of ink I’m gripped by a cold panic that wasn’t there back in my younger days. But when the meeting is over and the people dissipate, the chicken-scratching only accelerates.

It is the chapter of life I’m occupying now.

I have to write it down…so I don’t have to remember…I’m past that other point, that runner-up point. You know, the one where your memory is slipping away and so you think “I won’t write this down, then I’ll have to remember it, and that will exercise it and keep it around for a few years more.” I’m past that. I’ve learned the hard way that if I care, I don’t play that game anymore. It’s become a trust issue.

Oh so now we’re assessing competence in our technical personnel by making them memorize answers to questions, hmmm? No one asked me. But I’d advise against this.

And we’re teetering on the brink of assessing ethics in our computer programmers, which we’ve learned is a thing we need to value — the same way?

That’s a disaster.

I’m not saying so because I suck at it — although I do. I’m saying so because it’s bound to validate exactly the kinds of practitioners we don’t want. The “cram for the test tomorrow, forget it all the day after” types. The tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear types.

There is a story about Einstein addressing this. He supposedly didn’t know how many feet are in a mile.

One time Albert Einstein was asked “How many feet are in a mile?” and he responded saying “I don’t know why would I fill my mind with facts I can in two minutes in any standard reference book”

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“Lady Ghostbusters” Rule
Saturday, July 13th, 2019

Success is predicted with greater effectiveness and confidence, by evaluating the priorities of the practitioners, than assessing the resources at their disposal or critiquing their methods of implementation.

Movies, as I wrote before, are important. They show us how we build things when the stakes are high, and how we consume and rate those things after others have built them. Now this one illustrates several important points. It tanked, at least in the sense that the audience was left wanting more even though the critics were afraid to give it anything short of slobbering praise. If you watch it, you’ll see there are a few funny bits in there that should’ve worked. These actors are talented. The writing is okay. It just doesn’t gel.

The problem isn’t the parts and it isn’t in the execution. And it’s not that they gave women too much prominence in the film. It’s the priorities.

We don’t discuss this because we can’t. You’re not allowed to dislike female-led superhero movies, or female-led action movies, or female-led comedies, or anything female-led. Because we’re not allowed to say anything negative about these efforts, the problems don’t get fixed. Again, it’s priority. The real mission is to entertain the audience and that’s what makes a great film. But that’s not where the priorities were with lady-Ghostbusters or with Captain Marvel, or with the new Tomb Raider. The makers of those films were concerned about other things and they ended up making mediocre messes.

Jason Reitman, son of legendary director Ivan, got into Twitter trouble when he announced he was going to give the franchise back to the fans. With our current prevailing insanity, the perpetually offended were free to read whatever they wanted into that comment, and it seems like the most damning inflection they were able to make out of it was that someone somewhere liked the old Ghostbusters better than the new one. That was enough to get the chest-thumping going, and the younger Reitman ended up apologizing.

Much about this is silly, but that one thing in particular strikes me as the silliest. New things, in general, are no good. More of these remakes/reboots/re-imaginings than not, move the audience to shout almost in unison “What was the point of this?” And the best example I have in mind for that is The Omen. It is a scene-for-scene remake of the original…because…? Why? There’s no answer. You’ll end up wondering this if you sink the time into it. Gregory Peck wasn’t a good enough actor? Why did you guys do this?

Fans of the Lady Ghostbusters movies should have been thrilled that it did well enough people weren’t asking that question. But, it’s a comedy with just a few laughs, measured against the time sunk into watching it, and it did about as well as most comedies that have just a few laughs. The market is not kind to such offerings, and this one was spared the harshest criticism that would normally rain down upon it because, well, it’s what Matt Walsh was saying. You’re not allowed not to like it.

I’m saying this as someone who wasn’t entirely thrilled with the original Ghostbusters. That’s another thing that makes this a good example. There was a fever that caught on, you couldn’t get away from the theme song no matter where you went, and people recited the lines from the movie everywhere…not because it was funny, but because it was fun. Harold Ramis and the other folk who’d put it together, wanted to entertain the audience. And it showed.

Kinda like Quentin Tarantino wanted to dazzle and overwhelm the audience with The Bride. He did a good job with it, and it worked.

Now the strong-women offerings today, just aren’t as good. That’s because the priority is missing…and what’s even much worse than that is, there’s no reason for it to be there. If anyone doesn’t like the movie or utters so much as a peep of protest against it, or merely withholds praise, you can just napalm them on Twitter until they apologize. It’s looking like something that’s crystallized from being merely an unseemly reality, to morph into a hardened battle-plan, a way to win Internet arguments about your movie. It makes for shitty movies.

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The Scariest PrognosticationSunday, September 29th, 2019

Impeach Adam SchiffFriday, September 27th, 2019

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An Honest Sales Pitch for Climate ChangeWednesday, September 18th, 2019

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People Are Missing Out on the American Dream, and the Climate is Going to Kill EverybodyFriday, September 13th, 2019

A Lady James BondTuesday, September 10th, 2019

Four KindsFriday, September 6th, 2019

Can We Please Knock it Off With These Dumb ExcusesMonday, September 2nd, 2019

Koch Derangement SyndromeSunday, August 25th, 2019

“It’s Masculinity to the Rescue”Saturday, August 17th, 2019

Do Not Leave Politics Out Of ItWednesday, August 7th, 2019

Fork in the RoadFriday, July 26th, 2019

If PDJT Were From Somalia…Friday, July 19th, 2019

Speaker Amplified Too Much, Put Out of CommissionWednesday, July 17th, 2019

Feelz Over RealzTuesday, July 16th, 2019

Their Problem with ExperienceSunday, July 14th, 2019

Don’t Have to RememberSaturday, July 13th, 2019

“Lady Ghostbusters” RuleSaturday, July 13th, 2019

Fake Oppression For the Rest of Us
Monday, November 11th, 2019

Veterans Day 2019
Monday, November 11th, 2019

Happy Birthday Marine Corps 2019
Sunday, November 10th, 2019

The Iconics
Thursday, October 31st, 2019

Thinking Like a Grown-Up
Sunday, October 27th, 2019

“Big Mother”
Sunday, October 27th, 2019

My Favorite Die Hard Movie Line
Sunday, October 13th, 2019

I Made a New Word LXXVII
Sunday, October 13th, 2019

Take Your “Investigating His Political Opponents” and Cram It
Saturday, October 5th, 2019

The White, Middle-Age Males Calling Out the Swedish Brat
Tuesday, October 1st, 2019

The Scariest Prognostication
Sunday, September 29th, 2019

Impeach Adam Schiff
Friday, September 27th, 2019

Greta Thunberg
Tuesday, September 24th, 2019

Memo For File CCXIII
Tuesday, September 24th, 2019

An Honest Sales Pitch for Climate Change
Wednesday, September 18th, 2019

Three Orgies
Sunday, September 15th, 2019

People Are Missing Out on the American Dream, and the Climate is Going to Kill Everybody
Friday, September 13th, 2019

A Lady James Bond
Tuesday, September 10th, 2019

Four Kinds
Friday, September 6th, 2019

Can We Please Knock it Off With These Dumb Excuses
Monday, September 2nd, 2019

Koch Derangement Syndrome
Sunday, August 25th, 2019

“It’s Masculinity to the Rescue”
Saturday, August 17th, 2019

Do Not Leave Politics Out Of It
Wednesday, August 7th, 2019

Fork in the Road
Friday, July 26th, 2019

If PDJT Were From Somalia…
Friday, July 19th, 2019

Speaker Amplified Too Much, Put Out of Commission
Wednesday, July 17th, 2019

Feelz Over Realz
Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

Their Problem with Experience
Sunday, July 14th, 2019

Don’t Have to Remember
Saturday, July 13th, 2019

“Lady Ghostbusters” Rule
Saturday, July 13th, 2019