House of Eratosthenes

I so wish I could claim credit for that headline, I am slightly more envious of its accuracy than its prose. It is a reference to the infamous, though not nearly as much as I’d like it to be, Congressional Hush Fund:

Which is worse: candidate, businessman, and then still private citizen Donald Trump using his own money to make what Hillary Clinton might call “bimbo eruptions” go away to protect his brand and himself from personal embarrassment, or Congress using taxpayer money in a slush fund to pay off those sexually harassed by sitting officeholders?

As Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, notes in USA Today:

Literally a year ago – as the #MeToo era was erupting – the nation was waking up to news that a secret congressional “hush fund” had been used by Members of Congress to pay off accusers of sexual misconduct. Taxpayer money – yours and mine – was used to pay off these alleged victims[.] …

Nobody knows how many congressmen and Senators are involved, and if [Pelosi] is a willing participant to keep all of this a secret she will forfeit credibility on every other issue[.] …

What we know already is devastating. We know congressmen John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Blake Fahrentold (R-Tex.) used this “hush fund” to settle with alleged victims. Both men have already left Congress.

We also know that none of the beneficiaries of this slush fund has been threatened with indictment and incarceration for campaign finance violations since suppressing such information, as Rep. Nadler puts it, amounts to committing a fraud on the American people using their own money.

It certainly is a double-fuck-you. It’s worse than a cheating spouse meeting up at a posh hotel with the distraction of the day, then using the other spouse’s credit card to pay for the room.

At least at the end of it, the other spouse would get a bill. Our tax money is being used to keep secrets from us.

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Social Media Shame Storming
Friday, December 14th, 2018

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today:

Hunters and gatherers were at far less risk for infectious disease because they didn’t encounter very many new people very often. Their exposure was low, and contact among such bands was sporadic enough that diseases couldn’t spread very fast.

It wasn’t until you crowded thousands, or tens of thousands of them, along with their animals, into small dense areas with poor sanitation that disease outbreaks took off. Instead of meeting dozens of new people per year, an urban dweller probably encountered hundreds per day…Likewise, in recent years we’ve gone from an era when ideas spread comparatively slowly, to one in which social media in particular allow them to spread like wildfire. Sometimes that’s good, when they’re good ideas. But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas aren’t in the top 10%. Maybe we don’t know the mental disease vectors that we’re inadvertently unleashing.

It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition…Maybe there are some lessons for us here…
:
Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection… [emphasis mine]

Helen Andrews tells of her personal experience…

No grand lesson presented itself…I couldn’t tell myself it had happened because I was a woman. Had the genders been reversed, I probably would have received less sympathy than I did…I could not even blame the prospective employers who demonstrated a marked reluctance to bring me in for interviews. If I had to choose between a candidate whom no one had ever called a sociopath on national television, and one who probably wasn’t a psycho but might be, I would play it safe, too, even if the probability was only a fraction of a percent.
:
The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful — and even necessary — but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion. [emphasis mine]

Via Reynolds’ famous site Instapundit, where the comments are interesting…

Seems the only people susceptible to online shame cycles are those who put themselves out on the internet as some sort of celebrity, authority, or pundit.

Chances are they all, each and every one, deserve what they get.

No, look at Julian from Columbia, he’s being shamed out of future employment for saying white people have done good things.

I wonder at times if the whole shaming business isn’t a wild pendulum swing at the fact we have not had a shame culture for years. A whole lot of people who should be embarrassed being seen in public live their lives like nothing happened….see Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Anthony Weiner, et al.

I”m reminded of Clint Eastwood’s line in Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.” But this is not frontier justice borne of a necessary roughness and isolated desert-town living. More like a maelstrom of Reynolds’ “groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling” borne of snowflake tenderness and world-in-an-instant inner-connectivity.

I’m inclined to think it will get worse before it gets better. The solution is to make it so these things happen as infrequently as possible, right? That would necessarily translate to, not saying or writing anything that could be taken the wrong way — by anybody, anywhere, within any overly-sensitive local culture, anywhere on the globe. Mundane wins and remarkable loses.

When the pendulum of sense and sensibility swings, it makes the least sense at the end-points of its trajectory, where it’s slowing to a stop and reversing course, furthest away from the center.

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Womens’ Brains, Mens’ Brains
Thursday, December 13th, 2018

The “nothing box.” Heh. There’s some truth to that alright. Now…what was I doing again?

I recall a joke about this. Her: “Are you even listening to what I’m saying??” Him: “What a weird way to start a conversation.”

Office Space relates:

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?

Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.

Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?

Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.

Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.

Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.

Peter Gibbons: Good point.

Lawrence: Well, what about you now? What would you do?

Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?

Lawrence: Well, yeah.

Peter Gibbons: Nothing.

Lawrence: Nothing, huh?

Peter Gibbons: I would relax… I would sit on my ass all day… I would do nothing.

Lawrence: Well, you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he’s broke, don’t do shit.

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Their Agenda
Wednesday, December 12th, 2018

It is clear to me, following that confrontation yesterday among Trump, Pelosi and Schumer, that all three would agree with Friedman: “You can’t have open borders and a welfare state.” And yet the last two among those three insist on both. They’re pushing something they know won’t work.

In fact we have the same people pushing a great many seemingly unrelated issues:

Power People 1. Higher taxes — not to fund anything, just to aggravate and weaken the taxpayer.
2. Open borders and the welfare state.
3. Political correctness.
4. State control over “education” which doesn’t teach anything useful.
5. The “climate change” scam.
6. Higher fuel/energy prices.
7. Gun control.
8. Lower voting age.
9. Secularism.
10. Destruction of the family unit.
11. Animosity among races, creeds, sexes and sex-preferences.
12. State controlled censorship.

I’m seeing a few strands connecting together pairs, and in some cases triplets, of these things. But only ONE thing connects all twelve, and that’s the weakening, or hollowing-out, of the individual. We’re supposed to be ground down into the dirt, by frustration and despair. Everything we ordinary-rubes do should be taxed, obstructed, or both. The individual should be made to feel like there’s nothing he can do, nothing he can say, no way he can defend his career, his property, his family, his home. We aren’t supposed to be able to relate to each other. We’re supposed to lose our sense of community.

It’s more frightening to think there’s no conspiracy here, than to think there might be one. That would suggest the tie that binds this all together is merely common incentive; the “globalists” are simply state leaders acting in their own interests, who’ve figured out their own political prospects are brighter in a one-world government with a dispirited and depressed constituency.

Sadly, I think that’s it.

I know for damn sure there’s nothing they plan to do with tax revenue to keep the planet inhabitable for a few more decades, nor are they planning for the sexes to heal rifts between them by banning “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” or recognizing the word “too” is sexist…

With the climate change scam, it has always been clear to me the ultimate goal is taxation without representation.

It’s paving the way for a new narrative, which says “The oncoming ecological disaster is so great that we can’t afford to deal with that antiquated ‘consent of the governed’ crap anymore.”

But it’s not about making the planet livable or heading off an environmental disaster. If it were, they’d say how. They just want attention, the twelve bullets listed above, whatever the hell it is they’re supposed to get out of those, and money.

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Knowing So Much
Friday, December 7th, 2018

Hirono:

…[W]e Democrats know so much, that is true. And we have kind of have to tell everyone how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain.

Reagan:

The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant, it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.

I have nothing to add.

But Laura Ingraham does.

Reflecting on these remarks, Ingraham said that “Democrats and their allies imply that they have a monopoly on intelligence and brain power. But if that’s true, why have they screwed things up so badly when they had the chance to fix them?”

“Liberals claim to be for the little guy — you know, ‘they’re the champions of the average person.’ But they’re really elitist snobs at heart,” Ingraham argued.

After playing clips of liberals and media elites trashing Trump in 2016 and claiming that the stock market would tank and the country would be thrown into World War III if Trump somehow won the White House, Ingraham said she is still “seeing there’s very little evidence that they’ve learned much about America, why [Americans] voted in the first place for Donald Trump and why they still support so many of his policies — especially on trade and immigration.”

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Behar May Quit
Thursday, December 6th, 2018

Surber:

Years from now, you will remember exactly where you are right now and what you were doing when you learned Joy Behar may quit “The View.”

She had an on-air dust-up with Meghan McCain.
:
The Daily Mail reported, “Behar was then seen slamming her cue cards on the table and turning to sound off on McCain just as producers cut to break. Producers muted Behar’s microphone so that her expletives would not be heard on air.

“But the source told DailyMail.com that Behar threw her hands in the air, yelled ‘My God!’ and ‘Get this b***h under control.’

“‘If this s**t doesn’t stop I’m quitting this damn show. I can’t take this much more,’ Behar allegedly fumed.
:
Now then, Barbara Walters started “The View” because she felt men dominated political talk on television. An all woman panel would not be as aggressive and suffer the toxic testosterone that divides people.

Instead the show has proved the maxim that a misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women do.

I don’t see the issue at all. Yes interrupting is rude, and it grates on me even if it’s someone else being interrupted. Makes it hard for me to follow the flow. But that’s why I don’t watch The View.

Isn’t that the whole point of the show? Four or five nags sitting around a coffee table holding their obnoxious cups, not drinking out of them, constantly prattling away and interrupting each other. So what’s “this shit” that isn’t stopping, exactly? Joy Behar will quit if the show doesn’t change formats?

More likely, she wants — without consciously realizing it — special status. You all can interrupt each other. But not her. And does she have the privilege of interrupting others? Do you even have to ask…

I perceive there is a plot to revoke Women’s Suffrage, and to discredit women at large from holding positions of influence. I could be wrong, but if I’m right, The View must be linked to it. Every time I catch a glimpse of it I end up wondering who else is watching, and at the end of it what they think of letting women run things. It almost looks like a propaganda drive. It would be quite natural and fitting for a chyron to appear onscreen, right before the commercial break, asking the viewers if they’d want a panel like this to make decisions about their health care, their kids’ school curricula, the taxes they pay on each gallon of gas…

You end up thinking: I don’t care if they collectively happen to land on the right decision at the end of it. This is a bad process, I’m watching the sausage being made.

For the record, I don’t have any more faith than that in an all-male panel. An all-guy team gets sidetracked. The efficiency drops off when the team membership is up to about…five. At that point, there’s generally a bit too much diversion, too much guffawing, dirty jokes, not enough work getting done. In ancient times, packs of men would get together to go hunting so they could feed the tribe, and they were lean, mean and ruthlessly efficient. But that was because the prey might turn the tables and go after them. Nowadays the danger has been removed, and gaggles of guys are not the models of efficiency they once were. They’re the furthest thing from it.

Five double-X chromosomes are no better.

I really don’t know what in the Hell Barbara Walters was thinking. Probably, the show would be on awhile and now & then achieve ratings success; well okay then, mission accomplished. But was it supposed to show us how much more tranquil things would be with chicks calling the shots? As Surber notes, the forum leaves much to be desired there. It seems to have demonstrated the opposite.

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I Made a New Word LXXVI
Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Softracize (v.)

To ostracize a person faction or thing, not out of malicious intent, but as a necessary act of exclusion against a chaotic agent, a prerequisite first step to getting something done.

In the manuscript, Chapter Two, I describe…

…the toddler jumping on the bed, while you’re sitting on it trying to fix a pocketwatch…

It is a metaphor I invoke a few more times subsequently, because it’s important. Indeed, as I recall bittersweet memories from my twenties and thirties, I see much of this record amounts to a circular dummy-go-round of me learning over and over again, the real difference between order and chaos.

Things that actually work, be they living or not, are organisms of maintained order functioning within skins. Chaos exists on the outside of those skins. Order is preserved within. The rules may go on for pages and pages, or they may consist of a line or two; they may be written or they may not be. But there has to be a perimeter, within which there is compliance, or at least a means to assess, achieve and maintain it.

The software development project has coding standards. The village has a gate. The castle has a moat.

“Democratic socialism” is trendy right now, it politically appeals to people who have compassion for the ones outside of the moat. It is not an unreasonable thing to have this compassion. The implied contract of the community is “We maintain that all within these walls adhere to the standards but we make no assessment for or against the ones outside.” From time to time, an outsider may enter, or petition to enter, and be found worthy. Or the community may venture outside, discover someone worthy, and approach with an invitation.

But the goal people have in mind when they hear about this, is to tear down the walls so that everyone on the outside can benefit from the advantages within. It’s a fool’s errand. It may be achieved in a moment for photo-op purposes, but over the longer term of time, you can no more practically separate privileges from associated responsibility than you can separate the soy sauce from a jar of teriyaki.

If an element on the inside does not conform, it has to be brought up to spec. If that cannot be done, there is going to have to be an act of separation. Until that is completed, a situation of moderate disorder will have to be acknowledged. Typically that will result in a temporary suspension of real progress; creation will have to give way to preservation.

This is not obliteration. It is simply the way human progress, and communal living, function. Can’t fix the pocketwatch when there are little kids jumping on the bed. Can’t build the house of cards while you’re in the same room practicing your kickboxing. Order has to be shielded from chaos, or else chaos will devour order. It has always been this way.

So don’t shoot the messenger.

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The Religion of Leftism
Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Allie Stuckey writes at Townhall:

Leftism provides many of the same comforts that religion does without the expectation of personal sacrifice. Its adherents can feel that they’re caring for the “least of these” because they vote for policies that empower the government to offer more welfare to the poor. It is a lazy form of compassion, and it is appealing to those who want to pat themselves on the back without having to voluntarily spend of their own time, energy or money.
:
While leftism may not require personal responsibility, generosity or morality, it does demand everything of its devotees. It aims to conform the mind, the heart and the soul fully to its agenda. There is no room in leftism for disagreement on abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration, race or economics. All reasoning must be guided by intersectionality. All thoughts must be centered on some vague notion of social justice. There is no tolerance for defection.
:
Leftism is not just against traditional religion; it has replaced it. It is its own religion. And, like all religions, it excludes adherence to any competing value system. It is its religious nature that has made its believers so fiercely defensive. It is why they cannot stand disagreement.

Someone is trolling the leftists on Quora — again — probably because it’s easy to do. (It’s not me.) “Why are democrats and liberals considered leftists?” Interesting perspectives are to be found here.

In political science, leftism is the disposition to optimize for thriving in safe environments, where rightists are disposed to optimize for survival in dangerous environments. Planting perfectly edible corn in the ground is a leftist undertaking (it will grow and increase a hundredfold!) while the rightist urge is to eat it now and be on the lookout for tigers lurking in the foliage.

Of course, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are relative terms, not absolute ones. Left of what? Right of whom? The American corporate/Clintonite left is, by and large, to the economic right of most of the rightists in Europe, and economically to the right of even the mainstream Republicans of the 1980s.

There’s some truth to this, but it’s easy to see how wrong this is because overall, we grow corn and other staples in our red states. Where leftism thrives, nothing is produced except crackpot psychology theories, and high-tech gadgets for playing games and looking at porn. The gadgetry, as I’ve speculated previously, had to have been built by someone who didn’t think like a lib — at the very least, suspending the dead-end daydreaming while there was work that had to be done.

The part I find to have merit is the part that fixates on building the perfect environment. Leftists maintain a maniacal obsession over this. They’re not quite so keen on fulfilling the dead-tree definition of liberalism, their favorite part of it that has to do with welcoming change and embracing the future. Quite to the contrary, they’re constantly bellowing at us “Not yet, not yet, we don’t have the perfect environment yet. No one can go forward because we found someone still left behind.”

When The Real God blesses you with a lifespan approaching a full century, and you burn it all away on “Keep waiting, and force everyone else to keep waiting, until my imaginary oppressed people manage to catch up with us”; you can’t claim to be in favor of progress. Well you CAN. But only falsely.

Leftism’s god is a jealous god.

Cut the Flow Today being the day of mourning for George H. W. Bush, I’m hearing and seeing lamentations about our bygone era of civility, and wondering what we can do to get it back. “Stop arguing about politics!” seems to be the favored answer. Seems to me we tried that already; generations and generations of kids raised in schools and households where politics, sports and religion were not to be discussed. Because it leads to fighting, doncha know…

But then a funny thing happened. Kids my age, and younger, were also raised to recognize BadThink when & where we found it, and not sit by in silence, but instead rise up, call it out, confront it. Pardon me for saying so, but the people who taught us that were idiots. They envisioned a false-reality that never, or very seldom, existed. We’d be out walking on our peregrinations and overhear someone say “Black people steal a lot of stuff” or “Those ni**ers are no good” and we would confront the person engaging in this BadThink, shunning bigotry and intolerance into non-existence. We-ell…what happened was that we had to embiggen the definitions of bigotry. Today “I’m not quite so sure about same sex marriage” qualifies. “Kavanaugh is telling the truth” qualifies. “Don’t wreck health insurance for everybody else” qualifies.

Us grown-up children, good-thinkers, are to confront this BadThink where we find it. And play the “This argument’s not over until it’s over the way I like” game.

But so many among us were never taught how to argue. So many among us grew up in “Stop talking about politics, there’s cheesecake!” households. And simply do not know how to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting it. Desperately want to go through the experience of freely and sincerely exchanging ideas in a true dialogue, while maintaining respect for the opposing view and the person holding it — but don’t know how.

That’s the real reason we’re so contentious lately. It’s real. But it’s artificial. We created this, over time. We didn’t know where it would ultimately lead, but we were conscious of each step we took.

The jealous god of leftism is a hormonal rush. It isn’t thought at all. It’s the rush the liberal feels from confronting. We compound the existing sin when we acquiesce, offering up without resistance the apology or policy change demanded, just to avoid a little temporary awkwardness. If you resist, there is awkwardness, but it’s the responsible thing to do. And there follows a bit of enlightenment. The virtue-signaler stumbles around for a bit, not knowing what to do, like the dog that caught the car. I recommend anyone who has never tried it, do so at the earliest opportunity, partly to go through the experience. But mostly because, if the resistance doesn’t happen, there’s so much harm done, the effects of which may not be felt for years, but may last an entire lifetime.

Don’t apologize when there’s no apology due. Don’t feed the monsters. It makes bigger monsters.

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Ballot Harvesting
Sunday, December 2nd, 2018

Monica Showalter writes in American Thinker:

Anyone can turn in ballots now [here in California], no questions asked, no chain of custody required…Democrats were hollering about low turnout and how getting more turnout was a priority…They painted themselves as all concerned about “democracy” given the low rates of turnout in their districts…But what they really had in mind was “ballot harvesting.”…
:
I sign up for every party mail list in order to read what all political sides are thinking, so I get lots of Democratic Party mail, including polls of members…Could the fact that I am on those lists be the reason why I got a mail-in ballot when everyone else in my household gets sample ballots and goes to the polls on election day? Despite my Republican registration, it sure sounds like it.

This signals a grotesquely changed electoral landscape. Turns out the mail-in ballots are all that matters now, because all anyone has to do is harvest, and keep harvesting them, until Democrats get the result they want. I wrote about those lingering questions in the recent midterm here.

“Count all the ballots!” has been the Democrat rallying cry. Yet in reality, it was their defense of this sneaky little project…

I haven’t been keeping track, but it seems to me like every time the democrat party has had a rallying cry of any sort, in the long run it emerges you’d have been better off believing the opposite of whatever the rallying cry was supposed to make you think. Every “make a rallying cry” project, evidently, is attached to at least one of their notorious “make an established word mean something other than what it’s supposed to mean” projects.

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Staged
Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

Well yes, of course. it’s obvious. Click the pic to embiggen.

Hoft:

In the background of the picture a group of men are posing for one camera man and another is running towards another camera man. In other areas, people are just standing around. The woman with the children was just a photo-op…

Surber:

The whole media is a PR shop for this caravan. The media hailed the Reuters photographer as a hero.

He told NBC News, “When the tear gas started, some people were screaming and everybody started running away. I saw the woman and two children running away. One girl was barefoot from the beginning. The other was wearing beach sandals and lost them in the chaos.”

She lost her sandal!

Oh no.

Orange Man Bad…
:
…We have the worst media in the world.

We have made our media what it is, of course. The lies are going to get worse and worse, as long as they keep working. Our friends the liberals are the loudest among us — they solve everything by way of emotional outbursts, and they have the time, no one is counting on them to produce anything. And liberals have made it a point of pride to believe the right things, no matter how risible, and disbelieve all the WrongBadThink, no matter how little cause for doubt there may be. A brief glance in the rear view mirror at the Chredible Christine imbroglio, is sufficient to confirm that.

The rock won’t cease its descent until it reaches the ocean floor, and the floor has yet to be found.

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Psychology’s Replication Crisis
Friday, November 23rd, 2018

The Atlantic:

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena — the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks — might not be real…

One by one, researchers have tried to repeat the classic experiments behind these well-known effects — and failed. And whenever psychologists undertake large projects…they typically succeed, on average, half of the time.

Ironically enough, it seems that one of the most reliable findings in psychology is that only half of psychological studies can be successfully repeated.
:
But skeptics have argued that the misleadingly named “crisis” has more mundane explanations. First, the replication attempts themselves might be too small. Second, the researchers involved might be incompetent, or lack the know-how to properly pull off the original experiments. Third, people vary, and two groups of scientists might end up with very different results if they do the same experiment on two different groups of volunteers.

It comes as news to me that anyone was even making the attempt. I have long understood psychology to be a “soft science.” It qualifies as a scientific discipline only just barely, out of the sense that there’s a reality out there that is worth studying. But that the standard requirements applied to all others, which are really just prerequisites for conducting a valid experiment, were out of scope due to the nature of what was being studied.

Rather like economics. You can compile histories of this thing happening and then that other thing subsequently happening, then you can look for patterns. But you can’t truly reproduce these “experiments” according to a strict interpretation of that word in a scientific context, because you can’t isolate. Economics is the study of how everything is necessarily connected to everything else, and there’s always something spoiling the process. It’s the same with psychology. Those skeptics in that third group have it right. The old maxim about snowflakes, no two being identical, that’s true of people as well.

It is dangerous to intermix soft sciences like this, with hard sciences like physics, astronomy, geology, et al. Lacking the tools to replicate or to falsify, the discipline inevitably deteriorates into a hodge podge of theories that endure because they’re interesting…to someone. And then a credentialed priesthood arises around the unverified theories, because for something to be interesting, someone has to be around to find it so. The old thing about the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it, you know? Someone has to say “That’s an interesting theory” in order for someone else to say “The experts say this causes that…”

So we require credentialing, so those high priests can say “That’s a good theory because I say it is one, and who are you to take issue?”

If all of our science deteriorates into that layer, we will have no science and we will know nothing.

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The Walls Are Closing In!
Saturday, November 17th, 2018

From PJ Media.

“It’s not surprising that Donald Trump is increasing his attacks,” Rep. Red Lieu (D-CA) recently said on CNN. “The walls are closing in on him.”

That’s a familiar refrain on CNN and MSNBC, where hosts continue to string their audiences along with the hopeful narrative that Mueller is on the verge of delivering a death blow to the president. Those walls have apparently been on the verge of crushing Trump for the past 14-plus months now.

I’m just wondering: If this Mueller character is about to unleash the devastating final report and this is really gonna cook Trump’s goose once and for all…who gives a fig about those tax returns? Conversely, if the release of those tax returns is such a game-changing event, what does this say about the sum total of everything Mueller has managed to collect?

One really tips the scales or the other one does. Can’t be both. If it turns out to be neither one, though, that would be in keeping with the trend we’ve seen hold up thus far.

How do liberals miss this? That’s the real question. They still maintain a chokehold on our consensus expectations, on our prevailing sense of normalcy. They’ve won the House of Representatives after going two years having nothing to sell other than “we hate Trump.” Now they’re going to guide the course of Congress’ lower chamber, and arguably deserve to…therefore, The People have a right to know. What makes them so dysfunctional? How do they miss such obvious things?

It’s the same as it ever was. They “think” emotionally. A good story hooks ’em every time, if they happen to like it. There is little to nothing by way of critical thinking going on here. Regular-thinking is thinking about what fits, critical-thinking is thinking about what doesn’t. The if-then stuff.

“If your hair’s wet because you fell in the creek on the way home from school, and you didn’t go skinny-dipping, then how come your clothes are dry?”

If they had what it took to ask such questions about the narratives they happened to like, they wouldn’t be liberals.

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Fourteenth Birthday
Monday, November 12th, 2018

Of the blog that is; “The Blog That Nobody Reads.”

Due to work and personal obligations, we’ve throttled way back over the last two years but the flame is still lit. We’re at 8,320 posts, 26,826 comments and many users/readers.

Normally this time of year our rotation is 11/10: Marine Corps birthday; 11/11 Veteran’s Day; 11/12 our birthday. This time we disrupted the pattern because we wanted this business up in Paradise to stay on top where the uh, you know, “nobodies” would have more of a chance to see it. We’re still waiting to see how that all goes for our friend(s) and this is sort of a sad birthday for us all.

It’s obvious here that there’s a problem. Many days are very smoky. Air quality is extremely poor. The soot is getting everywhere and everything’s filthy. We’re still safe, but the emerging news remains less than encouraging for others nearby.

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Stan Lee Dead at 95
Monday, November 12th, 2018

Washington Post:

In the ’60s, Mr. Lee took a distinctly new approach to characters and setting, as well as to the very interaction with readers who had grown used to comics that were aimed solely at a younger audience and that featured flawless, square-jawed heroes who had uncomplicated morals.

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the comic-book-themed novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” said in an interview that Mr. Lee’s best-known characters were “vain, pompous, conceited. . . . Everything that works in comic books today is indebted to him for that.”

Wikipedia:

Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber, December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018) was an American comic-book writer, editor, and publisher. He was editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, and later its publisher and chairman, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.

In collaboration with several artists – particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko – he co-created fictional characters including Spider-Man, the Hulk, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Black Panther, the X-Men, and – also with co-writer Larry Lieber – the characters Ant-Man, Iron Man, and Thor. In doing so, he pioneered a more complex approach to writing superheroes in the 1960s, and in the 1970s challenged the standards of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to it updating its policies.

Following his retirement from Marvel, he remained a public figurehead for the company, and frequently made cameo appearances in Marvel Cinematic Universe films. Meanwhile, he continued independent creative ventures into his 90s.

Lee was inducted into the comic book industry’s Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. He received a National Medal of Arts in 2008.

Well that’s too bad. I generally disapprove of these reforms, but it is true that his contributions to the entertainment medium were invaluable and I’m certain he’ll leave a big hole that will be hard to fill.

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He’s Always Been There For Us!
Friday, November 9th, 2018

I have, by the grace of God, many dear close blogger friends. Gerard Van der Leun is my most prized, for so many reasons.

Within the last day, he passed on word that he had to evacuate from his childhood locale of Paradise, CA due to the Butte fire, and subsequently learned his house was destroyed.

Paradise This is a fatal fire. The latest death toll I have is nine, and unfortunately I have a feeling providing linkage to the stat would be useless because that number may change. But our friend is safe, and so is his Mom, and his cat. Thank God. But so much lost. Can you even imagine.

Nobody reads this blog, as I’ve noted many times…so I’m sure no one’s reading this. But anyway. I’m heading on over to the tip jar. Anybody who wants to come along, meet me here. I’ve been interacting with this wonderful man and watching him for over a decade, during which time he’s just so freely given of himself to younger lesser blogs, like me, with his linkage and his advice and literary talents. To say nothing of his entertainment value.

It’s go-time. This is a compatriot, in his hour of need. If you have the means, at the moment, please join me in treating him that way. If not, I’m sure your best wishes will be welcome as well.

Gerard, your grief is ours. Our home, should you see fit to work us into your rotation for whatever reason, is yours.

Update 11/10/18: Returning to survey the damage. Pretty heartbreaking.

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This Is Good CXXI
Thursday, November 8th, 2018

I could watch this over and over again.

Want to set it as my ring tone. The good stuff that starts around 1:18 and builds to…”Well I’m not a big fan of yours either…”

I am wondering. How many people in society today, learn how to so-called “discuss” issues like this by watching CNN reporters? I’ve seen that on these very pages, in fact the one and only account I’ve ever banned in all these years, I banned because of exactly this sort of behavior. There’s this ostensible “question” but it’s really a manhandling of the narrative — the person asking the “question” doesn’t get back the so-called “answer” he wanted, and so what follows is this won’t-shut-up, me-do-all-the-talking thing. It’s a disgrace to the what-we-call “press corps” because those exchanges occur in an environment in which this sort of passive-aggressive behavior works much better than on the pages of a blog.

Maybe we, as a supposedly advanced civilization, would do well to get back to the noble institution of…the question. You know. The interrogative. The specification of some piece of information that is actually missing, and courteously followed by a period of listening…for that very piece of information the questioner is supposed to have wanted. And then if both provider-of-question and provider-of-answer do their jobs, and are really making a priority out of exchanging information to make things better understood by all others, the exchange will be over relatively quickly and the next person can ask the question…

Remember those days?

In the strange surreal pocket-universe of CNN, I’m sure President Trump is thought of as a tyrant who is bringing that to an end — especially after the Secret Service suspended Acosta’s press pass yesterday afternoon over this. The reality is the President might very well be bringing those days back again. His behavior, here, is refreshing and if you pay attention closely, you’ll see it’s carefully compliant to the traditional rules of decorum. Please. Thank you. Excuse me. He handled this like a champ.

Acosta’s behavior, on the other hand, has become standard procedure. Anybody who’s been watching these proceedings, more than sporadically since sometime around George H. W. Bush, knows this. The whole “speaking truth to power” thing has gotten out of hand. Acosta asks “questions”…harumph. Those aren’t questions. They lead to round-robin never-done arguments, until he gets adherence to the script he’s got in his head…wasting everybody else’s time…because they’re not questions.

Trump: Making questions questions again!

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I Made a New Word LXXV
Saturday, November 3rd, 2018

Lemonhead (n.)

A person who labors under the belief that his or her feelings of resentment have something to do with the preferred and final solution to all problems.

Don Lemon More broadly, a person who can see resentment does not solve all problems, but any problems not solved by being resentful are not worth solving.

You may have a lemonhead or two in your circle of friends, or in your family. You’ll know it for sure if there are certain subjects you just try to avoid because you don’t want to hear the same litany yet again…see, the problem remains. They’re not really solving it.

Credo of the lemonhead:

1. Resentment solves all problems.
2. If any problem can’t be solved by way of resentment, it must not be worth solving. It’s stupid. Fuck it!
3. All feelings of resentment must be expressed.

The three questions all diligently-thinking adults must ask about all things, have no place in the world of the lemonhead. Is there room for doubt? What makes it so? What are we to do about this? Piss on that. Just be an ornery little wanker about it, do some ritual bitching, and most important of all be seen doing the bitching.

Problem solved.

In their world. Their tiny, yellow, sour little world.

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“We Have to Stop Demonizing People and [Demonize] White Men”
Wednesday, October 31st, 2018

Don Lemon, talking too much on Cuomo Prime Time:

CNN host Don Lemon insisted that “the biggest terror threat” facing the U.S. “is white men” — and wondered what the nation could “do about that.” He made his comments Monday night on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time.”

“I keep trying to point out to people not to demonize any one group or any one ethnicity,” Lemon told anchor Chris Cuomo. “So we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the Right, and we have to start doing something about them.”

Lemon claims he doesn’t want to “demonize any one group” — but he has no problem doing exactly that when the group is conservative white men.

Cuomo either ignored or missed the obvious contradiction in Lemon’s assertion.

All these years, people overall imagined “news” to be put together and brought to us by angelic Walter Cronkite types…we imagined a kindly uncle wise saintly type…

Cronkite himself, in truth, was very far removed from this.

As for the so-called “news” people who work the circuit today, they’re a bunch of deranged hateful kids. Self-loathing white kids, non-white kids bigoted against whites, self-loathing male kids, non-male kids bigoted against males, self-loathing straight kids, gay kids bigoted against straights. Sheltered, inexperienced, bigoted, ignorant, hateful. Proud of their ignorance and proud of their hate.

It is the kind of ignorance that can come only from people who haven’t done things. Like “Buy your meat in the store where no animals were harmed.”

Or “Move those deer-crossing signs to someplace with less traffic…”

They don’t even get the basics. They don’t understand the difference between a fact and an opinion. They don’t know the difference between an opinion about what’s so, vs. an opinion about what to do. And as Mr. Lemon so aptly demonstrates, a blatant contradiction in mid-sentence, setting the first half and second half of said sentence at odds with each other, doesn’t even give them pause.

Trusting them to bring us our news made as much sense as trusting a barnyard pig to do our taxes. Or, scratch that, to recommend a decent brand of bacon…

Never let them decide for the rest of us what’s so; never, never, not ever. They don’t know and they don’t care. You can’t build anything, in tech or in anything else, thinking the way they do — except onerous rules that make it less likely someone else could build something. Their silly arguments are built for monologue, not dialogue, and they can’t give us answers to even the most obvious questions about them, nor can they answer to the fundamental questions all diligently thinking adults must ask about all things.

And they lie. Even worse, wherever they can get away with it, they “demonize” others for merely telling the truth. If the rest of us notice this, too audibly or in the wrong company, we’re to be demonized too because we’re creating a threatening environment — for them. But they may do their demonizing at pleasure. I can’t explain this and you can’t either. It’s got something to do with “equality.”

Update 11/1/18: Evidently he still doesn’t understand what the problem is, and has taken to spewing some more hateful nonsense…thinks there is blowback against his earlier remarks because of lack of data or something.

It’s not going to be possible in the short term, to get the point across to him that statistical support is not the issue. The issue is that he’s blinded by hate and therefore can’t be trusted to know what is and isn’t so. People like this can be trusted to report what the statistics are, but that’s all. They can’t be trusted to interpret their meaning, to figure out what some closely related statistics might say, can’t be trusted to notice, let alone process, any evidence that might contradict. In fact they can’t even rely on themselves to make a statement about what it is they’re trying to prove. What is he trying to prove, anyway?

I see only one possible answer, and that would qualify his whole litany, indisputably, under the very textbook definition of racism. No doubt he’d say this means I lack the sophistication required to comprehend. If he had what it took to realize “A, therefore B” he wouldn’t be a liberal. It’s gotta be the other guy’s problem.

It’s really sad. He thinks he proved what he said earlier. He really proved what I said earlier. Listen to these people…only to get a reading on how bad so-called “journalism” has gotten, how far it’s fallen, how much it’s rotted from within.

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The Good People They Don’t Deserve to Have
Tuesday, October 30th, 2018

I’ve said liberals are definitions-averse, once, or a thousand times. Want me to prove it? Let’s just wait until they start recruiting new liberals, from the ranks of the wise centrists…you know, the ones who don’t lean one way or the other, because they’re above paying attention to politics. The salt of the earth types. The decent people who want to do right by others. The genuinely good people that the liberal movement doesn’t deserve to have.

When they make the pitch to these good people, the definitions of things don’t just whither and die. They come to an abrupt stop like Wiley Coyote hitting the side of a cliff.

We need to raise taxes so government can pay as it goes!! Sounds so reasonable. It sounds, at first blush, like anyone opposed to this must be the ones who want to ruin everything. Pay as it goes? As in, not pass on the debt to my grandchildren? Who’s opposed to that? Of course we have to raise the taxes…on…uh, you know…those other people over there. Rich people. Not me.

The definitions have abruptly ceased. What is the public debt today? What do we expect it is going to do next year, and the year after, if we don’t raise the taxes? What will it do if we do? Are we thinking about paying it down a bit, or off entirely? If so, when?

Liberals don’t give a shit about deficits, debt, solvency of future generations or any of that boring stuff. They just want high taxes.

Another example is the spooky climate change. You have to agree with them on it anyway, right? Otherwise you’re “going against the science,” because ninety-seven percent of all scientists agree…uh…on stuff. Well, what is that exactly? You actually aren’t supposed to be asking about that, you’re supposed to just assume: Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree my great great grandchildren are going to fry like worms on a hot sidewalk, if we don’t tell that nasty man Donald Trump what’s what & what-for.

We have to raise the minimum wage because it’s impossible to raise a family on this! Oh really? What are people doing, raising families on minimum wage?

We can’t have someone like that on the Supreme Court! Anita Hill and Susan Blasey Ford were telling the truth! Oh is that right? You were there? And what happens if we do have someone “like that” on SCOTUS? If you could have blocked that nomination, what exactly would that have done? Send some kind of message to would-be molesters? A message that would have managed to do more good, than the harm done by the other message that would have been sent…if you don’t like the President’s nominee, just make up a story and we’ll socially cudgel people into believing it…

Of course you’re not supposed to demand specificity if someone uses “everyone” or “nobody.” But you’re certainly supposed to act like they’re serious when they say it…because they sure act like it. Everyone agrees! Or: Nobody wants to take your guns! So you went door-to-door and took a poll?

Must raise taxes on the wealthiest one percent to make them pay their fair share! One percent? Why not two percent? Or five percent? How much adjusted gross income is that? What is this “fair share” of which you speak, how do you go about determining that?

I don’t care if President Trump cures cancer, I refuse to support him because of my principles! Okay, so what are those? At this point, Trump supporters can point to any one of a number of things he’s done to ease the suffering of people here & there…and you can argue against some of it, but to argue against all of it would be silly and absurd. So your principles include making people suffer, or do they not include the abatement of peoples’ suffering? What other principles are worth having?

Part of the reason radical liberalism has made such inroads over the last fifty years, is our society at large deserved to have it happen. Liberalism is like the vampire that cannot enter your house, until someone invites him in…and someone did. People were in a bigger hurry to demonstrate their kindness and goodness, than to demand details where it would have been more than appropriate to demand those details. That is what opened Pandora’s Box. On all the rest of us.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Be specific, and when someone else wants you to support something, make them be specific too. Next time around, ignorance will not be an adequate excuse.

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Belonging
Wednesday, October 24th, 2018

Modern liberalism; the desire to be a liberal; all the mission statements of liberal efforts; all their misguided legislation, when you strip away the red-herrings that are things they don’t really care about like “economy” and “environment”…

STEM What you’re left with is the desire to belong. This is the real distinguishing characteristic between liberals and conservatives. The conservative is not a spoiled-rotten nobleman from the court of King Louis XVI who wants to keep his inheritance and his lands and his status and his privilege; it’s a frazzled shopkeeper downtown who doesn’t want bums crapping on his sidewalk. When he’s done with trying to see what he can do about that, he has to use his remaining hours attending to his business, which may or may not be profitable. But he’s got something he needs to do, and a sense of purpose to it. He belongs. That’s the issue.

Liberals are in the process of building a whole new world, atop the ashes of this one as soon as they’re done destroying it, in which the people who belong somewhere today, don’t belong anywhere then. And the people who don’t belong anywhere now, will have a place to be in this new world.

This is why they accuse dissenters of “not going with the science.” It’s got nothing to do with science, it’s all political. A carrot to be dangled before the nose of the ones who seek to belong.

As this “caravan” continues to demonstrate to us, the emblems of the movement are people who don’t belong. The gays who couldn’t get married, the transgenders who supposedly couldn’t go to the bathroom anywhere, the women who are having perceived trouble breaking the glass ceiling…

I’m old enough to remember when the rallying cry of liberals was “think globally, act locally.” If liberals who craved this sense of belonging actually did that, they would find, in a very short stretch of time, they’d belong. But then the political movement would whither and die.

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On Hillary Being Uncivil
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018

CNN:

Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that civility in America can only begin again if Democrats win back the House or Senate this fall.

“You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.”

I’m late to the party on this one and others have already commented quite a bit. There is one thing, though, that doesn’t seem to get mentioned…

She never qualified this “what you stand for, what you care about” thing. Ever. Right? In context, we could presume, by reading everything literally, she’s talking about an up-or-down vote on the nomination of Merrick Garland. I have some doubts that’s what she means.

This is one of the reasons I frown on ending sentences with dangling prepositions. It ties into my dislike of passive voice. This is a sterling, shining example. The most important facet of the message she’s supposed to be conveying…isn’t even in there. It’s left for us to guess.

By design, one must conclude. If she said what she really thought, people would start to shy away from it.

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On the Pink Hats
Sunday, October 14th, 2018

I have a character flaw. Actually I have many, but perhaps the one that has alienated people most frequently is this one…

From the time I could talk, I have driven people to distraction by treating the unknown as, you know, the unknown. Like a little kid — but why? Why this? Why that? I’m sure for people who don’t welcome it, it’s quite tedious. There hasn’t been any enigma worth leaving as an enigma. This is not to say I’ve managed to figure out everything — far from it — but at the very least I’ve always wanted to make a lasting footnote out of whatever story was incomplete, whatever mystery couldn’t be cracked. Just in case some new information came my way, at a later time, that could answer the question…

Right up until these fucking pink pussy hats.

“I am unhappy with Trump winning the election” has something to do with wearing a knitted facsimile of a woman’s vagina on your head…how? I’m at the point where I don’t give a shit anymore. Past it, rather. Yes it’s got something to do with this hot-mic debacle on the bus with “grab ’em by the pussy,” that part I get. But what’s this supposed to be on your head? Another woman’s vagina? Your own? You’ve got pussy on your mind? You’re offering up your hat for Donald Trump to grab? You want him to grab your head?

The core message seems to be one of: I really wanted that scandal to decide the election so Hillary would win, and since that didn’t happen it makes me unhappy. Okay, so you learned the hard way the country overall isn’t that hung up on this stuff. Now you wish to repeat the message, in the form of knitted head wear, that you’ve learned through experience doesn’t work. And toward that end you want to spend real money, make a big show out of spending the money, encourage others to spend money on this thing you know doesn’t work. I don’t get that part.

It’s like the desire went one way, reality went the other way, and what you wish to advertise is that you elevate your desires above conflicting reality. Well right. That’s part of what makes a liberal a liberal, “feelz above realz.” Well yeah, we knew this about you guys already. For quite awhile. If you could put what’s real above what your feelings were about it, and in so doing acknowledge reality even when you find it uncomfortable, you wouldn’t be liberals. So what else are you trying to say?

Pink Pussy Hats The official website says it is a

social movement focused on raising awareness about women’s issues and advancing human rights by promoting dialogue and innovation through the arts, education and intellectual discourse.

No it doesn’t do that. Not unless you count eyeball-rolls as “dialogue” and wearing a lady-parts reference on your head as “intellectual discourse.” There is slippage here. I know I’m the one reading things too literally, and there’s a “wink wink nudge nudge” going on that I’m supposed to…you know…just get. Like and stuff. Well no, I don’t get it, it eludes me.

I see some other lefty activists, it turns out, don’t like the hats. This comes as a surprise to these people who are much smarter than I am, who can just-get-it. Looks like they didn’t get something: “…that they [the hats] might not include trans women or nonbinary women or maybe women whose (genitals) are not pink.” Alright so maybe this is a fail anyway. But what was it trying to say? The questions above remain open.

Or…maybe not. Unlike the many, many other things I haven’t managed to get in my half century on the planet…and I’m including in that, things like “Why doesn’t Ziggy wear pants?” and “How does the roadrunner disappear into a tunnel the Coyote painted onto the rock?”…with this one my patience is at an end and I don’t care anymore.

The hat wearers themselves, apart from displaying execrable judgment, don’t know. And don’t care.

That’s like George Lucas not knowing or caring why “Han shot first” at Darth Vader at the dinner table in Cloud City, when he didn’t shoot first with Greedo back at Mos Eisley. Or for that matter, Darth Vader sitting down at a dinner table. If he’s ignorant & apathetic and he’s the one putting together this universe, that means there’s no answer. I think we’re at that point with the pink hats. The thing that would make it all make sense, is out of view, but since it’s out of view, I’m ready to seriously entertain the possibility — now a likelihood — that there’s nothing there at all. I can’t prove it. But this time, perhaps for the first time, I’m ready to enshrine that without any further evidence substantiating that it’s so, as an article of belief.

It’s an incoherent message. End of mystery.

3 Comments »

Are You Serious?
Sunday, October 7th, 2018

Now that the Kavanaugh-scopy is over, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on one thing: This “job interview” metaphor which I think was first invoked by Lindsey Graham. There are many problems with this; as more than one Los Angeles Times reader has pointed out, “job interviews aren’t supposed to ruin lives.”

I have some experience with job interviews, on both sides of the table. When interviewing, I see my role as a senior technical adviser who, when you get right down to it, is extraordinarily unlikely to contribute anything that will change the outcome one way or the other. When I’m the one being interviewed, of course the food on my table is connected directly to that, so I put a lot more importance on that.

Being a “two century man” in the tech world, I look back on my experiences and divide them that way. There is pre-Y2K in which everything was straightforward; there is post-Y2K in which something seems to have happened and I’m still not entirely sure what it is. I’ll get to that in a bit. Let me first concentrate on the earlier time back when the year began with “nineteen.”

Life was simple. Employers wanted to know if I already had the skills; and if I didn’t have them, what would the experience be like for them as I acquired those skills. Do you know the — let’s call it — Lizard computer programming language? Five years experience with the Lizard language was obviously superior to 2 or 3 years experience. If you had zero years, maybe you knew the Newt language. Lizard is just like Newt, someone might say. He’ll pick it up real quick if he’s as smart as he seems. After assessment of experience in the relevant field, we would proceed to team-compatibility, which was really as precise an estimate as could be formed about whether you were a natural-born horse’s ass. Remember that pudgy guy in Jurassic Park who stole the frozen dinosaur embryos? They wanted to not hire that guy.

Nedry Now my full-time jobs have lasted awhile, on average. Against the obvious expectations, this is more of a bug than a feature when it comes time to go looking, because this recruiting-world can change dramatically while I’m disconnected from it. Some people have spent twenty years or more contracting and haven’t been in any one gig for more than a year or so, which must be interesting. I lack their familiarity with the system. And so a few years after the calendar changed, I woke up from my slumber and discovered everything else changed too. This “soft skills” assessment that’s supposed to screen out double-chin guys who’d steal the dinosaur embryos, had exploded like a supernova, incinerating and consuming everything else. Fifteen years onward I’m still figuring out how to process this. The technology has become much more complicated and there are many more horror stories of enterprises hiring the wrong guy — wrong in the skills department — and having to dismiss him. And so the concern is there. But it doesn’t seem to percolate through the system. It’s like Human Resources has thrown a protective barrier around this process and imposed its own system of priorities, excluding all others.

Which isn’t necessarily wrong. You don’t want to hire a horse’s ass.

The most obvious explanation is that shared experience must have necessitated the shift. Maybe there have been a lot of horse’s-asses getting hired. Lots of dinosaur embryos stolen. I would imagine you could absorb a lot more damage hiring a guy with the correct skills but missing the necessary scruples, than the other way around.

But isn’t hiring a candidate who’s missing either one a nearly-guaranteed fail? So in that sense, sympathizing with it as a business decision, I’m still a bit baffled. I think I’m not the only one.

But my point is, throughout it all what we’re doing — the employer and employee alike — is the dance of being an adult. We’re adulting. And this essentially comes down to three words in the form of a question.

Are you serious?

The hard skills, the soft skills, the clothes you’re wearing, the company you keep, your training, your pursuit of the training. It all comes down to showing the other person you’re serious. That’s the big difference between being an adult and being a kid. For me this has become a big issue, as over the years I’ve come to turn it around, out of necessity, figuring out prospective “employers” or the recruiters who represent them aren’t serious. And from talking to others in the tech field, I’ve learned this isn’t unique to me. The emphasis has shifted away from the recruiters assessing our skills; many among them aren’t doing that at all. They assess whether we’re serious, in terms of whether we’d be a good fit for the team, and then we have to assess whether they’re serious about opening up an interview in which we’re really being considered, as opposed to what looks like an interview and isn’t one. Or whether they just want to collect names to put on a list so it looks like they’ve really gone through the field with a fine-tooth comb, when the successful candidate has been chosen already.

With the wisdom of hindsight, I can see things didn’t really change that much between the centuries. Back in my younger days when the central question was “Do You Know Lizard?” they really just wanted to know if I was serious. Do you know it already, or are you going to have to learn on our nickel, was almost a peripheral question, somewhat along the lines of “Is shipping included?” when you buy something over the Internet. Looking at it from the employer’s point of view, back in the days when I wasn’t commanding that much in terms of salary, things would work out alright even if I didn’t know Lizard or Newt or Dragon or Iguana — as long as I was serious. It was exactly like, for them, the way it is for us when the supplier has the item in stock, but has to ship it from China. If we really want the item and we know it’s right for us, we’ll pay the higher amount, and wait. And it will make good business sense to do so.

This is why adults ask each other, in these words or in other words, “Are You Serious?”

It’s not just looking for a job, or even buying & selling stuff. About this time I had to re-enter the dating field, and I discovered once again that things had changed. The sex appeal I never really thought I had in great amounts, in my youth, I must have had because there was something present-and-accounted-for before, that was missing now. But also, in my age group this faded away as a consideration. Women my age were more concerned about compatibility, which was a good thing because that’s where my concerns were as well. But what was that, exactly? Throughout the weeks and months a certain reality slowly began to sink in, that women by & large weren’t personally sure of what they wanted to find. It was as if the vision for most-desirable-male, had descended upon Planet Woman, much like a popular new fashion trend. And women wanted to be seen by other woman pursuing this type of guy, just as they’d want to be seen by other woman wearing a particular brand or style of leather boot. What I was coming to learn was that the “success” of these encounters, and their duration over this very brief window of time, were in inverse proportion to the distance between me — as each of my prospects saw me — and this ideal.

Whether I was an interesting person. How much money I made. How I spent my spare time. What I watched on the teevee (which, at that time, was nothing). What books I read. We think, when we’re available and looking, that women want to know these things so they can pick up clues and form conclusions about what makes us tick, our compatibility with each other, what their lives would be like as they share them with us. My own experiences quickly disabused me of that. From what I saw, it’s more like picking up clues about what other women will think of them when, for some period of time, you’re the one bringing them to the whatever. I found this to be frustrating, of course. It meant even my successes were defeats. The women weren’t thinking that much about what they really wanted. They were thinking way too much about what they’d be telling their girlfriends about their new fella, and whether that made for a good story that would contribute to their social position with those girlfriends.

And I see nowadays, with a new generation, as was the case back then — if a woman is really cornered with the troublesome question of “What do you want in a man?” and forced to come up with an answer — reliable as rain it will come back. “He makes me laugh.” That’s Planet Woman talk for “I don’t have any idea and figuring it out isn’t my priority right now.” That usually means they don’t want a happy life they’re sharing with a man. They put a much higher value on getting approval from other women.

Oh Shut Up I say now, to the lads who are available and are struggling to fix what’s broken: That’s what’s broken. Fix that first. The women who are doing the selecting, like all other selecting adults, are struggling to properly assess the answer to the question “Are you serious?” And they’re confused because the most common way to resolve that is to figure out if the prospective suitor is not serious. No wonder they’re so frustrated.

How do you fix that, when you don’t get to control how a woman evaluates you? Same way you fix the employment thing. You turn it around. In both areas of life, if you’re having troubles it means you’re not putting enough emphasis on assessment. You’re not spending your share of time in the magistrate’s seat. It means you have to put more thought into whether the other person is serious. Women, jobs…we may be bringing something to the table that opens a lot of doors, or we may not, but either way we’ve only got time for one of each. It’s not my place to do all the jobs or to date all the women. So grown-ups have to make a selection and that starts with figuring out if the other person is serious.

How to figure out someone isn’t serious, is something I should probably leave for a whole separate post. But it might be within scope here, and paying a decent minimal respect to the reader’s time, to burn off just one short paragraph kicking off that topic before returning to the subject at hand. In all these walks of life, we have a great many purported “adults” walking around among us who don’t really have what it takes to be an adult, because they haven’t ever gotten over that one big shock of entering adulthood. The squirming away under the microscope, while someone who’s considering entering into, or maintaining, a relationship with you tries to figure out if you’re serious. Incomplete “adults,” just tall old kids really, want that settled so that the question goes away. They want a lifetime-guaranteed affirmative-adjudication. After some deadline, if the question remains there must be something wrong with the person asking. Think in terms of Barack Obama’s, and His supporters’, seething resentment against anyone daring to question His birth certificate, or that Blasey Ford woman’s supporters and their anger against anyone who wouldn’t uncritically believe her so-called “testimony.” This is a desire for immediate and lasting approval — and a simmering grudge if it isn’t forthcoming. Adults know there is no such thing; they are comfortable with the reality that there are only two answers to are-you-serious, “no” and “pending.” That’s a very different thing from saying some residual distrust will always be there, or that no one has any real confidence in anybody else. Actually it means quite the exact opposite. Adults judge each other, they each find the other person is serious, they renew the business or marital or friendly relationship for the day, and then…they keep assessing and renewing. This is not suspicion. It is affirmation.

How this pertains to Kavanaugh, and likening his confirmation process to a “job interview”:

It’s incorrect, of course, and not for the reasons the LA Times readers say. They’re still right and Sen. Graham is still wrong. The Senate, as a whole, made an ass out of itself because it did not assess Judge Kavanaugh the way adults assess each other, trying to figure out the answer to “Are You Serious?” The democrats, who still have way too much power even though they’re in the minority, sat in judgment of the opposite. They didn’t want five seats on the Supreme Court taken up by people who are serious. They wanted more not-serious people on the bench, and fewer serious people.

This, the knowledge that has come my way tells me — both the personal anecdotes and what I’ve learned through more established and orthodox channels — is what’s wrong with our society all-around at the present time. We are pandering way too much to people who entered into adulthood, and couldn’t cope with the idea that they have to convince someone they’re serious, which of course kids don’t have to do. The trolley came off the tracks when these grown-up kids managed to get power without figuring out how to do that. And now, in dating, in real job interviews, and in politics, they’re usurping the very concept of adulthood, turning it upside-down, by sitting in judgment of who is & isn’t serious…

…and then making a point of picking the people who aren’t.

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About Yesterday
Friday, September 28th, 2018

Why are the smarmy liberal jackasses so quiet? I remember when Cohen agreed to talk and Manafort got convicted, there was donkey-bleating everywhere and you couldn’t get away from it. I’ve got one at home and one at work. They’re actually letting me go about my business now, not saying a word. They act kind of like the guilty dog.

I’m still waiting for something to emerge from this Cohen-talking thing. Maybe that’s it. I was told at the time I wouldn’t have to wait long for something juicy, and I’m still waiting…

The other thing I notice is that it seems something is happening with the women-accusing-men thing. On the Internet, liberals aren’t afraid to share their feelings, and it doesn’t take much time at all to ascertain that feelings are all they have here. The facts are friendly to Kavanaugh and unfriendly to his so-called accuser. But — I believe her! Because! Her testimony! So brave! It’s like stepping into a time machine and emerging in 1991.

These people don’t seem to understand: You can take sexual assault on women seriously, and still take a pass on the flakier allegations of it, even call them out for being flaky. It’s not a package deal. As I often like to say, grown-ups form opinions based on facts, not based on expectations of other people. This is yet another problem with left-wing politics: Low, as in rattlesnakes-belly low, standards for their emblems. Time after time, they choose the wrong ones. Their selected highlighting icons representative of some supposed far-reaching social problem, stink on ice, stink worse than they’d stink if they were picked randomly, as if someone is making an effort to choose the ones that stink the most. Example: Innocent young men and boys of color being shot and killed by overly-aggressive, trigger-happy cops is something that really does happen and is a real problem — I think — but somehow they decided to pick Michael Freakin’ “Gentle Giant” Brown. Who made that call? And Trayvon Martin? Who picked him to represent anything, who decided we should all be watching him?

If I made it my business to go around arguing about this, I’d feel betrayed. “This is a real thing! Why didn’t you pick that guy, over there?”

The woman who testified yesterday made it look like maybe we’re entering into a whole new era here. It will take a lot of time to determine whether this perception is accurate, but it looks like accusations of this nature are nothing more than an expected price men should pay when they are on ascension. They/we have to grease the right palms to pass through the right checkpoints. Wasn’t that the original complaint in feminism, that men were enjoying the fruits of success without bringing women along, a sort of “take your little sister with you when you play outside” thing? But we already had a convention for that, it was called marriage. Not good enough, because a woman’s place is in the office. Oh and now you’re not promoting them as often or as quickly as some paper-pusher in the nation’s capitol, who knows nothing of your business or of what men & women are supposed to do in it, thinks you should. So we have the usual gimmicks that make paper-pushers happy, affirmative action, quotas, set-asides, and lots of showboating about ending institutionalized sexism “once and for all.”

Still not good enough! When a man’s contributions are being appreciated and he’s being promoted, all of the women who share his interests profit; but what about the women who don’t? So unfair! Something must be done for them!

I don’t know what’s a sadder sight: The people among us who think this is how it’s supposed to work, that the fruits of labor are distributed according to ever-evolving social rules & taboos and aren’t legitimately earned; or, the casual-observers who tune into these things like they’re Hallmark Christmas movies, and come away bumptiously boasting “I believe her!” based on her performance, not on the facts. The latter toiling away in complete ignorance about their bedfellow-tethering to the former, failing to catch on to what’s obvious to everyone else, that they’re supporting a movement and not a woman.

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Memo For File CCX
Wednesday, September 26th, 2018

Conservatism as defined in the dictionary:

A political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change…the tendency to prefer an existing or traditional situation to change.

Liberalism:

A theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard.

A political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties…a philosophy that considers government as a crucial instrument for amelioration of social inequities.

These don’t work, especially when one seeks to understand the current political situation in the United States, led as it is by a “conservative” who seeks to change things, and is resisted by “liberals” who want to keep things the way they are. These liberals do not believe in the self-regulating market, as America’s First Holy Emperor made all too clear.

My definitions are imbued with the unique desirable advantage of actually working, even across across time:

What exactly does conservatism seek to conserve? Civilization, the blessings that come from having it, and the definitions that make civilization possible. From what does liberalism seek to liberate us? Those things — starting with the definitions.

Civilization, the dictionary tells us, is:

A relatively high level of cultural and technological development…the culture characteristic of a particular time or place…refinement of thought, manners, or taste…a situation of urban comfort.

I take issue with these as well. Not because I disagree with what they say, but because they’re weak definitions. They depend on themselves.

Civilization is the banishment of something else; it is an absence of something. That something is brutality.

Savage cruelty, inhuman behavior, insensibility to pity or shame.

Brutality is when we act like animals, civilization is when we act like something better. Brutality is when, I am bigger and stronger than you and you have something I want, it’s mine already. You just don’t know it yet. When I want it I’ll take it. Civilization is a bulwark, of some kind, against that. Civilization has laws, usually criminal and civil. It has hierarchies of authority. It provides for redress of grievances.

I wasn’t there, but civilization must have started with motherhood. That’s because it must have started with someone who was weak, and yet valued by someone who was strong; this must be how physical strength, as the coin of the realm, was displaced by something else — the only way it could happen. The brute is at the top of the local hierarchy of brutes, the strongest one who can take all that he pleases. But the brute has a mother. If he wants to go and do his brutalizing, he has to leave the cave and roam around, and cannot be there all the time. And so there must have been pacts made: You leave mine alone, and I’ll leave yours alone.

Civilization depends on definitions of things. For a definition to work, it must a) impose an objectively-evaluated reproducible result upon complex situations that arise from everyday life, and b) not depend on itself. Reviewing human history, even casually, it is easy to see civilization is not the default state. The human race has managed to erect various civilizations, and after a time these crumble into nothing and become archeological relics. So it takes something to get a civilization going, and once it’s started you can’t just walk away and expect it to keep on truckin’.

Anything that is not the default state, that involves other people and may or may not work — to get it working and keep it working, you have to have three things. You must have these definitions, along with the willingness to make and abide by the definitions once they’re made; you have to have the resources, including time, work and the willingness to do the work; and you have to have the vision.

A thought, concept, or object formed by the imagination.

Many people can participate in a common effort, each contributing their visions, if they agree on a common set of values.

Something intrinsically valuable or desirable: …sought material values instead of human values.

Once you form a vision, you can make a plan. The plan requires the vision; you have to incorporate a workable understanding of what it is you’re trying to do.

A method for achieving an end…a detailed formulation of a program of action.

If the plan involves some threshold of complexity, it can be broken down into objectives.

Something toward which effort is directed…an aim, goal, or end of action.

Plans and objectives may require strategies.

The art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal.

And of course strategies rely on tactics.

A device for accomplishing an end.

Values → Vision → Plan → Objective → Strategy → Tactics.

We argue among ourselves about politics, because we have disagreements about one of those six. The six are in sequence. Disagreements about strategy and tactics are easy to resolve. Disagreements about values and vision are much harder to resolve.

All of these depend on defining things. An organizational hierarchy can work as an effective substitute against definitions of things, with someone at the very pinnacle laboring under, or enjoying, the final word on how to resolve whatever pressing questions arise. But these civilizations are not stable and they don’t last. One may protest that ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptians, persevered exactly this way and for thousands of years. But it only appears that way to the very casual reader. Such “civilizations” were broken up into dynasties, with schisms, internecine squabbles and other conflicts. We tend to think of these as enduring civilizations because new factions were too respectful, or perhaps too lazy, to knock down the monuments and other artifacts of the previous ones. But in the meantime, they obliterated some of the definitions made or observed by those previous ones.

It is fashionable, in this day and age, to observe that conservatives and liberals are all trying to achieve the things outlined above. It isn’t so. “Liberals,” as we use that word today, are definitions-averse. Definitions get in the way of their fun, so they oppose the creation of new definitions where they’re needed, and in fact are in favor of obliterating the definitions we have already. They seek to “liberate” us from the definitions that make civilization work. They want their pyramid-shaped power structure. Each liberal fancies himself either as the despot at the pinnacle of the power-pyramid, or sharing a kinship with that despot.

The old saying is that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. That’s close to the truth, which is: A conservative is a liberal who was on the wrong side of bureaucratic power, on the wrong side of capriciously made “final” decisions. And the liberal may think himself a conservative who was on the wrong side of law, and/or police brutality. Even in cases where that’s true, the eradication of civilization, in whole or in part, is an overly heavy-handed solution to the problem. It appeals only to those who “think” with their emotions, and are definitions-averse.

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Chapters 8 and 9
Friday, September 21st, 2018

Eight…

The conservative says: I am good, and/but I am irreparably flawed. I can never be perfect but I am on the right path. I am a force for good. The liberal says: We are building a “perfect society” that would put us on the right path, but as individuals we must be on the wrong path. As far as being a force for good, it’s all about having the right opinions. STOP WATCHING FOX NEWS!!

Liberals, therefore, don’t have it within ‘em to grasp the grown-up thoughts that have to be considered, and managed, after one takes into account what’s “true.” They seem to think, after they’ve proven something is true – or much more often, presented an emotionally-compelling argument that it’s likely true, or it might as well be true since our social status will suffer if we’re caught doubting it – the job’s done. This is the child-thinking mistake we should expect people to make when they proceed from the premise that everything in the universe is disconnected from every other thing.

Nine…

How do people learn to discuss contentious issues in a civilized way, when they grow up without ever having been allowed to do so? They don’t!

We have many generations, now, of people who haven’t learned. In our modern age politics are much more contentious, information travels faster, and you can’t get away from the weighty issues. They’re being talked about everywhere. People need to know how to argue a point, substantiate it, prove it, cast doubt on others, refute them, challenge them. They need to know the difference…between a reasoned inference and gut-feel. Too many people need to know these things…and yet they don’t know them. Auntie Petunia didn’t allow them to talk about such things at the dinner table.

…We are more contentious today, I submit, at least in part because of this widespread lack of knowledge about how to argue…this ignorance makes it worse because people feel pressured to refute things they have been taught, or feel, must be obviously untrue…and they don’t know how to do it so they lunge for these hayseed dismissals. “Oh well, opinions are like assholes everyone’s got one and they all stink, ha ha.” “Whatever makes you happy.” “Denial’s not just a river in Egypt.”

The point about things in the universe being connected to other things, resurfaces here and there throughout the manuscript. Many a conservative, or other normal-person, has observed that on the intellectual funny-planet of liberalism “history always began this morning.” Also, that effects do not have causes: He’s rich, I’m poor, that’s just the way it is. To suggest things happen because other related things happened previously, and offer any belief in antecedent action, is regarded as heresy in their little cloister.

Around chapter 2 somewhere I liken it to building a sandcastle on a sun-baked beach where all the sand is bone-dry. It doesn’t work, of course. That’s what the world of liberalism is. Thoughts aren’t consistent or coherent, because they cannot be. Every little thing is completely disconnected from every other little thing.

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Kavanaugh and Climate Change
Tuesday, September 18th, 2018

I see a connection here between the Kavanaugh matter and the climate change scam.

It’s actually a simple, sturdy and solid connection believe it or not…

In both cases, the democrats are not only demanding we accept an unknown & unknowable interpretation of events, eschewing all residual doubt; they are brazenly sitting in judgment of our character based solely on whether or not we so accept.

And in both cases, it is their behavior that has created the problem for our acceptance. Kavanaugh’s accuser has sat for decades on these memories, whatever they are, of what happened, whatever that is. And then Feinstein’s office apparently sat on this report.

Just like the environmental zealots are spewing all sorts of carbon emissions, which we’re not supposed to notice, “raising awareness” on this issue on which awareness has been raised already.

So bottom-lining it: Their sole criterion for our being decent people, in both cases, is our acceptance of their sales pitch, our willingness to behave as if we take it seriously. We’re not good people unless we take it more seriously than they did.

What’s that say about them…

Related: Someone else noticed something…

He’s referring to a remark made by the lady Justice last year…

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not hold back from talking about gender politics and partisanship Monday night at Roosevelt University in Chicago, but avoided discussing current events after a controversy last year.

“There will be enough women on the Supreme Court when there are nine,” Ginsburg said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

She added, “I think there has not been a better time to be a woman in the legal profession because no doors are closed.”

She also decried the partisanship that she believes was evident at recent Supreme Court justice nomination hearings.

“I can only hope that in my lifetime they will stop that nonsense,” Ginsburg said, according to the Sun-Times. “Partisanship in selections of justices is a dangerous thing.”

How else to interpret that? She doesn’t want any ol’ division, rancor and resentment; just the kind she likes. Cross the aisle, bring the parties together, so they can act as one…confirming women to the Supreme Court and not men.

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Liberals in Tech
Saturday, September 15th, 2018

Yes that Google video was an amazing thing to watch. A company-wide group hug, WTF?

I once worked for a company like this, following the sage advice of keeping my political leanings under wraps. It didn’t work out well. That’s probably a good thing. The problem remains that this thing we call “social media” is the 21st century’s version of the telephone and the radio, and it’s dominated by libs.

What to do about it? It’s not just conservatives and Republicans who have an interest in changing the status quo, assuming it can be changed. It’s the whole country. We know this because we’ve put forth a good-faith effort to implement their ideas and it turned out the same way it always does; some people benefited and some people were fleeced, and liberals are right there to stick a microphone into the face of whoever benefited. And, like always, and this is one of the most reprehensible things they do out of everything else, ignore the plight of the ones who were fleeced. Robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Now their sign-carrying Facebook-typing enablers say there are underlying reasons for the pattern and this is the moment for me, and other conservatives, especially those of us who work in tech, to show some requisite humility. They do have a point. I’ve yet to build a billion-dollar empire or launch a car into space. If Sergei or Larry or Jeff or Mark say it would’ve been good if Hillary won, who am I to argue?

But then there is this: If there’s one thing on earth more loathsome than a failure to show the requisite humility when someone else does something better than you, it has to be a lack of gratitude. Watching these liberal tech-giants act out their chosen roles as liberals-first tech-giants-second, I’m put in the position of knowing — for sure, having seen proof first-hand — a lie is being told, which others hearing it have no idea is a lie, and being unable to comment. It’s not a comfortable position by any means. And I’m not a nothing. I do work in tech. My victories don’t stop with MyStuffWorks, I’ve actually made a living out of it. I do pay a mortgage with my brain, and if it all comes to a stop bright and early Monday morning never to be revived again, it’s still three decades. That’s something. I’ve seen many a swaggering cockswain make a good pretend-show of comprehending the implementation details while knowing nothing, and directing resources, ordering others about, and manufacturing a series of disasters before calling a stop to the charade and going back to selling Amway or something. And in the case of the most braggadocious, such implosions follow a lot less time than that. So maybe we’re not looking, here, at a problem with me speaking above my station. Maybe we’re looking at the opposite. Maybe I’ve been quiet too long.

Having opined on many other things in these pages over the last fourteen years, allow me a few paragraphs to indulge that and let’s see where it goes.

Starting with the conclusion. Based on what I’ve seen thus far, it is that reality is reality and it has certain characteristics to it; one must behave certain ways around it. One must swear allegiance to it, forsaking all others, and call out betrayal against it. Think the Bible says something about that, does it not? And people who have built things that actually work, know this to be the case. God agrees, technology agrees.

If you can’t build anything that works thinking like a lib, how come so many of these tech conglomerates are run by and staffed by such emotionally-immature liberals?

Could it be, as the liberals insist, that this is not merely an indicator that you can build working things thinking like a lib…but, maybe it’s necessary? Can it be that this is where I show my willingness to perceive truth? And so I am obliged to do an abrupt but expected about-face, racketball style. Maybe I have to be a liberal to get the plum jobs anyway. And I don’t really know tech if I’m not one. They’re right what they say about conservative cavemen…how ’bout it?

And the answer is — not only no, but I don’t seriously consider it for a fraction of a second. And I’m not looking back at the wreckage in my rear-view mirror, not even sparing it a glance. I can’t; I know better. Watch liberals “work” for just a bit. Watch the libs in the Google video. It’s all about creating the correct emotional climate. It’s true of everything they do. Generate the excitement in this, generate the disappointment in that, give off the correct vibe, make the wave. Real technology does surprising things. Whether the crowd does or does not expect the thing to work, has so little to do with whether or not it really will. To merely grasp the essentials, you have to learn the very first thing about reality which is: There is one. Objects exist, they have certain states to them, and human emotion is entirely disconnected with all of this. The masses are asses. Majority-opinion can maintain that the freezing temperature of water is 50 degrees, or 68, or 12; this has nothing at all to do with what it really is. Public sentiment is right the way a busted clock is right.

Run the tests. That’s how you know.

I can’t claim to know more than these moguls about how to make tech work in business. But my mortgage is paid so I must know something; and I don’t need to know much to comment. I know enough. You have to do two things after you get the darn thing to work right, you must layer and you must market. I’m maintaining the proper respect for all these men and women — interesting, I think, nearly all the heavy hitters are men, but that’s a side-point. They must be experts at the layering and the marketing. And you can read about marketing anywhere, which isn’t my field anyway. Let’s talk about the layering.

It is, to explain it crudely, a vertical arrangement of interfaces. You might think of it as “Now that I used threading to get the nut to attach properly to the bolt, how do I fasten the alternator to the frame of the car?” You get the simple stuff working first, then you work your way upward to build complex stuff out of the simple stuff. This is how you build a powerful application that can do complicated, amazing things, without losing the necessary attribute of maintainability. You do it with layers.

I do have the requisite humility. I think these guys are geniuses at marketing; and, layering. I respect their leviathan thought-controlling goose-stepping conglomerations. I acknowledge the many layers within them. I’ve seen them, up close. They are numerous and strong, as we should expect them to be, like rivets holding together a passenger jet that really flies.

But you can’t build tech thinking like a lib.

I said “thinking like.” There certainly are successful people in technology who are liberals. Some of them — far, far more slender a proportion of the overall workforce, compared to what the layman might think — have achieved, or started with, a respectable command of the implementation concepts. But there is some falsehood going on here, some two-facedness. If they’re still contributing to the growing technology, there has to be a switch being flipped whether they consciously realize it or not. You can’t get that code working thinking like a lib. You can’t figure out why it’s not doing what it should do, thinking like a lib. Can’t figure out which component is faulty, can’t figure out how to validate the inputs so that the gizmo will yield the correct behavior in practice.

There’s another rule about this:

Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

These people, being good at layering, necessarily became agile about it. And they found themselves responsible for building, not just a gizmo that worked, but a proper working environment for their employees. A rapidly expanding, exploding work environment. They could delegate the responsibility, of course, but it’s still a lot of responsibility, arriving after having not been sought, guesting without being invited. Gushing in within an exceptionally narrow piece of time.

The truth is that, while you can’t think like a liberal and do tech, tech allows you to get away with thinking like one. Mmmm, that’s quite good innit? As long as I’m taking a breather from requisite humility, let me go back and admire that. It’s good enough for a tee shirt, bumper sticker or coffee mug.

It’s also true. We’re dealing with a Butterfield fallacy here.

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“Don’t Be Fooled, There Was Nothing ‘Financial’ About the 2008 Crisis”
Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

John Tamny writes in Real Clear Markets, H/T Maggie’s Farm.

It’s said that banks lacked oversight in the 2000s such that they took risks without adult supervision. The problem with such a view is that financial institutions like Citigroup had over sixty full-time regulators working at their headquarters, and who had no clue about the troubles brewing. Not only were U.S. banks still heavily regulated in the 2000s, it was frequently the regulators themselves who were encouraging more exposure to mortgages. Others like journalist Charlie Gasparino still claim that repeal of Glass-Steagall (a Depression era law that separated banks from investment banks) sparked banking’s troubles in 2008, but the inconvenient truth for Gasparino is that the financial institutions that had the most difficulty in 2008 (Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie, Freddie, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns) were decidedly not the financial hybrids that Glass-Steagall’s repeal allowed. Better yet, the banking activities that got them into trouble to begin with would have in no way been restricted under Glass-Steagall.
:
Economies and markets gain strength from periods of weakness whereby lousy companies are starved of precious resources so that they can be replaced by good ones. Implicit in the view that a failure to bail out Lehman caused a crisis is that economies gain when the businesses rejected by investors are kept afloat. Sorry, but such a belief is completely backwards. It’s the Silicon Valley equivalent of government officials propping up Friendster, eToys and Webvan…
:
That the economy and markets convulsed in response to what was done wasn’t a surprise, nor was it mysterious. Government intervention in the marketplace is always and everywhere harmful. Period.

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Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump!
Sunday, September 9th, 2018

2 Comments »

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

The Double-Eff-Yew to the American TaxpayerFriday, December 14th, 2018

Social Media Shame StormingFriday, December 14th, 2018

Womens’ Brains, Mens’ BrainsThursday, December 13th, 2018

Their AgendaWednesday, December 12th, 2018

Knowing So MuchFriday, December 7th, 2018

Behar May QuitThursday, December 6th, 2018

I Made a New Word LXXVIWednesday, December 5th, 2018

The Religion of LeftismWednesday, December 5th, 2018

Ballot HarvestingSunday, December 2nd, 2018

StagedWednesday, November 28th, 2018

Psychology’s Replication CrisisFriday, November 23rd, 2018

The Walls Are Closing In!Saturday, November 17th, 2018

Fourteenth BirthdayMonday, November 12th, 2018

Stan Lee Dead at 95Monday, November 12th, 2018

He’s Always Been There For Us!Friday, November 9th, 2018

This Is Good CXXIThursday, November 8th, 2018

I Made a New Word LXXVSaturday, November 3rd, 2018

“We Have to Stop Demonizing People and [Demonize] White Men”Wednesday, October 31st, 2018

The Good People They Don’t Deserve to HaveTuesday, October 30th, 2018

BelongingWednesday, October 24th, 2018

On Hillary Being UncivilTuesday, October 23rd, 2018

On the Pink HatsSunday, October 14th, 2018

Are You Serious?Sunday, October 7th, 2018

About YesterdayFriday, September 28th, 2018

Memo For File CCXWednesday, September 26th, 2018

Chapters 8 and 9Friday, September 21st, 2018

Kavanaugh and Climate ChangeTuesday, September 18th, 2018

Liberals in TechSaturday, September 15th, 2018

“Don’t Be Fooled, There Was Nothing ‘Financial’ About the 2008 Crisis”Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump!Sunday, September 9th, 2018

The Double-Eff-Yew to the American Taxpayer
Friday, December 14th, 2018

Social Media Shame Storming
Friday, December 14th, 2018

Womens’ Brains, Mens’ Brains
Thursday, December 13th, 2018

Their Agenda
Wednesday, December 12th, 2018

Knowing So Much
Friday, December 7th, 2018

Behar May Quit
Thursday, December 6th, 2018

I Made a New Word LXXVI
Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

The Religion of Leftism
Wednesday, December 5th, 2018

Ballot Harvesting
Sunday, December 2nd, 2018

Staged
Wednesday, November 28th, 2018

Psychology’s Replication Crisis
Friday, November 23rd, 2018

The Walls Are Closing In!
Saturday, November 17th, 2018

Fourteenth Birthday
Monday, November 12th, 2018

Stan Lee Dead at 95
Monday, November 12th, 2018

He’s Always Been There For Us!
Friday, November 9th, 2018

This Is Good CXXI
Thursday, November 8th, 2018

I Made a New Word LXXV
Saturday, November 3rd, 2018

“We Have to Stop Demonizing People and [Demonize] White Men”
Wednesday, October 31st, 2018

The Good People They Don’t Deserve to Have
Tuesday, October 30th, 2018

Belonging
Wednesday, October 24th, 2018

On Hillary Being Uncivil
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018

On the Pink Hats
Sunday, October 14th, 2018

Are You Serious?
Sunday, October 7th, 2018

About Yesterday
Friday, September 28th, 2018

Memo For File CCX
Wednesday, September 26th, 2018

Chapters 8 and 9
Friday, September 21st, 2018

Kavanaugh and Climate Change
Tuesday, September 18th, 2018

Liberals in Tech
Saturday, September 15th, 2018

“Don’t Be Fooled, There Was Nothing ‘Financial’ About the 2008 Crisis”
Wednesday, September 12th, 2018

Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump!
Sunday, September 9th, 2018