House of Eratosthenes

We need a new unit of measurement. We’ve got people running around who think they’ve thought this through all the way, saying “Sure there was fraud in the 2020 election but not enough to change the results.” They think they are quantifying. They are not. They do not even have a unit of measurement they can use to measure fraud.

And so I propose the FRAUDULUM. It is the smallest unit of fraud. I define it to be the amount of fraud that is taking place when a husband tells his wife that the pants do not make her ass look fat. When you call a company and their recorded message tells you “Your call is very important to us,” that is 2 or 3 fraudulum. When the gas company calls and you tell them the check is in the mail, that is a dozen fraudulum. A dozen dozen fraudulum is a gross fraudulum, and that’s when a politician tells you “I feel your pain.”

A “great gross” is a dozen dozen dozen which is 1,728. An example of a great gross fraudulum would be “BLM protests did not spread COVID (but Trump rallies are death).”

There is no kilofraudulum or megafraudulum because the Metric System is for sissies.

Now that I have established the base unit of measurement, can someone please engage in this quantifying they only feel like they’re doing. How many millions or billions of fraudulum would it take to change the results of the election in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, et al? And how many fraudulum did, in fact, take place? How is it you guys are able to put any sort of cap on this? I am so intrigued. Tell me more.

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Consequences
Sunday, January 17th, 2021

The #NeverTrump people won after all. This is their election. Let’s face it, there is no mandate for any democrat policy but there is a mandate for “get that guy out of here.”

Me, personally, I’m the opposite of this. I approved of President Trump when Trump brought good results. Good policies have rewards, bad policies have bad consequences. From arguing with the #NeverTrump types I’ve been impressed by, and occasionally bewildered by, their complete lack of regard for consequences. Some of them are even proud of it. Principles are everything! If only they could say what the principles are.

A lot of their argument rests on Trump’s mannerisms and so I assume our difference of opinion is there. For me, way back when I was just starting to become aware there was this thing the grown-ups were watching called “news,” the President’s name was Richard M. Nixon. So this idea that the President should set a good example for children to follow, is alien to me and it’s absurd to me. Children don’t take their cues about how to behave from the current President. Who would think that? Who wants that?

I don’t like the idea of kids on the elementary school playground calling each other “LOSERS” just because they heard Trump do the same thing. Well, I also don’t like their parents being forced to explain to them what a blow job is, when the kids are something like eight years old. The way kids should learn about politics is: It’s good when you share your toys with other kids who don’t have any, but it’s very wrong when someone comes along and forces you to share your toys.

Out here in the grown-up world, we have a lot of losers running things who shouldn’t be running them. Even people who hated Donald Trump should, right now, be wondering what we’re going to do to call out those losers. They’re still cranking out execrable results and no one’s calling them out on it. Gov. Whitmer, Gov. Cuomo, Gov. Newsom, I’m looking at y’all.

Good manners, but no one’s calling out the losers? Or someone calls out the losers for being losers, and in so doing sets a poor example for children…who shouldn’t be watching that closely anyway? Which?
Looks like we just had an election, and my side lost. Now we have to worry about consequences.

The consequences that really hurt people, but mean exactly nothing to the people who won.

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Burning Barn
Sunday, January 17th, 2021

People who don’t pay attention to politics, want people who do pay attention, to stop paying attention. But it never seems to happen. People who used to not pay attention start doing it, and once they start paying attention they don’t stop. You would think it must be a lot of fun to pay attention to politics. It isn’t. It is as close to an opposite of fun as you can get, so why do people do it? And how come, once they start, they don’t stop?

That’s the question that’s really on people’s minds.

No one answers it because no one asks.

Well, I just did. And so now I will tell you.

Once you start paying attention to politics, you will immediately and continually notice a pattern in which power is seized, and then used, by people who are not fit. There is a reason for this. Generally, the people who want the power are the people who shouldn’t have it. We as humans have a tendency to just give away the power to whoever wants it. So this is not a problem that dissipates on its own.

Lots of problems do that. A toddler screaming about bedtime, throwing a tantrum, will eventually wear himself out and fall asleep so you can just carry him to bed. People think if there are any problems in politics, they’re like that, ignore them and they go away. That’s wrong. Unfit people having power, is like the barn being on fire when it’s too close to the house. You don’t ignore that.

Who doesn’t understand this by now? Last year the Chinese Virus shut down our economy. We can now look back with the wisdom of hindsight and see that among the various remedies and countermeasures we implemented, all disadvantaged because they fell into the category of closing the barn door after the horse has run away…as far as effectiveness, “shutdowns” and “lockdowns” and “shelter in place orders” bring up the rear of the parade. It’s too late now, but there’s a good chance nobody ever had to be laid off from their jobs, no restaurants had to close. They closed on the orders of public health officials, usually appointed not elected, who’d never provided a service in their entire lives for which someone would willingly pay. Political animals who paid absolutely zero of any price for making the wrong decision, unilaterally making the call to shut down entire industries.

In the aftermath, I waited patiently for all the people who scolded me for paying too much attention to politics over the years, to apologize and acknowledge how right I was and how wrong they were. It still hasn’t happened yet. What’s wrong with them?

Yes I know I’m writing those last three sentences like something of a jackass, on purpose, but I’m semi-serious. If this recent experience doesn’t alter their perspective on things, what’s it going to take?

Right now the prevailing consensus, if there is one, is that Donald Trump was the one guy who had power who was unfit. That’s the reward of a massive effort of people-programming. Imagine taking this idea seriously. We had all these career politicians in the capitol just doing their thing…problems problems problems galore, not getting fixed, across decades, across generations. Here comes Trump the outsider, and whether you like him or not, he fixed some of the problems. Oh but he himself was a problem that we just fixed now? So it goes back to the career politicians. Who wanted the power. And they had it before…what did they do with it? Good things? If that were the case, there never would have been a Trump.

He didn’t want this job. Remember? He only started being this super bad nasty dumb guy a little while ago. On that escalator.

So now with the problem fixed, we can go back and not pay attention anymore? Back to wondering why there’s more month left at the end of the money. Wondering why gas is getting more expensive…while our betters soothe us with their palliative words, about how we’re going to rejoin this or that “climate change summit.”

Right now, there are no ideas other than “marginalize those creepy red hat wearing guys.” That’s it. That’s all. Problems galore. No solutions. The people who have all the power…wanted it.

The barn’s burning. It’s not a problem you can ignore.

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Real Bullies
Sunday, January 17th, 2021

I’m so happy that the law enforcement agencies and the people who lead them, along with the mainstream news media, have all discovered a variety of destructive mob rioting they don’t like.

To me, what democrats and liberals are doing is not at all complicated but I guess my perspective is unique.

As a child, I was bullied a lot and I asked for it. I was socially detached, underweight and underheight. But then in the middle school years when the bullying reached its apex, my growth spurts started to be a little bit…off. This was when I figured out the bullying would stop if you were the second-wimpiest kid. Just hit back once or twice. Bullies are cowards. Go ahead and get hauled in to the principal’s office with the bully. Of course they’ll let the bully go, and scold you because you’re one of the “good kids” and you’re not supposed to be doing that. That’s okay. Authoritarians are cowards too. That’s what I learned.

Kamala Some of these bullies that stopped picking on me, like in a heartbeat, because I had the balls to fight back turned out to be among my best friends.

But the most important lesson I learned about bullying? By the time I finished eighth grade, I was taller and stronger than a lot of my bullies. And I began to notice they worked it into their bullying, the fashioning of a fake phony narrative: They were the “real victims,” and I was the “real bully.” I am grateful for this education. This is when I figured out what bullying really was, and is, and always has been.

It’s deception.

I was just minding my business, teacher. That guy you think I was picking on, he’s the real bully. I’m the real victim, here. Look at Morgan, he’s almost six feet tall, I’m just five feet. That’s why I had to join the wrestling team instead of the basketball team. Just like now. They’ve campaigned for no purpose other than to grind us, their opposition, down into the dirt. They don’t like Placeholder Joe. They don’t like Kamala, we know that. They just wanted to obliterate us. And now that they’ve succeeded they’re just so, so scared. Oh somebody help me. Please! What a bunch of b.s.

Now I dunno…maybe because of these weird growth spurts, my experience was unique. I guess I’m seeing something not a lot of other people can see. But I do know for sure what I learned. Bullies are deceivers. Bullying is deception.

And that’s what we’re watching right now.

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The Four Groups
Saturday, January 16th, 2021

Placeholder Joe prepares to govern a country that is divided as follows:

The first group resolutely refuses to consider the possibility he won this election fairly or legitimately. The second group refuses to consider any possibility that he didn’t. These two groups all by themselves create considerable difficulty for the task of governance, since they’re both sizable and each of them represents a different reality. In rhetoric, there’s no way for both of them to win a contest. And in reality, there is no way for both of them to be right. They are entirely mutually-exclusive.

There is a third group of people who think Biden won the election fairly, but aren’t militant about it. They’re willing to allow for the possibility that some shenanigans may have taken place. But they justify this with questionable excuses like “not enough fraud to change the results.” They don’t think they’re rewarding the fraud, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing. It is the sentiment of crooked places within our great nation, like Chicago, Baltimore, Sacramento…the bosses fix the election, and whaddya gonna do? Just let it ride. A lot of people in this group are from such crooked places, and they don’t understand the damage that’s involved when you get the entire country working this way.

The fourth group is like the third group, but biased the other way. I’m in this group. The idea that the Biden/Harris ticket won this election fair and square, it just doesn’t compute. We know that history, even when recorded by historians who hated Trump and loved seeing him go, will offer up a huge bright cherry-red asterisk by the Biden administration. And we know that is fair and just.

But only one group gets the megaphone, and that’s the second group. We could call this the “Schwarzenegger Group.” They call others “spineless,” but they’re the ones who “know” things that they don’t really know. Nevertheless, their “knowledge” has become the dominant narrative, so I guess that’s good for Placeholder Joe. It portends ominous things for the rest of us, though, when the prevailing narrative doesn’t allow for sensible doubts. They are deeply suspicious of anyone who doesn’t agree with them. About everything.

Maybe people in the fourth group like me, will end up relying on the good graces of people in the third group for…staples of life? Food? Shelter? They are leaning in the correct direction and they won’t be ostracized. But they’re not following logic and reason. They’re just trying not to be ostracized.

The first group is actually more logical than the third group. Yes, they’re strident, maybe even shrill. The first group, like the second group, will not tolerate any doubts. But at least they’ve been paying attention and they’re refusing to be gaslit into accepting silly, nonsensical things.

What’s scary is that a lot of people who would claim to be in the third group, actually aren’t there, they’re in the Schwarzenegger Group. The defining distinction I laid out is tolerance of doubt, which is a characteristic of reasonable, mature thinkers. A lot of these people want the cachet that goes with being a reasonable, mature thinker but they’re not willing to bring it. If you show doubt, they will mock and ridicule you mercilessly, and that’s the acid test.

After all: Doubts about Placeholder Joe’s legitimacy, contribute to structural weakness in our system of law and order. That’s the lie they have been told, and they’re eager and anxious to pay it forward.

Meanwhile, they’re in no hurry to fix what was broken with the 2020 elections that led to this fracturing. To the contrary, they want the system to remain dirty, and in the near future, to get a whole lot dirtier.

It’s going to be an interesting four years. It won’t be fun to be in the fourth group, where I am. But I think it will be even less fun to be Placeholder Joe. Or Gigglepuss Kamala.

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Reimpeachment
Thursday, January 14th, 2021

Yesterday afternoon, I checked and it wasn’t a word yet. I’ll check various resources periodically.

President Trump became the first President in United States History to be impeached by the House of Representatives — twice. How do we explain this to future generations?

I can boil it down into seven words: Liberals impeached Trump for using their tactics.

That explains everything. What we’re seeing at Congress now is this perfect acting-out of the “Nobody picks on my little brother but me” syndrome. And you can see it in the official damning article:

Resolution impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Resolved, the Donald John Trump, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors and that the following article of impeachment be exhibited to the United States Senate:

Article of impeachment exhibited by the House of Representatives of the United States of America in the name of itself and of the people of the United States of America, against Donald John Trump, President of the United States of America, in maintenance and support of its impeachment against him for high crimes and misdemeanors.

ARTICLE 1: INCITEMENT OF INSURRECTION

The Constitution provides that the House of Representatives “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and that the President “shall be removed from Office on Impeachment, for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Further, section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits any person who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States from “hold[ing] and office … under the United States.’ In his conduct while President of the United States — and in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, provide, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed — Donald John Trump engaged in high Crimes and Misdemeanors by inciting violence against the Government of the United States, in that:

On January 6, 2021, pursuant to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Vice President of the United States, the House of Representatives, and the Senate met at the United States Capitol for a Joint Session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College. In the months preceding the Joint Session, President Trump repeatedly issued false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials. Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump, addressed a crowd at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts.

President Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021, followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Those prior efforts included a phone call on January 2, 2021, during which President Trump urged the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the Georgia Presidential election results and threatened Secretary Raffensperger if he failed to do so.

In all this, President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government. He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.

Wherefore, Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law. Donald John Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.

False statements…addressed a crowd…made statements that encouraged lawless action. You don’t say! Fight like hell?

Oh so you mean this rabble-rouser put ideas in people’s heads, that the government we have now isn’t going to address their concerns? He convinced them that extraordinary action was necessary, and absent that, the powers-that-be were going to ignore the hopes, dreams, desires and misgivings of the assembled hordes? Hmmmm…

Yesterday, liberalism impeached liberal tactics. It was a classic case of “Okay now that our revolution has succeeded and we’re on top, no more revolutions.”

No more appealing to the “forgotten man.” That’s our job!

Ten or so Republicans climbed on board, and there are going to be more. You may have had discussions with squishy Republicans like these. They claim to be the ones holding “principles” and they claim to be among the very few who are behaving consistently, deploring mob violence on both sides. They’re not wrong about that. But by recognizing this as what it is — liberalism punishing liberal tactics only when used by others — you can easily see how these squishes are being fooled. Their focus is all on the maneuverings and the manners, and they turn a blind eye to the agendas and ultimate goals. They say they’re the few who have principles. They’re really among the few who don’t have any. Their “principles” are, zero tolerance for revolutions, unless the revolutions succeed, then no more revolutions after that. Unless they succeed.

Penguin Clap The immediate ramifications are non-existent. The likelihood of our current President being removed before the new guy takes charge, is on par with a bullet knocking another bullet out of the air. This is something that is a possibility, but the point is not to make it happen. The point is to put together a temporary, fragile coalition that includes lawmakers who want it to happen. That’s a different thing. Time will tell.

The precedent for the future is execrable. It is now an impeachable offense for a sitting U.S. President to say…nobody knows what. Whatever will set off emotionally unstable “Auntie Mabels”…as inferred by some pearl-clutching, Well-I-Never Pseudoboi. Predictable as a bouncing football. And it’s another step toward that perfect, perfect world they want to build. The one in which everyone is responsible for all the bad stuff everybody else does. No one, anywhere, is responsible for his or her own actions though.

The consequences are gawdawful. Impeachment is now a weapon. Anyone want to complain when Republicans take the House, and then retaliate? You better practice acting surprised now.

And the optics can’t be worse. Looks like there is, after all, a “Deep State” that wants Trump gone before he declassifies something that will land someone important in the graybar hotel. These may or may not be optics only. There’s probably reality behind it. Ponder the implications of that.

Other than those very few minor quibbles, Grey Goose Nancy…perfect impeachment. Flawless. Penguin-clap for you.

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The Stopwatch Test
Wednesday, January 13th, 2021

Continuing the thought from yesterday in which I identified the two sets of rules that are putting us in conflict with each other; the real grown-ups have two rules and the fake grown-ups, who think like children, have two rules…

There is a third rule, maintained by the real grown-ups, that is all-important. It is what makes society, as we know it, go. And it is:

3. You can tell me what to do (or not do) for sake of law and order, but you don’t ever get to tell me what to think.

So no, when we vote in elections we’re not voting on whether climate change is scary, since real science doesn’t work that way. We’re not voting on whether Michelle Obama is pretty or on whether Hillary Clinton is smart, or whether George W. Bush or Sarah Palin are dummies, or Joe Biden still has his faculties about him.

The fake grown-ups have a third rule too, and this is what’s really setting us at each other’s throats.

3. Oh yes I can!

We know this conflict exists because the grown-ups have won elections before, and we have won court victories before. No one presumed it was obligatory for the losers to believe in the Bush v. Gore decision, just like you don’t have to believe slavery is morally unacceptable. You just have to stop practicing slavery, and you have to stop counting votes in arbitrarily chosen counties. You’re free to doubt it if you want. That’s okay, you’re just wrong. But you’re not an affront to moral decency. And you’re certainly not getting anyone hurt. We’re grown-ups. We can handle fellow citizens disagreeing with us.

Lasso of Truth And so now we have the myth of the Biden/Harris victory. My intellectual superiors won’t allow me to question the idea that Joe Biden netted 81,283,485 votes. That’s the official total and it’s been made official in every possible way. This divides us, rather cleanly, between grown-up, critical thinkers, versus fake-grown-up, obedient thinkers.

I can’t get any of them, not a single one, to go along with my mental exercise in which I task them to go out and find the 81 million votes. Supposedly I gift them with Mr. McNulty’s stopwatch so they have an unlimited allocation of time to complete this, along with Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth. It would be a lot of work, but that’s okay because it’s just a thought exercise. They don’t have to do this actual work, they just have to be honest and do a bit of thinking. I’m very clear about it. I can’t get a single one to commit to the objective of finding that many votes that were

1) non-duplicated,
2) from people who were living at the time,
3) and authorized to vote,
4) who knew what they were doing.

No takers. Seems the entire country is in agreement Biden didn’t really get that many.

If you do buy into this doctrine that the majority gets to tell the minority what opinions to have, it becomes a textbook case of circular reasoning: I get to tell you what to think because my guy won the election, because he got all his votes, because I get to tell you what to think…

But…you don’t.

The mythology that persists is that people died last week because other people didn’t accept that Biden won that many votes, so if we let people go around thinking Biden didn’t win that many votes, more people will die. This latest incident, this, this right here, this episode, here is where you M-U-S-T stop supporting Trump! And stopping supporting isn’t good enough, we all must actively oppose! Or else we’re complicit in murder. Nobody can say what Trump said to cause the destruction. So even if we accept all their fake-grown-up child-thinking premises, there’s a huge gap that remains.

The democrats stuffed the ballot boxes and everybody knows it. We’re supposed to pretend it didn’t happen then? I’m not from Chicago. I’m not from Baltimore or any one of these other places that just rolls over and accepts crookedness. Someone please tell me, why are we in such a hurry for the entire country to emulate those bits and pieces of it, in which the law of the land is crime itself? We do not want the whole country to work that way. You don’t tell me what to think, and you don’t reward theft.

Nobody’s talking about how it seems every single dead victim was a Trump supporter, because the media wants to make it look like the Trump supporters did the killing. We’re still waiting for the details on that, but no matter how that goes, two and two still make four and I’m not inclined to reward theft, or pretend it didn’t happen. No it doesn’t mean I don’t care about dead people. It means 2+2=4 and the democrats stuffed ballot boxes.

It’s science. You can’t have more votes than voters. Stop being a denier!

Now President Trump is to become the fourth outgoing President, and the first one in modern times, not to attend the inauguration of his successor. Good. He’d be the subject of all sorts of criticism if he did go, so he’s invoking Morgan Rule #1 “If I’m gonna be accused I wanna be guilty.” I approve wholeheartedly.

Go ahead and inaugurate Placeholder Joe, before an empty mall. I hope a tumbleweed rolls by in the background.

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The Two Sets of Rules
Tuesday, January 12th, 2021

What we’re seeing play out now is a conflict about how one achieves, not the authority that goes with being President of the United States, but the basic respect that we expect to come our way once we’ve reached full adulthood. And I mean, by that, real adulthood not legal adulthood. True maturity. Two sets of rules.

To people who’ve fully reached adulthood there are two simple rules:

1. I can’t make you respect me. I can only inspire respect by way of my words, my efforts and my achievements.
2. I can also inspire you, in the same way, to disrespect me. It’s your choice how to see me, my choice how to inspire you.

To people who haven’t reached adulthood the two rules are much simpler:

1. I get to tell you what to do.
2. You can’t tell me what to do.

The problem that turned deadly last week is that people who haven’t fully reached adulthood can’t see things from the perspective of people who have. And so with all the loud voices heard most often, belonging to people who haven’t fully reached adulthood, the whole “certify the votes” ritual turned into an imbroglio. We hear of the people who “stormed the capitol” and committed the acts of violence, be they genuine Trump supporters or not, having trashed the movement. This is demonstrably true. We’re left to debate whether it was foolish Trump supporters doing damage to their own cause, or brilliant Trump-phobes who committed the perfect false flag operation (seems to be an eclectic mix of both).

But as far as what happened, with the election itself as well as with the aftermath, it’s been a never-ending fireworks show of decrees dressed up in fancy costumes as hard news. But we have to wait so long to get any hard news. Most of it is just decrees, from people who haven’t grown up all the way, telling us what to think.

“Baseless” and “false” have been thrown around by these loud people, so often and so lazily, you have to wonder about the ramifications of wearing out whole words. Can you do that? We can certainly wonder if editorialists have programmed them in as keyboard macros. Words certainly can be abused. The word “false” has been used in place of “contested” or “disputed,” so routinely that by this point we just expect it. We don’t discuss it. It’s “false” that natural herd immunity applies to the Chinese Virus, or it’s “false” that Joe Biden received votes that are non-existent. If you contest either of these, or any one of several other “debunkings” and say “You know I think there might be something to that,” the guy who made the statement that they’re false will just find an expert or two who agrees they’re false. Then the conversation is over. So what’s the point? There may be an equally qualified expert who would affirm these propositions are possible, not necessarily false…but this is so time consuming and we all have work to do. So false it is.

We all like things to be settled, don’t we?

And people who have not yet reached full maturity, need things to be settled.

One of the defining attributes of true adulthood, is the condition of knowing what to do when doubt remains. It’s a learned skill, and these kids don’t have it. They’re accustomed to knowing which answer to choose on a written test, and they want to know…just that much. A, B, C, D or None Of The Above.

Meanwhile, we also hear that power corrupts. I think deep down, whether people want to admit it or not, we’re seeing how that happens. No one who has achieved genuine adulthood, is inspired in the genuine-adulthood way, to respect Joe Biden as a fellow adult let alone as a U.S. President. It’s not as if this predicament is new ground for us. We saw Bill Clinton would lie just for the sake of lying, as if someone was ready to slap a fine or a penalty on him for not telling enough lies within some defined period of time. Joe Biden has the same issue. This whopper about “[BLM] protestors would have been treated very differently…[had they been the ones that] stormed the capitol” is as good an example as any. It’s the sort of lie that demonstrates an intense disrespect against anyone who’s being persuaded to believe it. It relies on a forgetfulness of the events of just a few short months ago that, if it were to be validated, would signify something bordering on mental illness.

Trump-phobes would retort that the current President has told 20,000 lies or something. But the claim disintegrates when placed under the minimal burden of being taken seriously. These are just more postcards from the heartland of faux-adulthood, “I get to tell you what to think.”

If Joe Biden really does get to serve a full term as our next President, or even part of a term, I don’t envy him. He’s pushing eighty and he’s still at that stage where you stumble around thinking you get to give orders to others about how much respect to give you. As the kids say on the Internet, that’s not how any of this works.

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Conspiracies
Sunday, January 10th, 2021

My belief in “conspiracy theories” is a bit complicated. I am reluctant to believe in them because I don’t have confidence in people’s ability to communicate fine details to each other, one time, the first time, with accuracy, and surreptitiously. People can train together and get it right with repetition. But to do a one-time thing, “Ocean’s Eleven” style or “Great Escape” style, and get it right the first time requires meetings. I’ve been in meetings. I’ve chaired meetings. I think, by default, everybody misunderstands everything. By default, it’s an exercise in herding cats. Defaults exist to be countered and overriden, and this is possible…but the effort is expansive, inertia is great, and progress is slow. So I doubt it.

And I doubt people can keep secrets. People can keep state secrets if their livelihood is attached to the secret-keeping. Or if they’re threatened with real jail time. Even then it’s not foolproof.

OTOH…I do believe large numbers of people can be affected by a common incentive that will fill them with a common passion, that manifests consistently even as they operate with something resembling autonomy. I think this is intensified if they show off for each other. I believe our public education system has been perverted into an abomination that trains children to be good subjects in a quasi-communist collective state and it’s been training them to show off for each other. I believe higher education intensifies this. And, from my experience in high tech, I know how fond high tech is of higher education.

Now I understand Twitter, YouTube, Apple and Facebook have banned President Trump and/or any mention of the election results being in error. Several other platforms are de-platform-ing Trump. At. The. Same. Time. Hmmmm…

This is ominous. Best case scenario, the high tech whiz kids are showing off for each other the way they’ve been trained. They don’t know shit from Shinola about whether the election’s been fixed but they’re eager to show off for each other that they embrace the correct and approved opinion. Banning the opposite opinion, to a weak or unfocused mind, just intensifies the signalling. Nothing wrong with that! Even though, to a more resilient and better focused mind, it’s a way of forfeiting the argument. But they’re not applying their resiliency, they’re not focused and they don’t need to worry about arguments anyway. Because nobody in their peer group disagrees.

Worst case scenario…there is a secret that is being kept because someone is worried about their livelihood, and/or going to prison. Someone knows more than they’re saying. And what they know must run contrary to the narrative they’re pushing, because if the truth supported the narrative they’re pushing, they’d enjoy the luxury of openly discussing it.

After all, in the few circumstances in which conspiracies can actually function and remain secret, they’re still very expensive. There is no reason to maintain a narrative by way of conspiracy, if there are alternative methods for supporting that narrative. No reason, if truth supports the narrative. You would only opt for this clumsy and difficult coordination and secret-keeping, and banning of the opposition, if truth is aligned against it.

So yeah, I’m unsure about “conspiracies,” but I’m very sure Joe Biden did not win that election.

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Chasing a Rainbow
Saturday, January 9th, 2021

I have been struggling for the last 35 years or so to find out, and writing almost without pause about, what exactly it is democrats are trying to do. I have been curious about this since 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro made it look like what they want to do is a lot of scolding. This time, they have won all three branches of government and we should all be more sure of what they want to do than we ever have been before. But now, even after all this time I can’t give anyone an answer with any confidence. I suspect I’m chasing a rainbow; I don’t know what they’re trying to do because they don’t know what they’re trying to do.

Just like I don’t know why Darth Vader can’t sense his daughter when she’s standing right in front of him. You can pretend to have an explanation for that. You can pretend to know where Iron Man keeps the rocket fuel for his boots. Why Wonder Woman needs bracelets if she’s bullet-proof like Superman, or why she needs an invisible jet if she can fly like him. Why the look of the Klingons changed so much after the old teevee show was over. Some of these answers are plausible. Some are popular. Some would be highly likely to be true, even, granting the premise that we’re talking about truth and not fiction. But there’s a certain dishonesty permeating throughout all of them, which we don’t notice because we’re honoring the rules that come with thinking about fiction. That doesn’t mean the dishonesty isn’t there. The honest answer, to all, is that there’s no answer. Deep down we all know this. The rainbow doesn’t have an end.

But, we chase it anyway.

Now the democrats say their goals have something to do with empathy. Gosh, ya know…if we had a major political party established that was opposed to anyone showing any empathy to anyone else, it’s hard to envision what such a party would be doing that the democrats are not, in fact, doing. All this time later, scolding remains an important ritual to them. And not scolding like a loving parent who wants a dumb child to mature more quickly and grow, to live a happier life. They’re scolding more like the housewife scolding the mouse right before she hits it with an iron skillet.

It’s clear they ran this election, not with any vision of guiding the country to a better place or to come up with resolutions to any problems, but to obliterate the enemy.

They don’t want America pulled out of any counterproductive, useless, “illegal unjust” wars. They don’t want the unemployment rate lowered for minorities. They don’t want women respected or recognized for their talents and contributions, regardless of sex. In fact they don’t want women recognized at all. They don’t want to provide opportunity for the poor to achieve upward mobility. They are not honoring the “working man”; they seem determined to make “him” obsolete. They’d much rather attend their fancy dinners at The French Laundry than crusade for any sort of greater egalitarianism or equality in our society. So if they want anything with regard to inequalities, they want to exacerbate the inequalities we have already, and maybe make some new ones. They’re not interested in getting rid of any. They don’t want small businesses to remain afloat; they seem determined to get them closed for good. so that big business can buy up their spaces and scavenge their parts.

After all this time studying this movement, I couldn’t begin to tell you what their value system is. My working theory is that I can’t tell you because they can’t tell you, just like I can’t tell you why Han Solo shoots first in one movie but is constrained from shooting first in another movie. The answer doesn’t exist. Things just haven’t been thought out that well. Sure here & there a democrat can tell you what he or she wants to do. But that democrat is only speaking for himself or herself.

“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.” — Eisenhower.

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This Wednesday
Monday, January 4th, 2021

January 6th is not all about policy or who-runs-what.

Stop and take notice that every now and then, a liberal will pop off with some kind of remark that Trump wants to keep being President to keep from going to jail. Now notice that no one is accusing him of anything that would send him there, and that it’s a defining trait of liberalism that they’re saying their enemies are doing whatever they themselves are doing.

The democrats impeached Trump for investigating a crime. Now they think they managed to elect the guy who committed the crime.

How many other crimes are out there?

If the whole point of the election — for somebody — is to keep from going to jail, and they have the connections to stuff ballot boxes, they will stuff ballot boxes. It wouldn’t make any sense for them not to do it, right? We don’t have established penal codes for this and we don’t have established procedures to actually put someone in the graybar hotel over that stuff. It doesn’t happen. If they have the connections to stuff the ballot boxes, they have the connections to keep from getting caught.

If the ballot box stuffing has to move into a higher level of magnitude because the other guy got more votes than expected, they WOULD shut down the counting for awhile to recalibrate things. Exactly what happened. Aborting the operation would be out of the realm of consideration. Commitments would have to get made and then there would have to be deliveries. No. Matter. What.

Now consider this. With the ballot box stuffing done, but statistical anomalies galore, evidence of fraud everywhere but it’s all circumstantial, the guilty parties are going to take the position of: You can’t prove it. They will object to any and all audits. They will not do what innocent people would do, and say: Go ahead and look at the innards we have nothing to hide. The very best the guilty people would do, is put on a sham…”The swamp investigated the swamp and found no swampiness.” But they’d make sure and control all of it. And then they’d tell us what opinions to have.

Exactly what we have been seeing.

See you Wednesday.

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Dave Barry’s 2020 Year in Review
Monday, December 28th, 2020

I haven’t been blogging about politics, mostly because I’m still waiting to see how things are going to go. But, I resolved quite some time ago to put this up when it comes out, and the day has come. I shall click it open and consume at my leisure.

Marpril…hehe, yeah, that’s pretty much how I remember it.

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Ehrenreich Never Had a Chance
Monday, December 21st, 2020

Alden Ehrenreich is the actor who played young Han Solo. He didn’t do a bad job. Being unfamiliar with his work, and having been tipped off that he performed to great acclaim in Hail Caesar!, which I have not seen, I don’t want to single him out for criticism. It wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be accurate either. But, he did fail in this role, and his failure is an important one because it highlights something we’re losing. This is going to become clear when the Star Wars franchise is wiped clear of everything touched by Kathleen Kennedy, who excels at making beautiful, expensive movies that have no point.

Ehrenreich never had a chance because he was born in 1989. He is missing something. I’m not sure I have it myself but Harrison Ford had it in 1977. His movie-daddy Sean Connery had it in 1962. There’s a certain swaggering confidence men had. It’s not discipline and it’s not charm. It isn’t wildness and it isn’t tameness either. It’s a certain ease, a harmony of sorts with chaotic things.

I think riding a motorcycle gets you closer to it, but that’s not all of it. Lots of guys do that and they still don’t have it. And I have seen this problem come up before throughout Hollywood’s remake fever. Even remakes of silly things that weren’t all that successful, or if they were successful, would not & could not have been taken too seriously. Dukes of Hazzard remakes, Knight Rider remakes, Judge Dread remakes, Robocop. The later version of the male action hero has this “bobblehead” look he can’t quite shake. So now they want a younger Indiana Jones? He’s going to be another bobblehead actor in an Indiana Jones outfit, and he’ll look like that.

Being young right now makes it likely you’ll miss out on it. These boys have been told just about everything they do is “toxic masculinity,” and it really shows. They’re more ready to genuflect before a disapproving mother figure than Indiana Jones or James Bond ever were. They can’t hide it.

I hasten to add that I am not singling out these lads for a lack of balls or toughness. Some of them might have gone over to Iraq and killed people, for all I know. I’m sure a lot of them can bench press more than I can and last longer in a gym than my pot-belly, code-writing ass. The nagging fear is that what I’m describing is a permanent disability, a wound that can never be closed, on one or several generations. The irreconcilable consequence of boys having been raised into men as second class citizens. I look at these bobbleheads struggling to swagger around the way Bo and Luke Duke used to do it, and there’s something that isn’t there. It’s not the “Who the Hell is this guy?” shock we got back in the olden days with replacement actors. There’s something else that has been stripped away.

Some of the young people I talk to, at least the males among them, show some timidness about odd things. Walking with a chin held high, like you belong in the world, is something that seems to have gone away thanks to the text messaging technology. Offering a firm handshake. Even making some money. I’ve heard it said that that’s “selfish.” Perhaps what they mean to say is, someone else might conceivably construe it as selfish to make your own money, and keep it. Maybe that’s the problem. “If someone could possibly interpret it as a bad thing, then you’re guilty until proven innocent.” My generation wasn’t raised that way. We had to respect authority, but the rules were firm and, if we were expected to follow them, always explained.

Young men are intimidated from doing such basic things, and they don’t think about the intimidation. I guess they think these are good manners? It seems like they’ve been bullied away from doing things we did, without preoccupation or deep thought. Speak in a voice below middle-C. Make that money. Look at a girl in a bikini. Change a tire, or if you can’t, learn how. Measure something without using the Metric System.

Stand your ground in an argument with a girl, or a woman, who happens to be wrong. Unthinkable!

Fire a gun. Tie a knot. Identify tasks and chores that have to be done…and do them. Unhooka bra. Spot a contradiction. Start a conversation.

Maybe that last one is the crux of the matter? “Don’t speak until you’re spoken to first.” Otherwise it’s date-rape?

Smoke a cigar. Light a fire. Grill a steak. Argue about politics. Grow a chest hair. Pee on a leaf floating in a creek.

Offer to hold a door open, or retrieve something from a high shelf for a lady.

Now I’m sure here & there, there are some guys born after Perestroika who can do, and often do, a few of these things. But there are also a few who are afraid to do a few of them, and some who won’t do them. “Better to play it safe” seems to be the operative guidance. Well, when you live life that way, I think what we’re seeing here is that it shows. Even if you’re a talented, professional actor, it shows in how you walk and how you talk. When you step into the shoes of someone from a prior generation, especially someone like Harrison Ford, Steve McQueen or Sean Connery, all of whom held a variety of weird, humble, odd jobs before acting…it shows even more.

I know it isn’t a matter of simply being young and having youthful features. Try this: Look up a male actor from back in those olden days. John Wayne, perhaps. Do some research. Everyone has at least an approximate birth date that is a matter of public knowledge. Add exactly thirty years to that, and go find a movie in which that guy plays a prominent role, and is thirty. Watch him walk. Watch him talk. Now watch one of the recent movies with a male lead, who is somewhere around thirty.

See it?

We can’t have another lovable rogue in our movies until this is fixed. Ever. Anywhere.

They all have that bobble-head look.

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The USA as Obi-Wan
Monday, December 21st, 2020

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” People think America is going to be struck down soon. Maybe Obi-Wan’s most famous line applies? Now that the Internet is on fire with concerned, compassionate people prognosticating imminent doom for the United States, what exactly would that entail? What would the final epitaph be, the lesson for the world to learn from the demise, or the steep decline, of the USA?

I think we can safely rule out “They did it the wrong way.” Quite to the contrary: If doom is near, history would have to record we met it after a good run, in fact a great run, and then it would be obliged to ask the question everyone who thinks like an adult must ask: What makes it so? Oh yes, a lot of loud, opinionated people would line up to shout “Nothing!” But that doesn’t pass the smell test.

Especially when so many of our enemies had to labor so long and hard to bring about our end. Using technology and economic models “borrowed” from us. As America confronts her destiny, we’re looking at thousands and thousands of years of various civilizations doing it the other way, with aristocrats twiddling and fiddling with more humble layers of humans. Nobody has succeeded, quite like we have, in lifting up the standards of living for those humble humans. Whether you’re trying to feed the hungry, speed up mass communication, develop medical procedures to extend life or save the sick — with the United States of America relegated to the ash heap of history, your first step would have to be to stop and ask “How do we make another one of those?”

I have been noticing a common refrain throughout all of these loud chattering voices yearning for the death of the United States. They all lust after world domination, with these control knobs and levers placed under the greedy hands of themselves, some dictatorial power that has earned their trust somehow, or…an enigmatic presence. A star chamber packed with strangers. Some respected commission of authorities, perhaps one yet to be established, that is to be offered unlimited deference by everyone precisely because we have no idea who’s on it. And whoever pulls these levers, flips the switches and twiddles the knobs, it goes without saying, pays no price for being wrong. The world as a plaything. That seems to be the fantasy. And this hatred for a country that has helped so many, is merely an offshoot of the fantasy. A child’s fantasy.

I’m less than impressed.

I’m left to conclude all this hatred must come from our national habit of doing it the other way: Authority must be an obligation first, with any privileges that come with the authority being a distant second, merely an afterthought, a byproduct that may or may not ultimately materialize. Power should be a raging pain in the ass. If the decision made is the wrong one, let the decision-maker suffer first. Oh yes, we’ve been lagging a lot in that department. We’re at our worst when we forget this. But we do make the effort, fulfilling the vision occasionally, and it seems that’s plenty enough to inspire all the hate. The mean children with their world-as-plaything children’s-fantasies; they don’t like it. Being obliged to help others, or at least not to hurt them, is enough to get them peeved. They’re ticked off when they think about others being so obliged.

They want us gone, and they want our way of living gone. The relationship between the rulers and the ruled, with the rulers laboring away under real responsibility, is what they want gone. It’s not going to happen. If we cease to exist tomorrow, the demonstration has been made and the lesson is taught: Mortals slaving away for other mortals, with one class living & dying to fulfill the whims of some other class, isn’t the right way to do it. Over the millennia, this has been given a fair shot in a variety of different forms and structures. It doesn’t work.

It works best when government recognizes the inalienable rights with which we have been endowed by our Creator, and is charged with defending them: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Home Stretch
Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

Five weeks left to the year. Plenty of time for people to apologize to me, others like me, they criticized in years past for “paying too much attention to politics.”

You can do it in a Zoom call. Wear your mask. Observe social distancing. Don’t go anywhere. Use proper pronouns. Don’t say “Chinese Virus.” And be sure to buy enough vouchers to offset your carbon emissions!

Seriously, though. It’s obvious we are deeply polarized and it’s been getting worse and worse. How come? It’s because of the Voldemort Virus and our response to it; made up “learning disabilities” in our kids; “global warming” or “climate change,” whatever it’s called today. Plastic or paper grocery bags. Plastic or paper straws. American exceptionalism. Nuclear power, fossil fuels, alternatives.

We are polarized because we are surrounded by a message of “Stop doing anything or else you’ll die and take everyone with you.”

Therefore there is a deep division between those who have been waiting for just such a message so they can stop doing anything, and those who would be enslaved for their maintenance. Between those who can, and cannot, afford to stop doing things. Between those are free to do as they please because they haven’t acquired the necessary skills for anyone to rely on them, and the ones upon whose efforts others depend. Between those who think they already know everything worth knowing, and those who regard it hellish and unthinkable to ever go a day without learning something new.

All of the scolding comes from that. Haven’t you noticed? From one hemisphere it’s all “How dare you” and “Listen to the experts.” From the other hemisphere it’s an eyeball roll, a protest of incredulity…and a job that has to get done, that the first one can’t bring itself to comprehend. All of the arguing ends with “Yeah but you’re going to get Grandma killed.” (So I win.)

It’s not just the virus. It’s this way with everything. It’s all Don’t versus Do.

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Our Passive-Voice Society
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

I have been saying for years now, in so many words, that anonymity has a dazzling effect on us. If we hear a commission has decided such-and-such a thing, it’s in our programming to accept this and even elevate it, like to Ten Commandments status, just because we don’t know who is on the commission. This is extremely dangerous because it makes us into a passive-voice society.

What a great time it is to demonstrate the truth of what I’ve been saying.

“The election has been called for Joe Biden!” carries gravitas.

“Such-and-such a thing has called the election for Biden” doesn’t carry as much.

“Bob my next door neighbor has called it for Biden” carries far less…and arguably should. But look what’s going on at the other end of the spectrum. Go passive-voice and lop off the subject of the sentence, conceal the identity of the persons making the call, and you give extra weight to the call. The exact opposite of the way it should work.

There is a word for this fastening of an identity to the content of an idea, to give weight to the content: imprimatur. It’s a word rarely used, and when it’s used it’s usually for sake of criticism: “You have placed this silly idea above your imprimatur.” The symptom of our mental disease is that we have forgotten how to manage imprimaturs. We think the 800-pound gorilla imprimatur that cannot be defeated, or even subjected to challenge, is the one that doesn’t exist. We don’t know who’s saying it? Then we cannot appeal it. And we’d better accept it.

Not good!

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Veteran’s Day 2020
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Shopping list for my day off is getting kind of long. I should be sure and take some extra cash, I suppose, for the guy (real vet I hope?) handing out poppies. I’m sure this year is not being kind toward that particular effort.

The difference between Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day:

Memorial Day is, as the name implies, a time to pay respect and honor those who have died either while serving their country, as a result of military service, or after they have finished serving as a retired or separated veteran.

Veterans Day honors those who have served in the past, present, and even pays tribute to those who will serve in the future.

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Memo For File CCXV
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

One week.

All of my discussions with liberals have been started at the behest of the liberal, although I’m sure in most cases the liberal doesn’t remember it that way. They tag me in a post on social media, or they call me on the phone, or whatever. The script in their head says they’re supposed to be jubilant and I’m supposed to be sullen and twitchy. They’re genuinely curious about whether I’m holding out unrealistic hopes, or have sunk into a catatonic state, or both. Instead they discover I’m in good spirits; the Trump era may be coming to an end, but all good things must come to an end, and in this case we have a near certain shot that Trump is going to uncover just a few more things. Just a few more flies in the ointment, clumps of crap in the air hose, skulduggery, shenanigans. Maybe some malicious intent, or at the very least, hard evidence that the reforms made so hastily earlier in the year constituted nothing more than a regrettable mistake. I give Placeholder Joe the odds but only just barely. Gun to head, I put my betting money on him and Proud-of-Rapists Gigglepuss…as little as I can. Nothing more than what I can afford to lose. Trump has a one-in-four chance, I think. And that’s climbing. And as the days tick on by with no concession out of him, I’m enjoying watching people around him reveal their true selves — yet again. Munching my popcorn. Having a good time.

Our roles unexpectedly reversed, the liberal rings off with “Well, I don’t wanna get into it” or some variation of that, forgetting that the discussion began in the first place because of their inquiry.

They’re not well.

I do have one frustration burning away right now. I’m all about learning the true nature of our polarization. It’s become something of a lifelong goal, one I am sure I’ll never completely finish. This is a big split. It’s bigger than our country, of that much I’m sure. My frustration now is that it’s been the key factor in all of our distress, all year long. The Chinese Virus, and all its attendant hardships, isn’t responsible for our problems; it is revealing our problems. Now it’s too late to do anything with what we’re learning, but this is where we’re gaining yet more insight on what is really dividing us.

We are having, it seems to me, a difference of opinion. It’s international, sprawling beyond the borders of the United States, but it falls short of global. It’s a First World schism.

Common ground: Life is short. Stay away from assholes.

Follow up question: What, exactly, is an asshole?

Their answer: He goes on Twitter and calls people “losers”!

My answer is a longer one, and this is the schism. If it were just me saying this, there would be no division. But millions upon millions see it the way I do.

Whitmer “Loser” is not a figment of anybody’s imagination. There really are losers out there. They’re energy sucks. If you’re worried about staying away from a certain kind of person because life is short and you want to make the most of it, these are them. And, far from laboring under some sort of asshole-pollution in which we have way too many people calling out the losers, we’re really struggling with something of a shortage. We have been coping with a sort of toxic mythology that good manners have something to do with pretending losers aren’t losers, and in so doing, we have spent generations and generations handing unearned influence over the most intimate aspects of our lives, to people who don’t even rightfully deserve to have influence over their own.

They’re losers!

Kind looks like I hate them, doesn’t it?

See, that’s also part of our toxic conditioning. If you see someone for what they really are, you’re hateful. The only way not to be hateful is to pretend what is so obviously true, cannot be. Meanwhile…if you’re feeling sad or depressed or angry about something, it’s important that all negative emotions are expressed. If you bottle up those bad emotions they’re going to come back on you, cause health problems, drive you nuts, etc. Have you heard that one? Of course you have. For half a century or more. “Don’t bottle up your feelings”…but…don’t say anything that might make someone feel bad about someone else, or themselves. We are therefore at liberty to — in fact, encouraged to — go around identifying any and all “problems” as long as they’re properly confined to our feelings, so that they are lacking in actionable solutions. Which multiplies the assholes, since we end up drowning in people moping about how sad or “triggered” they are and how they need help and can’t do anything…

No one can count on me to [Thing] until someone brings me a [Thing].

It’s healthy! Another person not bottling up their feelings! But once again, we have one more person pulling the wagon, one fewer person pulling it…

Meanwhile we have these problems with actionable solutions, usually because some “public servant” has been elevated to deity status — almost always a democrat — and is just screwing around, playing with their “toy.” Making judgment calls that have consequences, as the Owner of the ship not the Captain of the ship. We’re not allowed to notice that. Someone obviously has to be defrocked of their high position, everyone understands it, but to say so out loud is something we’ve identified as “hate.” The asshole is the person who says what we all know to be true.

I do not like the notion of small children looking up at the President of the United States, and learning it’s appropriate to say “Gretchen Whitmer has been doing a horrible job in Michigan” or “Hillary did a very, very bad job” or “Hunter Biden is a loser!” I’m displeased with these anecdotes of kids running out on the playground and calling each other losers. I suppose I should question the verity of such claims, but I don’t. I’m sure it’s happened.

But I have a unique take on it. Your children shouldn’t be watching the President that closely. That’s not his purpose. Article II of the Constitution doesn’t mention anything about the nation’s executive being a role model for children.

We have losers among us. Real assholes.

Our common ground is the notion that a life well-lived, has something to do with staying away from them.

We know — from repeated, and repeatable, experience — that if we do not define what asshole-ism is, not only will we fail to properly isolate it, but we will elevate it. Every. Single. Time. It is our ancient, timeless, common frailty. It is burned into our wiring. It is the way we are. Asshole-isolation is just yet another important thing that has to be done, that we can’t do without establishing, maintaining, validating and reinforcing strong definitions.

It’s impossible to get this idea across to the #NeverTrump crowd. They’ll misunderstand and think you’re talking about The Donald…or they’ll willfully misunderstand…and translate this wisdom to their own joke, at everybody else’s expense. There will follow the forced, non-jocular, horse laugh — HAR HAR HAR — and, the point will be lost. But they’re nuts. They seriously do agree with people who have more sense, that it’s important to call out the assholes. And here they are, defining the “asshole” in the room, as the guy who’s actually calling out the real assholes for being them. They want more of the same, more of the mistake we’ve all been making: It’s very important to stay away from a certain kind of person, but “good manners” means you’re not allowed to notice who they are, and you’re certainly not allowed to notice it audibly where others might hear.

I started my own adult living. I left my hometown for a bigger one, with the support of exactly nobody. I was full of enthusiasm, maybe a bit of youthful rebellion, but I had no guidance. Millions upon millions of us begin our adult living that way, and I think it’s common for us to learn the real secret to happy living the hard way. Maybe my story is so common, that it is the source of this real-split? Because at the beginning of my adult life, I ended up getting eaten alive. I will never forget. If I live to be a thousand years old, I will not forget. Stay away from assholes. If you choose your friends wisely and resolve to do right by them, you still have to work hard but others have had to work much harder before you came along, and things will pretty much fall into place. If you do not stay away from assholes, nothing else you do is going to matter very much. You will become one yourself. Or you will lose everything and live a life devoid of purpose. Probably, both of those things will happen, but definitely the one or the other.

But you can’t stay away from them if you don’t define what they are. And you have to call out people who’ve been elevated to positions of high authority, who aren’t doing any good there. The #NeverTrump crowd thinks they’re doing exactly that. They’ll say so on cue. But deep down, they know we don’t have any problems today — not a single one, not even the Wu Flu — that doesn’t predate Bad Orange Man. Deep down, they know he’s been revealing the problems, not creating them.

If they didn’t understand that, they’d be the happy ones. Things the way they are, they’re apprehensive and miserable. They agree with me: We’re still learning about what’s really broken, and we’re almost sure to learn a few more things, no matter what happens with this election’s outcome. They’re “winning,” in theory, but all of the genuine confidence is eluding them. All of it is on our side of the net. They can see this is so, but they don’t understand why. They’re not savoring this.

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Happy 245th Birthday Marines
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020

This annual wishing of a happy birthday to The Corps is a family thing, not a professional thing. I’ve actually been working around Army and Air Force guys. No leathernecks where I work. But we put up our shout-out to the jarheads every November 10th, because they’re our oldest branch, and Mom would’ve wanted me to do it.

This year things are a bit different. It is, just like with lots of other things, full of suck. So now we all get on the same side, and we fight. But fighting is what Marines do. They’re the first to do it. You know that old saying: If I can’t shoot, I’ll load, if I can’t load I’ll help with the wounded…etc. That’s where my family is right now.

We can’t make the trip for Thanksgiving, so our thoughts are with our warrior. Get well. Kick some ass.

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We’ll Be Fine
Sunday, November 8th, 2020

At least, I think so.

I’ve lived through…let’s see. Carter was the big education for me. I was actually for Carter at first. How much wisdom can a ten-year-old have? I’ve said before many times that I owe a huge debt to Carter. He did more to get me voting Republican, than any Republican ever did. And he forced me, before my 14th birthday, to endure the most hideous experience imaginable for a young teenager: I had to admit my parents were right about something and I had been wrong. What a priceless head start and at such a tender age.

I was breathing air throughout the last two and a half years of Johnson’s presidency, so I suppose that doesn’t count. Of course I don’t remember it. Those thirty months, from what I’ve read, were pretty much a big flame-out. It takes some digging, historians don’t like to write about it. There was “unrest” due to the Viet Nam war, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King got shot, and at the end of it the democrats lost pretty much everything.

I was very much politically engaged when Mondale challenged Reagan. In the aftermath, I could see everyone else understood what I understood because Mondale lost everything except Minnesota.
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Adult responsibilities and relationships with wounded, incomplete unstable women had distracted me from politics and lured me into the “don’t care zone.” I became one of those casual-living casual-thinking types, the “Not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties so what’s the point” types. Bill Clinton cured me of that. I remember after the Gennifer Flowers scandal had started to die down a bit, and Bill Clinton made an appearance in a Kindergarten class I suddenly realized: That’s our next President, no doubt. It made me sick to my stomach. Not because he was a democrat, but because he looked and talked like a computer software salesman and at the time, people in this vocation had made my life miserable. My adult responsibilities had grown to include developing and testing the products they were promising people…

Clinton’s presidency resulted in the 9/11 attacks. Hoping we don’t get another one of those.

Then there was Barack Obama. Too soon to say, we’re still anesthetized against the damage He did around the world, although we did get a front-and-center view of the War On Cops that He promoted nonstop. Our media blames all the fighting and distress on Trump, which just goes to show we can’t rely on them. I think the worst thing about the Obama era, among the travesties upon which we can rely for a new Biden era, is the fawning press. Questions they asked of Obama were not the same as the questions they asked of Trump. We never would have heard “Obama suggests, without evidence, that blah blah blah…” The running joke is that the harshest question Emperor Obama was ever asked was “What’s it like to be so awesome??” It’s not completely a joke.

Now before I came along, what sort of damage did democrats do? JFK shut down the loonie bins and to this day our streets are crowded with mentally challenged people who can’t get access to the services they need. Truman flooded our federal agencies with communists, and from what I understand we have yet to figure out if he knew what he was doing or was in denial. The historians are covering for all that. FDR failed to pack the Supreme Court, but succeeded in making the judicial branch into his lapdog, which in turn created misery for all sorts of Japanese-Americans who were wrongfully imprisoned…including George “Sulu” Takei, who somehow blames Republicans for it. FDR also created a whole new chapter in American liberalism, in which we’re supposed to sit on our asses and wait for the government to feed us. Lots of things are wrong with this. The worst is the mental abuse, since this romantic vision of the bold young revolutionary is supposed to remain in place. So we’re supposed to sing our revolutionary songs and join unions and march in the streets and show our strength and really stick it to The Man…but then cry like little birdies waiting for the momma-bird which is the government, to spew some pre-chewed food into our little beaks. We’re the resistance but we’re also the obedience. That cognitive dissonance started with Roosevelt.

Woodrow Wilson? Do I even need to go there. Racist. Segregationist. Eugenicist.

So…dunno…the damage democrats have been doing, is evidently on the wane, but nowadays there is a lag-factor and it’s hard to remain conscious in the moment of the consequences of the damage they’re doing. They, of course, would like to blame it on whichever Republican comes into office after them, and with a willing and complicit press, they tend to succeed at this.

But overall I think we’ll be okay. You’ll notice the revolution is never complete. And they keep losing. People figure out the effect they have is not good, and so they require young children who are idiots like I used to be, to come to voting age still being idiots so they can maybe win elections again.

Supposedly they’re representing the “poor” who would be helped by progressive taxes and redistribution schemes, with their opponents representing the “rich,” the very few who would be taxed to pay for this sumptuous buffet of social services for the poor. Should be a cakewalk for them. Obviously it isn’t. That’s what gives me hope. People are learning, like I did back at age 10, and they’re doing this learning pretty reliably.

I’ve already asked if Clarence Thomas has another four years left in him. I’ve been assured he does…these people wouldn’t know for sure. But I got to hear him when he swore in ACB, and he sounded alright. We’ll be alright. I can’t promise it for sure, but I’m betting on our good health for the long term. And as far as election shenanigans? We just rewarded them so for the short term they’ll get worse. But we’re going through a learning experience and over the longer term of time, we’ll come out of it wiser.

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Insurmountable
Saturday, November 7th, 2020

We’ve got a lot of people walking around out there, who have actually voted and are free to vote again, saying “Trump supporters need to give it up because the math is insurmountable” even as they admit the process of counting votes has been shady as hell and there likely has been some shenanigans taking place.

This is looks to me like some kind of mental enfeeblement. This is why I say things like “thinking like a grown-up” versus “thinking like a little kid.” Math is derivative of the counting process. Do I even have to say it?

Let Us Steal The Election! I noticed earlier this week CNN was putting up graphics of the electoral vote totals, things like “BIDEN 247 TRUMP 213” …without having put Alaska in Trump’s total for some reason…counting Michigan and Arizona for Biden, after both states had spent the night swinging back & forth…Trump within one percentage point in AZ, WI, NV, PA, NC…were they, perhaps, not looking at that and just fixated on the deceptive electoral vote totals the whole time? I’ve noticed we have a problem with widespread ignorance about the Electoral College’s purpose. Stands to reason we must have a lot of ignorance about how it works.

It takes a tiny bit of fraud to produce an enormous change in the Electoral College result.

What you’re getting here is a good look at what liberalism really is. You have millions upon millions of people who are reaching the same erroneous conclusions about things because they don’t understand the basics, don’t think in terms of cause and effect. And they’re hooked on the feeling of “I know something nobody else knows”…can’t stand that healthy humble inversion of it, “Everyone else seems to know something I don’t, I need to shut up and listen.” So, fresh after uttering something that reveals their ignorance, they strut, pose and preen. Oh yeah yeah yeah I know how the Electoral College works, I’m like an expert on the Electoral College. But you red-hats need to totally give it up, the math is insurmountable.

Related: “Glitches” in Michigan gave thousands of votes to Biden.

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Bobulinski
Wednesday, October 28th, 2020

Tucker Carlson’s Show last night.

A real whistle blower, covered by way of real journalism. We used to have that kind of stuff.

Update 10/29/20: Had to replace the video, the first one got yanked. Not surprised. May have to do this a few more times.

Funny how these “oopsies” always seem to go in the same direction…

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Election Year Bananas
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

Okay we got one week left. This is an unusual election in that all three are a toss-up or close to a toss-up: House of Representatives, Senate and White House. After today it’s pretty pointless to pass on any sort of deep-thinking to people who don’t already agree with me.

So if I could call it, here is how I would like people to envision it.

I wish to address the issue of the mommy-state providing us things for free. It’s become a big issue because looking after the public debt has gone out of style. Politicians have figured out they’re not going to make a lot of headway promising people raises so they can afford things, or easing regulations to make the things cheaper to buy. People just want their free stuff. They can see everyone else is getting free stuff so they want theirs.

So. I’m leaving a lot of pressing issues unmentioned so I can concentrate on this one thing. It’s that important.

I want you to envision a sort of alternate reality in which we all need and want our bananas but there is a banana shortage. If I use the example of “contraceptive shortage” I’m going to lose half of you and if I say “ammunition shortage” I’ll lose the other half, so let’s say it’s bananas.

Can you envision the fringe-kooky hard-lefty liberal politician jabbing his finger up in the air and proclaiming, with lots of righteous indignation, that “bananas are a human right”? Deep down inside I think we all understand it takes more than that to make something a right; just emphatically saying it is one doesn’t make it one. But I recognize a lot of people are well past that now. We need our bananas!

The point I seek to make is about a critical difference. It is relevant to the situation and the times in which we live.

There is: I will make sure, wherever someone is going without a banana, they get one…

There is: I will make sure, wherever someone is going without a banana, no one has two or more.

See where I’m going with that? Two different things. Not the same. When people say stuff like “Socialism has failed everywhere it’s been tried” they’re talking about that. Oh, this bait-and-switch game doesn’t fail. There’s something in the human psychology. People think they’re looking at a promise to make sure everyone has a banana, when they never even heard that and no one ever gave them that promise. The promise is “equality”; it has to do with taking bananas away, rather than giving them to people who don’t have them.

Now that I’ve defined this critical distinction, go back and look at what these fringe-kooky hard-lefty liberal politicians are telling you. And think back in recent history. A decade ago, the bananas were health care coverage, right? The guy whose name was on the bill got to be President of the United States for two full terms. He used executive orders to modify the provisions as He saw fit. It was like putty in His hands, because if anybody got in the way of what He wanted to do they’d have been called racists. Here it is a decade later. And all these people are still missing their bananas.

You vote them in ten more times to give you the free bananas, it’s going to go this way ten more times. The plan is not to give people bananas. The plan is to make it all “equal” by taking bananas away from people. Listen to what they are telling you. They’re explaining it to you. “It’s just awful that in the richest country in the world people are missing blah blah blah while we have millionaires and billionaires.” They talk this way ALL the time. The problem isn’t that someone is missing a banana. The problem is someone is missing a banana while someone else has two. There’s a difference.

Okay, I’ve said my piece. That’s okay. Maybe I didn’t manage to educate you, but if you’ve read this far you’ve lost your excuse. Now vote wisely.

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McConnell’s Speech
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

I found this to be nothing less than brilliant.

The truth is, on all of this, we owe the country a broader discussion. Competing claims about Senate customs cannot fully explain where we are…

Catastrophe looms right around the corner. The country will be fundamentally changed forever. When a Republican president makes a Supreme Court nominee. They have hauled out the very same tactics for fifty years. Some of the opposition’s more intense, but the doomsday predictions about the outcome of nominating these extremists like John Paul Stevens, David Souter? Why, somehow, everyone knows in advance that nominations like Bork, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are certain to whip up national frenzies… while nominations like Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are calm events by comparison. This blaring asymmetry predates our recent disputes. And it comes, my colleagues, from a fundamental disagreement on the role of a judge in our republic.

We just have a fundamental difference of opinion. We just heard the Democratic Leader name all of these things that are threatened by this nominee. It sounds very similar to the tunes we’ve heard before. We, like many Americans, want judges to fulfill a limited role the Constitution assigns to them: Stick to text, resolve cases impartially, and leave policymaking to the people and their representatives, which is what we do here…

But the left thinks the framers of our country got this all wrong. They botched the job. The people who wrote the Constitution didn’t understand what a judge ought to be. As several Senate Democrats have reaffirmed in recent days, they find it quaint and naive to think a judge would simply follow the law. Scalia used to say if you want to make policy, why don’t you run for office? That’s not what we do here…what they are looking for is a small panel of lawyers with elite educations to reason backward from outcomes and enlighten all the rest of us with their morals and political judgment. Whether the Constitution speaks to the issue or not. They know best what’s for us. No matter what the Constitution or the law may say. And for the last several decades, in many cases, that’s what they have gotten. One activist decision after another, giving us subjective preferences of one side of the force of law…

President Obama actually was refreshingly honest about this. He said he wanted to appoint judges who had empathy. Think about that for a minute. What if you are the litigant before the judge — for whom the judge does not have empathy? You’re in tough shape. So, you give them credit for being pretty honest about this. That’s what they’re looking for…And that is clearly why we have taken on such an outsized, combative atmosphere with regard to these confirmations…

The democrats aren’t afraid to play politics with the Supreme Court. Republican Senators have consistently applied a more congenial standard to nominees to the nation’s highest court: Is he or she certifiably crazy? If not, then confirm. Don’t worry about how many conservatives or how many liberals are there already, and don’t worry about going home and telling your constituents “I kept this liberal whack-job out of there.” Just confirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Which they did, 96 to 3. That was not — I think both sides would agree — because RBG represented the mainstream of the country’s thinking on issues likely to come before the Supreme Court.

This is important because the Senate is important. Keeping the Senate, in 2020, is almost as important as keeping the White House. It might even be more important than that.

A lot of people are out there ready to punch the chad for Placeholder Joe and Proud-of-Rapists Kamala because they don’t like President Trump’s combativeness. Or, they’re ready to stay home over this genteel-language issue, even though they support Trump’s policies. As we’ve seen over the last few days, a lot of the heated and counterproductive bickering is in Congress, and I’d really like to know what people think about this “blaring asymmetry.” Some liberal ACLU hack gets nominated to the Supreme Court and everybody falls in line, and starts fawning. Remember Elana Kagan’s nomination? Oh, she’s so funny! Just adorable.

Republican President nominates a learned and steady voice like Barrett and it has to be World War III. Seriously, what do they think about all that?

Truth is, for this function…and maybe for any other…we don’t need any democrats in the Senate at all. They’re just there to scheme for power, slander their enemies and stir the crock.

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The Captain of the Ship or the Owner of the Ship
Saturday, October 24th, 2020

Explaining 2020 in a single sentence…and a question that follows it. “It’s my ship, I control where it goes.” Who’s saying it? The Captain of the ship, or the owner of the ship?

This is how our red and our blue states have been governed during the pandemic, in the aftermath of our infection with the Chinese Virus. The Captain of a vessel, and the owner of the vessel, are both within their rights to declare that the ship should follow a course. But it makes a big difference who’s saying it, if you’re on the boat!

Red-state governors have governed like the Captain of the ship, who goes down with it if it sinks. They say: Let’s have this mask mandate…or not. Let’s open these schools…or not. These are predictions of what will or will not be okay. They are predictions made by someone whose goose is thoroughly cooked if the predictions are wrong. And they may very well have been wrong. But those are the vital ingredients of real leadership: You figure out what’s going to happen as best you can, you err to the side of caution within reason, and you accept the residual risk. If you bungle it, everyone gets onto a lifeboat before you do, so you do your best not to bungle it.

Blue-state governors have governed like the owner of the ship, which is very different. This is more in the spirit of “If I break it no one can complain because it’s my property,” like a child abusing his own toys. Hey, I won the election, what I say goes! This is not like the Captain of the ship at all. Not even close. “Guessin’ Gavin” Newsom, I call him, decides day to day…I’m going to use these colors on these counties, there’s no such thing as “green,” you can’t advance to the next-safe tier even if the numbers say you can, unless I’m pleased with the racial equity in your COVID statistics. Oh yeah and bar food isn’t food, because if you order beer without a proper sandwich and side of mashed potatoes, the VID is gonna getcha. I decided that! I’m Gavin and I won the election. Ships’ owners, more often than not, are on dry land. If the ship sinks, they’re safe even if all hands are lost…and they just lose their personal property.

We are a law and order society so it’s easy for us to forget this distinction. “Do it my way I have the authority” may be true, but it could mean: Do it my way, it’s my skin. Or it could mean: Do it my way, it’s my toy so who cares if I break it.

It bears repeating: When you’re on the boat, it makes a huge difference.

Okay, so a single sentence, a question, and then an explanation that’s a little longer. But anyway. That’s 2020 for you. We just learned painfully what leadership really is. And we’ve got a big problem with some 2 dozen states being governed the way a spoiled child governs his toys…that he’s about to wreck. Our blue states are sinking ships, with owners who don’t care because they have no reason to care, they’re just playing with their toys. But there are real lives in those toys, with hopes and dreams.

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Old Economy Steve
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

This is old. But it’s important, and since I’m just finding out about it…

The Atlantic:

Meet Old Economy Steve. As a proud member of the class of 1970-something, he’s got a doofy haircut straight out of “Dazed and Confused,” along with a sunny financial future. With commencement season drawing to a close, his awkwardly smirking face has become the canvass upon which some angry Millennials have decided to vent their frustrations with the economy, not to mention condescending Baby Boomers. There are almost 700 of these on quickmeme.

Definitely check out that QuickMeme link if this is new to you. As the article promises, it goes on and on…and on. Not that it takes a lot of talent to create a meme, but I’m sure a lot of the makers have talent to do something much more impressive and they chose to squander it by whining and crying about the older generation getting all the breaks…so they could sidestep any appreciation for their own breaks, and pretend to be wallowing in nothing but hurt and tragedy. How sad.

Old Economy Steve Yeah kids. Grandpa stormed Normandy dodging machine gun fire so you could whine and cry like this.

Article continues:

But wait, how good did Steve really have it? Assuming he finished school some time in the late disco era, probably not so hot. Remember, the 1970s were the time of stagflation — that awful combo of high unemployment and spiraling inflation that left policy makers flummoxed. When the Federal Reserve finally jacked up interest rates to combat it, the bank induced several rocky years of recession. In 1982, the unemployment rate for 20-to-24-year-old men peaked at more than 18 percent. For teens it was in the twenties. Meanwhile, the late 70s also kicked off America’s first plunge into industrial decline. Little remembered fact, Chrysler actually needed a government bailout to survive in 1979.

Meanwhile, there’s a decent chance that Steve saw his 401K cut in half come the 2008 financial crisis. Or, if he was a Chrysler worker, he might have gotten laid off just a few years short of retirement. So, maybe we should give Old Economy Steve a break.

When an enlightened, woken, no-comments Internet tabloid like The Atlantic is telling you to stop sniveling and pick yourself up by your bootstraps, something’s way off course. Here the problem isn’t that the meme-makers have never been told how to work hard at something; the problem is that they’ve made it impossible for anyone to tell them that. They live in their dungeon of despair. Say a word to bust them out of it, or a sentence or a paragraph or a whole essay, they’ll pigeonhole you as “Old Economy Steve” and let it all roll off them like water off a duck’s back.

It’s a popular idea now: The generation before ours, got all the advantages. You go back a few years before bad-haircut Steve, and you hit another crew that didn’t have to worry about expensive college tuition. In what would have been their sophomore year, they were worried about landing the plane after coming back dodging anti-aircraft fire. How’s that figure into the morose, angst-filled ruminations about dopey ol’ Steve and how he doesn’t realize how good he had it?

These “woe is me” kids were made and not born. It’s a manufactured problem, conjured up not by the requirement to try harder or to jump through a few hoops, but by the lack of such a requirement. It’s that soft sheltered space in mom’s basement with the electricity that always works and the video game console that’s always ready, that makes the problem. In my day, I didn’t have that, I had to pay rent. That created a necessity to get a job, and cope with rejection. There was no safe space for me to build memes or to play video games, unless I made one for myself. But that all begins with “In My Day” so you just try telling these kids that.

It should be noted that the Atlantic’s list of hardships for poor Steve, whatever relevance it has, is not complete. In my day, it was Black Monday. I saw it on the front page inside a newspaper machine — yes we really had those — waiting for my first-real-job job interview. Yes, at eight in the morning, Monday, October 19, 1987, getting my start at the very instant it all turned sour. I remember looking at the newsstand, maybe with my head cocked a little bit like a quizzical puppy dog. Looked like a dark omen. Still waiting to find out if it really was one! That’s life. But I guess not…I have a two-story house, with a mortgage I’m still paying…which makes me you-know-who, in the eyes of some.

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Greatness Is Scary
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

Let’s discuss this with honesty: #MAGA stands for Make America Great Again. This is offensive to many.

They are not offended because they think America was already great, although many of them have said so. They are not offended because America has never been great; many have said that. These would be two irreconcilable factions, fighting with each other, if they meant what they had been saying. They never did. We never saw them fight with each other and there’s a resaon for that. These were dishonest cosmetic statements lacking any matching underlying sentiment.

It’s offensive because greatness is decision-based. If you’re some slacker living in your mom’s basement with no job, and you wake up this morning and say “This stops now” and you mean it, you’re already great. The resulting education, job, saving, marriage, house etc. are merely following through on the awakening, like the position of a boat following a new bearing. If the boat is following a bearing of greatness, the boat is great already. That’s how people are. That’s how communities are. That’s how societies are.

Similarly, if you’re a nation and you’re the world’s superpower, but you let a bunch of commie filth design your school curricula and your government policies and your big budget entertainment and your evening news and your late night comedy; you have given away your greatness. If you build “sanctuary cities” in which you reward lawbreakers and you pass progressive income taxes and unlimited property taxes and lawn watering restrictions and silly little laws against plastic bags and straws, just to screw with the people who work hard and follow the law and let them know their place; you have given away your greatness. It doesn’t matter if the resulting decline in standard of living takes decades or a century.

#MAGA means: Let our nation conduct itself the way truly positive and spiritual people conduct themselves, not like these poor miserable hot messes you might meet late at night in a bar who you end up marrying right before they run up your cards and take off with all your stuff. It means to embrace standards rather than to abnegate them. It means recognize greatness in each other, where it exists, and to reward it rather than punish it. Stop finding excuses to fail at things before we’ve even tried.

It means, when some among us succeed at something, GO AHEAD AND CONGRATULATE them. Skip this little decision-point we’ve been reaching. You know the one…well now wait a minute, is there an opportunity for ME ME ME to do some virtue signaling here? Is he an amputee or special needs? Gay? Black? Female? If none of the above, then let’s peck at him like jealous chickens in a barnyard, make him step back and let a designated-oppressed person take his place because it’s all about ME ME ME. No. It’s not about you. Being great means recognizing greatness. It doesn’t mean to punish mediocrity and it doesn’t mean to pretend mediocrity is great. It means to inspire the mediocre.

Treat greatness…like greatness.

Don’t punish it or displace it to make room for another. Study it.

Treat friends as friends. Make it easy for people to be your friend.

Treat enemies as enemies. Don’t destroy them right away. First give them reasons to stop being an enemy, and consider becoming friends. If that doesn’t work, then by all means light ’em up.

But it should be easy and rewarding to be our friend, and difficult and expensive to be our enemy. Not the other way around!

In short, greatness means acting like we have some business being on the planet. Like we belong here.

Our country has spent the better part of a century going the other way. Too much apologizing…not for an ugly history or anything like that, but merely for existing. We’re discussing this honestly, remember. And honestly, if it wasn’t for the legacy of slavery, it would be something else. Negative, ungrateful people always look for a subject of complaint, and they ALWAYS find it.

And that is why #MAGA is controversial. Greatness means, ultimately, depriving hostile, negative, ankle-biting wounded incomplete people of their voice, until such time as they make up their minds to become positive people who treat friends as friends and enemies as enemies, and stop behaving like bar trash.

Because once you go down that road, the conversion is hard.

Not impossible. It’s doable. Others have done it.

That’s why it’s scary.

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I Couldn’t Possibly Care Less If “We’re All In This Together”
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Who needs to be told “We’re all in this together”? I daresay no one. Not even people who are severely depressed, psychologically and economically, teetering on the brink of doing something tragic and drastic. I don’t think even they care about being in it alone versus together. If you’ve ever been in a situation like that, you know it’s not terribly helpful to have it suggested someone else is suffering the same way. In fact, all that really does is diminish any residual hopes that help might be coming.

I care about young, inexperienced, confused kids struggling away in retail jobs suddenly charged with the responsibility of being miniature public health officials. “Sir! Sir! Where’s your mask?” The poor tykes think if they ever allow someone to walk past a line barefaced, the Wuhan Problem will flare up all over again and the blood of thousands will be on their hands. And I care about those kids maybe getting fired or laid off, then having to figure out how to collect from an overburdened unemployment system weeks & months behind in the process of figuring out which claims are fraudulent. Or, with maybe possibly getting another job. Right now. In this.

Mostly, I care about being told no. I care about losing my cool, not quite so much over being told no, but over the knowledge that my request is not COVID-related even in the slightest. I worry about losing my sense of perspective, as I struggle with a negligible inconvenience, knowing others have it so much worse. Because my intelligence is being insulted by the latest “No can do, because COVID” coming from some guy who can’t even be bothered to look up from his text messaging conversation.

I care about the end game. I’m one of the ones who resolutely refuse to accept the “new normal,” but are legitimately wondering how we get things back again if the answer to every little thing is: Nope. Sorry. COVID.

It’s dishonest because the people who are making the rules about how much suffering we’re all doing, as “we’re in it together,” enjoy immunity from the effects. That’s the real concern people are supposed to have when they wonder whether or not we’re all in it together. In the ways that matter, we’re not. And yet — we are. In a most unhealthy way. To those who make the decisions, the real harm is merely delayed. They’re going to have a lot of trouble collecting taxes from a base that has been so wounded. They’re already crying to Trump. Trump told them no, so now they’re campaigning for Placeholder Joe and Kamala Proud-Of-Rapists. If those two are victorious next month, the answer may change…and the bailouts will materialize. We saw that kind of stuff back in the seventies, right before the dollar price of every little thing doubled and tripled.

In fact, throughout the twentieth century there was a lot of excitement — the wrong kind. Lots of misery. Lots of Keynesian policies, micro-managing, totalitarian dictatorships across the globe. A pandemic came before all of this. And this gives me cause to wonder.

I wish people would stop popping up on the teevee telling me we’re all in this together. It’s the answer to a question no one was asking. The people who are saying it, are showing how little they understand of the real problem. And they’re addressing the sort of people I would hope went the way of the Dodo Bird: The kind whose day brightens just a little bit knowing someone else is suffering. If there’s anything we don’t need right now, that’s it.

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Progressive Taxation
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Once again, I’m venturing into a college town, a stranger in a strange land. This is where you can finally find one or two Biden/Harris signs. Which isn’t so bad, but there’s a prevailing sentiment that Bernie Sanders is an okay guy and might still have the right idea. Months after he took the money & ran. People can’t figure out what smells.

Resentment appeals to people, especially to people who pay attention to politics only occasionally. I suppose it’s like a smoothie, that first sip is enticing and delicious. Nobody wants to suck away at it all day, but that’s okay because with politics people only pay attention long enough to form an opinion. They can’t see what their resentments are doing to them, and to the rest of us.

Alright, I’ll explain here we can’t afford to have resentment in our tax policies. Let’s inspect the intersection between economics and politics by making it simple: I’m a collectivist-type politician, running on a platform of absolute collectivism. If I win, everybody’s money goes into a big pile, and then everybody gets back the total amount of money divided by the population count so everyone ends up with an equal amount.

To keep things simple, everyone votes their own interests. If you know my scheme will extract more money from you than it will give back to you, you’ll vote no, and if you know it will give back to you more than it will take, you vote yes. If you line everybody up according to how much they have, and take the property value of the guy standing at the halfway point, that’s the median. If you put everybody’s property in that big pile and divide by the number of people, that’s the average, or mean. So I lose if the median is greater than the mean. I win if the median is less than the mean. It all has to do with whether there’s a slope, and which way it goes.

The way economics works, this will always win. There’s always a slope and the slope always goes one way. The wealthiest guy has a whole lot more than the second-wealthiest guy. The poorest people have roughly the same amount as each other. An “Us Against Them” mentality emerges. But I don’t need to rely on the us-against-them mentality, the numbers are on my side. I can take to the airwaves and truthfully say “If you have less than X, you will benefit under my plan” and if people vote purely selfishly, like rats on a sinking ship, I will win.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Suppose a blue fairy godmother emerges from on high and says “I will straighten your curve.” She would wave her magic wand and do merely the first step of what I’m promising to do — curing inequality. Note, though, she’s offering merely to straighten the curve, not to go so far as I’m going to ensure everyone has the same amount of stuff. No curve means the median and the mean are the same. Poorest guy has 1, wealthiest guy has 100, so the guy in the middle has 50 or 51.

Well! If you ask me, I’m going to say not only no, but Hell No. I can’t win that way. Or — I could win, but I would only squeak through with barely 50% of the vote, best case scenario.

I, the collectivist-minded politician, M-U-S-T have the inequality and the inequality must have the curve to it. My whole political career depends on it. I have got to have those 70%, 80%, 90% continually shafted, continually possessing less than the mean, so they have an incentive to support me. I can’t have: Poorest guy has 1, richest guy has 100, with linearly spaced gradients in between. If it’s like that, my goose is cooked. Note that my plan is supposed to go leaps and bounds beyond that, ensuring that the wealthiest guy and the poorest guy have the same amount. The point is that to achieve merely the first step of that, would already be unworkable because it would be contrary to my interests.

Progressive taxation is supposed to do exactly what it has in fact done, which is to take this glorious fantasized instant of Bastille-raiding and stretch it out endlessly. It’s supposed to promise the whole cookie while offering only crumbs…across decades and generations. It is the ultimate in the counterproductive bureaucracy, which is incentivized to preserve the problem it was formulated to solve. The median has to be less than the mean, in order for it to work politically. Its proponents are not on the side of the rich people, and they’re not representing the interests of the poor people either.

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The Polls Have Problems
Friday, October 9th, 2020

The polls have Biden up over Trump. And the gap, I’m told, is consistently much greater than Hillary’s lead four years ago, which turned out to be phony. This Biden-advantage gap is also durable. Time to start worrying.

Some conservative bloggers, fearing a momentary episode of 2012-like disillusionment that could impact the future of the country for generations to come, have taken to characterizing these polls as inaccurate. They have their justifications, but I’m not going to churn up reasons to doubt the accuracy of the polls. I wouldn’t believe in this; the polls are not inaccurate.

But they are plagued with problems.

1. A nationwide poll doesn’t gel with the Electoral College. We have suffered massive and predictable confusion every four years from nationwide polls and the skew always goes in the same direction. A huge chunk of our blue-state electorate is all pooled up in places like California, Washington State, Oregon, New England…these don’t move the needle, nobody is wondering about them. A state like, say for example, Oregon sending its slate of electors to the Electoral College to vote for Biden, is a disaster that can only happen one time. If the state’s voters have gone 90% Biden it’s no different than if they’re 51% Biden. So the other 39% is, effectively, a waste. The Biden column has a lot of waste here. The Trump column, not so much.

2. Oversampling of democrat voters in the pool. The pollsters keep getting surprised the same way and they just keep doing it. I don’t know why. You have to ask them. Oh, I have my ideas. I think they’re in the entertainment business and not the news business, whether they know it or not. More on this below.

3. Liberals run the polls, and liberals inhabit liberal echo chambers. That has traditionally been safe, because the tinge of the echo chambers tends to drizzle outward, like the blue thing you toss in a toilet tank coloring all the water. But it’s different now because public trust in our news media has dropped to an historic low. It hasn’t been this low, in fact, since…2016. Yup.

4. The Bradley Effect, or The Wilder Effect. Historically, this has to do with people lying to pollsters about their vote for a black candidate, and then on Election Day voting for his white opponent causing an eight-to-ten point surprise. This year it’s more of a “shy Trump voter” effect but the principle is the same: People are lying to pollsters. They’re consistently lying to pollsters in the same way. They will vote Trump/Pence, but they don’t report that to the pollsters because they just don’t want to get into it. They got interrupted while they were cooking & getting ready for dinner.

5. The Flotilla factor. There is a serious enthusiasm-gap problem plaguing the Biden/Harris camp. If our polling resources were trustworthy, they’d at least discuss it, but they aren’t discussing it. Meanwhile, there aren’t any Biden signs out there. No Biden bumper stickers. No Biden flotillas to counter the five thousand boat Trump flotilla. That’s something.

6. Supporters of Biden/Harris have lead in their pants. It has always been true that people tell the pollsters they plan to vote, and when the time comes they just stay home and watch reruns. It’s a safe generalization to make that Trump/Pence supporters are not going to do this. In 2020, the bulk of the lead-in-pants vote is “committed” to Biden/Harris…and they’re going to screw that ticket. Again, if the news were trustworthy, they’d discuss this. They’re not discussing this because they aren’t trustworthy.

7. Contrasted with that, Trump/Pence supporters do not have lead in their pants. This may seem redundant with “The Flotilla Factor,” #5 above, but it’s not. Things are different in 2020 because the stakes are much, much higher and everybody understands this. If Trump/Pence loses, it’s not just a matter of putting up with smarmy liberal jackass nephews at the Thanksgiving table. Pedophiles are roaming the streets burning down the businesses, some of which are family businesses that have been built with caring, dedication and love across the generations. People are getting hurt and killed, because we have a need for law and order that far exceeds what we have. This isn’t a mystery and it isn’t something that’s affecting some unknown person three time zones away. It’s happening right in front of us and it’s real. Most elections, each side is motivated by revulsion and fatigue with the other. This election, only The Left is motivated by fatigue. The Right is motivated by self-preservation, political and personal.

The democrats do not process a dopamine flow the same way normal healthy people do. To a democrat, the dopamine flow is everything. Remember the Saturday Night Live sketch, when “Biden” put “Trump” on pause with a remote control? When strong-woman Kamala came out to lecture the two of them? Not “parody,” because these events bore no resemblance to anything that actually happened. That’s the liberal brain for you; they can’t distinguish between “It makes me happy to have this thought” versus a funny joke. And they can’t distinguish between their happy thoughts, and reality. They’re that hooked on the dopamine flow: Fantasy, reality and punchlines are all in the same Vitamix blender together and that sucker is revved up on high. This is why news can’t be trusted. They’ve given up real news, and have gotten into the business of delivering liberals their dopamine.

I don’t know that all this means Trump/Pence will win, or if any of it means that. I do know it’s a mistake to try to predict what will happen by what we have been told, without taking into account the above factors.

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Items of Interest

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FraudulumMonday, January 18th, 2021

ConsequencesSunday, January 17th, 2021

Burning BarnSunday, January 17th, 2021

Real BulliesSunday, January 17th, 2021

The Four GroupsSaturday, January 16th, 2021

ReimpeachmentThursday, January 14th, 2021

The Stopwatch TestWednesday, January 13th, 2021

The Two Sets of RulesTuesday, January 12th, 2021

ConspiraciesSunday, January 10th, 2021

Chasing a RainbowSaturday, January 9th, 2021

This WednesdayMonday, January 4th, 2021

Dave Barry’s 2020 Year in ReviewMonday, December 28th, 2020

Ehrenreich Never Had a ChanceMonday, December 21st, 2020

The USA as Obi-WanMonday, December 21st, 2020

Home StretchWednesday, November 25th, 2020

Our Passive-Voice SocietyWednesday, November 11th, 2020

Veteran’s Day 2020Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Memo For File CCXVWednesday, November 11th, 2020

Happy 245th Birthday MarinesTuesday, November 10th, 2020

We’ll Be FineSunday, November 8th, 2020

InsurmountableSaturday, November 7th, 2020

BobulinskiWednesday, October 28th, 2020

Election Year BananasTuesday, October 27th, 2020

McConnell’s SpeechTuesday, October 27th, 2020

The Captain of the Ship or the Owner of the ShipSaturday, October 24th, 2020

Old Economy SteveWednesday, October 21st, 2020

Greatness Is ScaryWednesday, October 21st, 2020

I Couldn’t Possibly Care Less If “We’re All In This Together”Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Progressive TaxationSunday, October 11th, 2020

The Polls Have ProblemsFriday, October 9th, 2020

Fraudulum
Monday, January 18th, 2021

Consequences
Sunday, January 17th, 2021

Burning Barn
Sunday, January 17th, 2021

Real Bullies
Sunday, January 17th, 2021

The Four Groups
Saturday, January 16th, 2021

Reimpeachment
Thursday, January 14th, 2021

The Stopwatch Test
Wednesday, January 13th, 2021

The Two Sets of Rules
Tuesday, January 12th, 2021

Conspiracies
Sunday, January 10th, 2021

Chasing a Rainbow
Saturday, January 9th, 2021

This Wednesday
Monday, January 4th, 2021

Dave Barry’s 2020 Year in Review
Monday, December 28th, 2020

Ehrenreich Never Had a Chance
Monday, December 21st, 2020

The USA as Obi-Wan
Monday, December 21st, 2020

Home Stretch
Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

Our Passive-Voice Society
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Veteran’s Day 2020
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Memo For File CCXV
Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

Happy 245th Birthday Marines
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020

We’ll Be Fine
Sunday, November 8th, 2020

Insurmountable
Saturday, November 7th, 2020

Bobulinski
Wednesday, October 28th, 2020

Election Year Bananas
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

McConnell’s Speech
Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

The Captain of the Ship or the Owner of the Ship
Saturday, October 24th, 2020

Old Economy Steve
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

Greatness Is Scary
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020

I Couldn’t Possibly Care Less If “We’re All In This Together”
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Progressive Taxation
Sunday, October 11th, 2020

The Polls Have Problems
Friday, October 9th, 2020