House of Eratosthenes

The Census is a ten-year event so people should be talking about it more. It says something, if anybody’s willing to take the time to notice, about the policies that arouse such passion between these ten-year events. California and New York are losing congressional seats. This is part of a pattern you can see now — with every gain and every loss — so it isn’t just those two states. I’m seeing, among the states losing seats, the only one that could be described as “red” is West Virginia, and among those gaining the only one that could be described as “blue” is Oregon. Each of those is highly debatable, and apart from those two, it’s a clean sweep.

With the last election as close as it was, this is a referendum.

As a referendum, it is not an outlier. Left-wing indictments against the “systemic racism” of the United States, our “patriarchy,” our use of God’s Measurement System as opposed to the flaky Metric surrender-monkey kilo-centi-stuff, guns guns guns, etc. etc. etc…are mere flies upon the windshield of: Which way are the boats headed? This one counter-argument defeats all of those attacks. It’s almost embarrassing to watch. The immigration crisis exists because people want to come here. Yes President Biden made it much worse, but not by making anything work any better than it was working before. He made it worse by saying “come on in!”

The interstate situation is somewhat different, since you don’t need to immigrate when you move from one state to another. And it’s clear there’s a lot of movement. It’s clear that, when leftists run things for awhile, people don’t want to live there anymore and that includes leftists. People in general should be spending more time wondering about this. I think both sides would agree The Right simply wants to keep businesses running; we can argue about whether they’re empowering evil soulless corporations that are polluting the environment or trying to make sure no one has any health care, or whether they’re really just trying to make it easy for people to work for a living. But I think all up and down the ideological spectrum people would agree that’s the overall point, and they’d be right. The Left, on the other hand, wants to Build A Perfect World, in which people have full and unrestricted access to the blah blah blah and there is no more blah blah blah. People in general would agree with that and they’d be right about that too. So where’s the perfect world? How come people keep leaving it after it materializes?

Why — The Left would retort — is The Left running everything right now? The White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. There’s an old Reagan quote that comes to mind: If you’re explaining, you’re losing. Blogs, like this one, don’t really help over the shorter term of time because we explain. If you pay attention while you’re doing this explaining, after a prolonged period of repeated experiences you’ll gradually come to see the wisdom of what Ronald Reagan was saying. People don’t like having things explained to them, even obvious things — especially obvious things. There is no explanation of the right-wing position that leaves a mark, at least, none that leaves a mark on par with simply letting The Left run things for awhile. That is convincing. No right-wing pundit could have delivered a smackdown that would make an impression quite like the two years of putting The Left in charge 1993-1994, or 2009-2010, or 2021-2022. Lots of righties would like to come up with one that does. But it hasn’t happened. I don’t think the human genome permits it. We have to go through the misery of bad ideas to figure out how bad they are. It’s in our genetic wiring. Can’t figure out what a bad idea it was to bite that apple, until we’re cast out of the Garden of Eden.

People talk about “Republicans are dead” or “the democrat party is finished” or “The United States is over.” When they say things like this they’re admitting to their own limitations as they attempt to comprehend a sustained conflict. The concept is an uncomfortable one for us, but that’s the environment in which we live. We live in a tempest in a teapot. There are forces in play which keep the conflict going. The Left has bad ideas; if it were not so, they’d merely take over at any one of the three biannual chapters mentioned in the previous paragraph, we’d all see what good ideas they have, and we’d leave it that way. That hasn’t happened. The Right cannot make an impression on people, that’s on par with letting their opposition run things; if that were not so, any one of a number of pundits or bloggers, like me, would state the case and then the next election would be a rout. That hasn’t happened either. The United States is far from over, and people want to live here. If that were not so, we wouldn’t have an immigration crisis.

The one thing that keeps things screwed up, that might be the easiest to fix, is this “purpling” thing. Blue states losing their population as refugees swarm to red states, with better policies, is nothing new. It’s been happening in California since I moved in, swimming upstream against the crowd, some thirty years ago. If only people would move in to red states and then vote like they’re in a red state, problems would dissipate over time the way problems do when people are applying their intelligence. But we’ve seen how blue-state refugees don’t do that. Their tendency is to vote, in the new state, for the same dumb policies that made their old states miserable, and worth leaving. This has been a constant source of distress to the newer states undergoing the purpling-process. Please remember, they say, you’re refugees and not missionaries. But the refugees don’t listen.

Is there an answer? Maybe some hurdles, some barricades to help thwart this purpling process. But overall, there may not not be an answer. We may be doomed to swim around in this tempest in a teapot forever, as a “reward” for our continued refusal to learn what a dumb, bad policy is. Our system of elected representation is what I like to call a Batman system: It gives us the government we deserve, not necessarily the one we need.

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“You See…”
Sunday, April 18th, 2021

About a month ago someone asked me to make a financial commitment toward a dumb plan, via e-mail. When I declined I got back a paragraph explaining the benefits of the dumb plan. This stuff had already been explained to me, almost word-for-word, when this very brief conversation had started.

I replied curtly: I just gave you my answer, and you responded to my answer by re-explaining your plan. Don’t do that.

This is part of what’s wrong with all of our evolving society now. Too many people simply don’t understand how to have two-way discussions of things. Or, for that matter, to absorb and process reactions other than the single one they have in mind. They talk when they should listen. They’re ready to be masters of puppets, but they’re not ready to truly co-exist with others. They think they are but they aren’t.

They start, or wade into, these exchanges with scripts in their heads they want to see played out to the letter, and when they get back something that’s outside the guardrails they start you-see-ing. They waste their time and everybody else’s time with pablum. “You see, if you wear a mask it slows the spread, and we’re all in this together.” “You see, scientific theories are seldom if ever proven, but they’re still scientific.” “See, black people can’t be racist because they lack the power to do racist things.” “You see, even men should support feminism, because feminism is really all about equality between the sexes.” “You see, by using these slightly heavier bags and charging the ten cents, the stores encourage recycling which will help save the planet.” “You see, in times like these, with things the way they are, we all have to conserve water and a golden brown (dead) lawn looks classy in a way.” “You see, when you plug in your car to charge it, you don’t need to use gas.” “You see, by wearing these masks, we show each other that we care about each other.” “You see, a noose causes a special kind of hurt in black people that white people can’t understand. It’s like a fairy tale, magical kind of hurt.”

There is a bloated “new world” subclass of these that begin with, or could begin with, the words: “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which…”

“You see, we’re trying to make a world in which everyone uses the Metric System.” “You see, we want a new world in which men and boys are not so attracted to fit girls, or who are attracted to girls who are not so fit.” “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which money is not what motivates people.” “You see, we want a better environment in which bullying is a thing of the past.” “You see, we want to rid the world of bigotry forever.” It has not been lost on me that when such activists win at everything and reform everything exactly the way they want it, the things they wanted relegated to the past are not relegated to the past. They “celebrate” these past vices and plagues as if they were present things. Sometimes they even bring them back again so they have something they can continue vanquishing. And the new world they’re building, far from being a dream world, is the stuff of nightmares. No one with a choice would actually live in it…but people who don’t have choices, are compelled to do so, and suffering on a large scale is the unavoidable result.

A very large portion of all “arguing politics on the Internet,” probably more than half of it word-for-word, is just “you see.” Simple minds re-regurgitating things they’ve already said, because they ran into responses they didn’t like, and rather than responding to the responses they didn’t like, just you-see re-explaining.

“You see, when the Government spends that money, it creates jobs…(Whereas if the people and businesses were allowed to keep it Lord knows what they’d do with it, maybe shovel it into a paper shredder).”

They dismiss legitimate questions, anecdotal evidence, and logical problems with their plans by “you see”-ing away the questions, evidence and problems. They re-explain the essentials. It looks like having a discussion but it really isn’t that. It’s more like an involuntary reflex. It’s like a facial tic.

I blame the lilty-voiced kindly old aunties who spent decades and decades warbling away about “No discussion of sports, politics or religion allowed at this supper table.” I blame them, because we now have multiple generations of people who think they understand how to have a discussion, in fact fancy themselves to be experts at it. How could they not be? Look at all the time they put into it. But their go-to maneuver is to retreat into the comforting embryonic sac of “you see” followed by explaining — again — to some imaginary opponent who’s hearing of the issue for the very first time, when the actual situation is that they got back a question they couldn’t answer, or have been shamed by the presentation of some contradiction or conundrum they know they should have settled themselves before bothering anyone else with it. So they go for the facial tic and start explaining.

Telemarketers who bother old people in the middle of the day with their scam phone calls, are much more savvy. When they run into a scrutinizing question for which they’re unprepared, like “Why do you need my money to invest if it’s such a hot prospect, why don’t you do it yourself and keep all the profits?” they just cuss, hang up, and go on to the next call. The Internet-arguers trying to sell scams on blog threads or on social media, aren’t that sharp.

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Conservative and Liberal
Sunday, March 28th, 2021

Friend/Relative #1: “I’m confused by all this conservative/liberal stuff. What’s the difference?”

Friend/Relative #2: “The difference is that liberals boldly embrace change because they’re not afraid of it. Conservatives cling to the past with bloody fingernails, even when it’s going away. They’re like the buggy whip factory worker making more whips after the car has been invented. They doom themselves.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh, well I definitely want to be a liberal then.”

Friend/Relative #2: “I’ve heard they’re called ‘liberals’ because they love liberty.”

Friend/Relative #1: “Oh! Well so much the better!”

That’s got to stop. This is wrong. Anyone who has been thinking for themselves, even for a moment, at any time over the last five years knows this is balderdash. President Trump was a reformer, a conservative reformer. The liberals resisted his reforms, clinging to a past that was going away, until they looked like buffoons. Now they’re going to try to bring it all back again. They may succeed at it, but they’ll end up looking even more buffoonish. They’re the ones manufacturing buggy whips.

They were, and are, afraid of change because they were, and are, afraid of their liberal swamp rat asses getting sent to jail where they belong.

And they hate liberty as if liberty shot their parents in an alleyway when they were eight. Their solution to every problem is some kind of encroachment or diminution against individual liberty.

The myth is that conservative and liberal have to do with change, and time. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is very much like using a boat’s compass to figure out where the front of the boat is. It is the application of a static concept upon a dynamic object, and such a “definition” will be wrong whenever the boat is headed in a direction different from the one on which you planned. That’s going to be roughly half the time, or more. “Liberals boldly embrace change” fails every time conservatives are the ones bringing the change, which is roughly half the time. “Liberals love liberty” fails all of the time.

Conservative vs. liberal has to do with definitions. Look it up:

Conservative (adj.): “marked by moderation or caution : marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners” (Merriam Webster) “(of an estimate) lower than what is probably the real amount or number” (Oxford)

Liberal (adj.): “not literal or strict : loose : not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms” (Merriam Webster) “Given, used, or occurring in generous amounts : giving generously : broadly construed or understood; not strictly literal or exact” (Oxford)

How it applies:

“Caitlyn Jennier is a woman” is a very *liberal* interpretation of “woman.” Conservatives are going to define “woman” conservatively, and they will tell you that’s a man, baby. And they’ll be right.

“Tom and George are married” is a liberal interpretation of “married.” Believe it or not, there are still conservatives running around who don’t recognize this. Our opinions are illegal, but we still have them…and, being the real lovers of liberty, we know we have a right to them. No matter what.

“Climate change is going to doom us all” is a liberal prognostication. It is the kite severed from the string. It is imagination running wild and free, unconstrained by anything.

“But it’s science!” is a liberal interpretation of “science.” It falls to conservatives to remind everyone else of the conservative understanding of science. Science doesn’t work that way.

“Absentee ballots must be received by this date” was interpreted liberally, which is how Joe Biden won some states last year. In violation of the local laws. Liberals violate laws a lot, rather capriciously, because they violate definitions. It’s what liberals do.

When liberals are “generous,” it’s with someone else’s money, which is a very liberal understanding of the concept of generosity.

In the antebellum era of the United States, history shows we had deep and irreconcilable conflicts regarding the proper interpretation of our founding documents, which held these truths to be self-evident,

…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it[.]

Today’s liberals would like to be viewed as proper ideological descendants of the abolitionists, who sought to end slavery. Those who were interested in the preservation of this institution, bent the rules on interpretations, and liberals would like us to think of them as conservatives. But if you could bring back one of those “conservatives” and ask him to justify his position, he would use tortured, liberal arguments. The most popular one at the time seems to have been something like: Yeah sure, all men are created equal, but these slaves aren’t men, they’re my property. Your document doesn’t say anything about rights of property, only rights of real men, and I don’t recognize them as such. I get to provide the final interpretation on this. Why? Because I want it! I want that authority so just go ahead and give it to me.

Liberals want us to think of those as conservative arguments. Why? Because they want it that way. So just give it to them! And…we do.

That doesn’t work. Not even half the time. In fact, the arguments used by the slaveholders to preserve the institution of slavery, are no different from the argument today’s “pro-choice” liberals use to preserve the industry of abortion. There’s no meaningful difference between these whatsoever. Yeah sure, the baby would have a right to life if it were a baby…but I do not recognize the “clump of cells” as a baby.

Here is something else that absolutely, positively, does not work:

Liberal (adj.) (Oxford) “Relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise”

That definition has not been removed yet, nor do I know for sure that it will be anytime soon. But it should be.

Our liberties depend on our legal system. Our legal system relies on definitions remaining strong, and interpreted according to original intent. You can’t be a lover of liberty, while you’re being liberal with interpretations. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to be using your fast-and-loose stretchy-Gumby elasticized definitions to remove someone’s freedom, and better than even odds you’re going to be hurting them by doing so. And feeling very, very smug about yourself while you’re doing it. That’s a liberal.

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“When does it end?”
Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

A year ago when the nonsense started, I took a stab at the “when” and ended up taking a pass on it, veering off into the arguably easier “how”:

Somehow, the relationship between rule-makers and rule-followers is going to get changed, forever…
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Looks to me like we all go there. Don’t you dare step out of that house, followed by a zillion exclamation marks!! And then followed by…yeah okay, whatever.

I do not like the idea of the other 49 states copying this idea of ours, that laws mean nothing. Like all the rest of our ideas that get copied, it’s bad.

But I think that’s how it goes.

The Washington Examiner just put out an editorial that says more or less the same thing, but views the situation in the context of responsibilities resting on the top layers of our modern aristocracy, going unfulfilled. Our leaders have duties, and the rest of us should expect them to deliver.

Lockdowns, distancing requirements, and mask mandates need to end as soon as possible. That doesn’t mean today. It doesn’t mean tomorrow. But it means at some point.

Our leaders and health experts have a duty to articulate, right away, standards of when these should end.
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We cannot wait for COVID-19 to disappear. That might never happen. And maybe Fauci has his own yardsticks. Maybe New York City will propose others. Maybe we’ll all disagree over the right ones.

But every public health authority and every government executive should lay down his or her proposed “finish line” right away. At least then, we’ll have something to fight over. Because right now, it seems indefinite. And indefinite “emergency powers” for the government are lethal to human freedom.

It is that very last line that tells the whole story, in my opinion. This should be simple. It’s complicated, not because we need to weigh safety against this “human freedom,” but because the loudest among us don’t give a rat’s south-end-when-facing-north about freedom. They sneer at the idea. They’re proud of not giving a crap.

Let them describe the conflict the way they see it. A hundred times. All hundred times, they’ll describe this concern over sickness and death as a novel idea…as if those of us looking forward to the end, are the neophytes who haven’t thought of things yet. As if we’re supposed to say “Oh the virus might kill people? Gee I hadn’t thought of that.” Time goes on and they learn nothing, because they refuse to think of themselves as the ones who are missing the vital nugget of game-changing information. They want that to be the other guy.

But, no. This is a balancing act of danger versus lethargy, of preserving safety versus preserving opportunity. It is an ancient struggle in our species, and a divisive one. Unfortunately, in these modern times, it’s always the safety-conscious ones, the ones who are so radicalized that they think of liberty as a disposable thing, or even a nuisance, who are the loudest ones.

They’re desperate. They really do think they carry the responsibility to avoid millions and millions of deaths, in their own little hands. And their voices carry. We have built an advanced society that is safety-conscious. That’s not a bad thing.

The problem is time. The more they win, the deeper we head into a territory in which other priorities have to be considered…and now, we’re a year into it.

My concern, just like a year ago, is what happens to the rule of law. We’re well on our way to ratifying ordinances, statues, codes, whatever, but in written form and as seriously as we can every establish any sort of law. And then, out of necessity, forming a more deeply respected but unwritten cultural protocol in which everybody gets to just walk all over it, California-style.

Society can survive the virus. But it can’t survive that.

So that’s my argument. We can listen to these safety-obsessed navel-gazers, and we can take their arguments seriously and we can act on them. But not to the exclusion of all other considerations. That leads to society’s undoing, and in the way I described. It can’t lead anywhere else, unless somewhere along the line there is a course-reversal. Putting it more concisely: It’s unsustainable.

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Laying Low
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

This is the fourth time, in my lifetime, that a democrat administration has settled into a White House previously occupied by Republicans. Now, the democrats don’t have the same priorities or value systems I do, but in 1977, 1993 and 2009 they were able to describe specifically what’s better according to them. There was some petty b.s. like “We have a President who can pronounce ‘nuclear'” and there was some stuff about endangered species and there was some prejudiced bigoted stuff about “diversity” or something, not as many white males.

At least there was stuff!

This time they’re laying low. It’s weird. The party in charge is laying low. We all know why. There’s no bragging to be done. Even taking into account their own weird priorities, from their own weird frame of reference, they can’t brag.

Even if they could brag, they wouldn’t be able to nail down who’s really running the country. Their own supporters don’t know the answer to that.

The cool thing about a republic like ours is, in one way or another, the country as a whole is always winning. Just like people who go through life making decisions smart & dumb; we make good decisions and benefit from them, or we make poor decisions and we end up learning. Right now we’re learning. We’re learning in the aftermath of a decision that was supported by those among us who are opposed to defining things. Seriously, what were the very best arguments for this? “Trump Bad!” “But his tweets!” “OMG I can’t even!” Very convincing. But who among us wanted a White House that “calls a lid” with crises galore, including a border debacle that is defeat snatched from the jaws of victory?

So we’re learning. People who don’t define what the specific problem is and what to do about it and provide at least a high-level rough-sketch overview about how this is supposed to lead to a more desirable state — they’re not the ones who should prevail in these things. In a way, they don’t even want to prevail. They don’t want to accept the responsibility that comes with victory. They’re not in any position.

It’s a valuable lesson. I do tire of seeing it repeated over and over again.

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“Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist”
Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Yesterday morning I inserted a key phrase that looked like a throwaway, but actually carries some significance:

They [liberals] are surreal and they have managed to create factional infighting in their opposition, just by being themselves.

I have long admired Dennis Prager — and there’s really no “but” to that, although there is, you might say, “a thing.” Prager writes a lot about liberals, and so do I, but he does not look at liberalism the way I do. Many others see things the way he does, and many others see them the way I do.

The “factional infighting” is over the word itself. Liberals, as I pointed out, are supposed to be champions of liberty. They’re supposed to be lovers of liberty. Supposed to be. That’s the way it should work, and clearly it doesn’t work that way. The “liberals” we see today hate liberty. They actually look at it as a root cause of our social ills, and their cures tend to have something to do with taking liberty away. And by “tend to have something to do” what I mean is “Go ahead and look for exceptions, like, try really hard.”

People in Prager’s camp tell me the enemy has been co-opting the word “liberal,” and I should not willingly cede ground to the enemy. They’re not wrong. What they overlook is that “ceding ground” is the wrong metaphor, this is more like a horse that’s run out of a barn door never to be seen again, and we’re pondering whether or not to close the door. Liberal means leftist. Rush Limbaugh would bitch about liberals, explain to his audience that “liberals don’t want their plans to be evaluated based on results, they want them evaluated based on intentions and feelings”…there’s zero confusion about what he means. You say “Those [expletive] liberals are trying to ban Dr. Suess,” everybody knows what you mean. We use words to convey meaning. There’s no ambiguity here. If that means the bad guys have won something, well then that’s too bad. Admit it and move on to the next thing. Life is full of ambiguity, we don’t need to go pretending there is some where there isn’t any.

You notice observations that involve, or depend on, this process of subversion or co-opting or however you want to think of it — it’s necessary to explain. “Conservatives today are the only ones who care about liberal values” is not wrong. “Liberals today are exactly what conservatives are supposed to be” is not wrong either. These can cause confusion even though they’re not wrong. That is a good thing. It’s good that explaining it all is necessary to continue the point. I like that. It means the conversations that have to happen, are going to happen. I think both sides of this conflict can agree, there needs to be more attention paid to, and inspection into, this “switch.” If we don’t do it, the liberals get to explain all of it and that’s exactly what’s been happening. They call it “the party switch” and they’re going around saying Republicans became democrats somewhere around 1964 and democrats became Republicans. With no one else discussing it, liberals get to write our history…and they don’t deserve to, if the best thing they can say about themselves is “We’re actually the other guys, and the other guys are actually us.” For those who are interested, Dinesh D’Souza has debunked this nonsense very capably. You talk about ceding ground to the enemy? Let’s stop fighting each other, and talk more about why liberals today behave so illiberally.

Yesterday’s rant had to do with the implications of living in a lie, and asking questions that threaten to breach the lie, like the dome of a pretend-world. When someone asks such questions, whoever is sharing the interest of the lie, or pretend world, can

1. Discourage the question by changing the subject
2. Remold the point of breach into something silly (“Darth Vader couldn’t sense Leia because Leia used The Force to block him…”)
3. Discuss the question honestly, admit that this is something the author of the fiction didn’t bother to entertain, that the pretend-world ends here, and real-reality beckons

Those are the three options. There is no other.

What’s important about this, is this: It is is how you distinguish truth from fiction. Fiction makes sense, because it has to, until it can’t. It is the work of mortal men. We can build universes, like God, but it isn’t within our power to build an infinite one. All pretend-domes have a perimeter…and sorry but no, there is no reason for anything in Skyfall to have happened. It’s a visually beautiful, relatable, intriguing movie filled with plot holes and we want to enjoy it so we just go with it.

This is what we’ve been doing with liberalism. A liberal is going to insist “I’m still a liberal who loves liberty because I want transvestites to have the liberty to choose their pronouns.” We know this is fake and phony, because what we’re really arguing about is applying penalties for using the wrong one. Once again, liberty is a problem to the liberal, and his solution to the problem is to encroach on the liberty. But my point here is, the liberal is sincere. He really does think he’s expanding liberty. Your ensuing argument is going to be about that. They’re not bullshitting us. Well, most of them aren’t.

Liberals have not been displaced by someone else. That’s my point. Liberals become leftists because they think like leftists. And leftists live in a cockeyed silly-world full of cognitive dissonance and false equivalences. They never became the opposite of what they claim to be — they were that from the very start. Their play-pretend dome is a penny-dome. You don’t need to cross it in a sailboat over the course of a day to pound on it’s perimeter. One or two simple honest questions would have pierced the periphery. They just never asked them. That’s because their penny domes are echo chambers. Anyone who would ask these most obvious questions, would be escorted outside and then booted out of the place. They’re doing this constantly.

Anyway. Those are my thoughts on it. While I disagree with Prager and his cohorts about the use of these labels, the questions to be asked are good ones. They can help determine how far gone your liberal/leftist kid/grandkid/nephew/grandniece is.

5. Do you agree that all white Americans are racist?
6. If your answer is yes, would you tell the millions of blacks in Africa and the Caribbean who wish to emigrate to America that they would be making a poor decision? If not, why not?
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16. Has capitalism been a net-plus for America and the world?
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29. Is the statement, “Men give birth” science-based?

These questions are likely to create “factional infighting” on the other side…which is not my primary intent here, but these are conversations that should be happening. If division must happen as a result, that’s a division that should be happening too. People who really believe America is inherently racist, shouldn’t be uniting with, or recruiting from the ranks of, people who don’t think so.

“Should we call leftists liberals?” is not that important of a question, in my mind. As I pointed out above, if I say “liberal” everyone knows what I mean. When a friend or family member who hasn’t been paying attention and is willing to admit it, approaches you and says “I don’t understand this conservative/liberal stuff, please explain it to me,” there’s no mystery about what he means. You can play the pedant and start with “Actually, liberal is the wrong term” — I can’t stop you. And many would start with that. Just like a lot of people can’t get over the very professional-looking and expensive labeling of “DRIVE THRU” by the fast food restaurants, which should be spelling it “through.”

The fact remains, liberalism is a pox upon us, a modern plague. And when you look into why people become liberals, you find it has to do with sloppy thinking. People who object to the use of the label, are not wrong, but they’re making inquiries that are exceeding the dimensions of the penny-dome, and breaching the perimeter. They’re over-thinking it.

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Morgan’s Six Dollars
Monday, March 8th, 2021

Sadly, your “wealth/income inequality” imbroglio doesn’t get any more complicated than this:

Brain dead liberals: We make $3 and Morgan makes $6. This is wealth inequity.

Company: Tell us about it. We want to hire Morgan and we’re ready to offer him $7.

BDL: Clearly we have to raise Morgan’s taxes to make the wealth inequity go away.

Government: How much?

BDL: Well let’s see. We pay %10 on our $3 and Morgan pays %40 on his $6. So how about you bump that up to %55 then he’ll be left with the same amount as us.

Government: Okay! Company, and Morgan, you do what you want because we’re not banning or requiring anything here, we lack the balls to take responsibility for anything. But these are the new rates! We’re representing our constituents, don’t you see.

Company: Yikes! Morgan won’t move his fat ass for 45 cents, but we really have to have him. So now we’re going to offer him $10.

Morgan: Uh…um…okay.

BDL: Morgan is making 10!! We’re still making $3, the disparity is getting worse! Who can we blame for this? Derp derp derp.

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Pounding the Dome
Monday, March 8th, 2021

There was this tragic-comedy movie awhile back about a baby born into a pretend-world, filled with actors, and he grows up into a man never realizing his entire life is a television drama. Hollywood does love their existential bullshit, and every now and then they put out something that makes you think. This one has a climactic scene in which the star, Truman, having put all the clues together, takes it upon himself to sail out on the open sea. Sure enough, he meets up with the wall of the dome that contains his pretend-world. And he starts pounding on it in a mixture of fear, realization, confusion, and God knows what else I suppose.

It is a masterful scene. It speaks to all of us who have watched and enjoyed fiction, and asked just a few too many questions about it. And it also entertains questions that have consumed the attention of philosophers across the centuries. How do we know any of this is real? Suppose we’re all Truman. Or suppose there is no “we’re all” and it’s just you. Who’s to say, when you were one year old you didn’t fall asleep in your playpen and start dreaming…and you’re still dreaming?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Man and God can make universes, but only God can make an infinite one. Certain questions about the fictitious, man-made ones that only exist inside domes, pound on the boundary from the inside by sailing too far. I’ve written before about these; with so much fakery around, it seems every time we ask a question about anything at all, it turns out to be one of these “you’re not supposed to be asking that” questions. It seems now that our play-domes are getting tinier, it’s becoming easier to sail out into the boundary and start pounding on it, regardless of whether that’s what we intended to do. One of my favorites has long been “How come Darth Vader can’t sense his own daughter when she’s standing right in front of him?” Such a question can be answered without breaching the dome, by merely extending it, although such an exercise quickly turns comical and silly. See, Leia was so masterful with her use of The Force, surpassing even her brother Luke, that she was blocking Vader — without even consciously realizing she was doing it. And from across the Galaxy, on Dagobah, Yoda was helping her or something.

The fascinating thing about this, to me anyway, is that such questions can only fracture brittle domes. There has to be some agreement that the answers are sensible, and that the dome is hard, crisp, brittle, infused with the appropriate sense of humility, ready to shatter and admit “Okay, you got me” rather than allow itself to be contorted out of shape into absurd positions. And that’s up to the person asking. If you’re really ready to distinguish between fiction and truth, you have to be ready to say: Cut the crap. The correct answer is that Lucas is making this all up as he’s going along, or he was at the time anyway. Vader could have sensed his own daughter, from quite a distance away actually, but at that point she wasn’t his daughter yet so there are plot holes. This space opera is full of such questions, because it’s full of geeky nerds who insist on stretching the dome-wall into a gooey mess with “You see, uh, it’s like this” explanations for every one of these plot holes. You can get much simpler if you want to. How come Cordé felt she had failed her queen by getting blown up, when she actually did a terrific job — the whole job — taking the hit? The sensible, concise and devastating answer is “bad writing.”

But again, geeks can build annexations onto the dome, and stretch it’s wall out of shape. Many have. How do you do a Kessel Run in twelve parsecs when a parsec is a unit of distance? How come Han Solo doesn’t shoot first, only on this planet not on that planet?

It’s not limited to Star Wars. How come the finest journalist in Metropolis can’t figure out her colleague is really Superman, just because he’s wearing glasses? How do rocks from his home world hurt him?

You’re asking questions the maker of this pretend-universe didn’t ask himself. You’ve exceeded the radius of the dome. You’ve overthought it.

And that brings us to our friends, the liberals. They are surreal and they have managed to create factional infighting in their opposition, just by being themselves. Why do we even call liberals liberals, when they don’t love liberty — far from it — and when Donald Trump introduces change, they resist the change by any & all means necessary? Have they been supplanted by a usurping agent? Or were they seduced into something? Were they seduced out of something? Did it happen all at once, or in stages?

The simplest answer, the one that extends humility and demands it as well, will usually be the one to fracture the dome and reveal the truth…provided the person asking really wants that to happen. The trouble with our friends, the liberals, is that they’re human, and we humans all have flaws. Ideas within a philosophical movement remain fixed, but we are not fixed as we seek to propound or to oppose those ideas. Loving liberty…there’s a dicey proposition for you if ever there was one. The truth is that liberty has a lot of fair-weather friends. Your own liberty, when there are no strings attached to it, is an easy thing to love. The test is if you can keep loving it if there are responsibilities connected. Can you love someone else’s liberty. Like many things that have never been tested until late in the game, liberals fail this one when it’s finally administered. They don’t apply it against themselves. And the rest of us haven’t been applying it to them.

We see liberals who hate and fear liberty…because they always did.

You see, these are high-grade interrogations into a low-grade subject. They exceed the dimensions of the dome. And that is what we should have expected to see happen, because this particular “Truman Show” dome is quite tiny. Liberalism isn’t a philosophy at all. It’s a plea for attention, a virtue signaling waste. It has been from the very beginning. Look how wonderful I am. Look how ready I am to boldly embrace change. Look how much I love liberty.

But if the liberty under discussion isn’t one of just a very few things that have to do with deviations from conventional morals, many of them having to do with sex…abortions, gay marriage, taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgeries…there’s no love for the liberty there, none at all, and they’re not ready to let us keep it.

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So Much Fake Stuff
Saturday, February 20th, 2021

Like the electrical power in Texas, public trust in our officials and our institutions is down at crisis levels. And much like the Texas power shortage, this public trust shortage is widely regarded as a spontaneous thing. We like to think of it in passive-voice terms, with no subject to the sentence, no one bearing any responsibility for cratering the quantity of this essential asset. Of course we’re not thinking of it that way because it’s true; we’re thinking of it that way because any inspection of who is responsible, would prove inconvenient to those who brandish the power of telling us what opinions to have.

These crises are hurting people though. Others are doing a better job of looking into the cause of the Texas problem than I could. I shall leave it to them. They’re closer. But on the other problem, the public trust problem, I’m square in the middle of it. I’m a member of the public. And I do not trust. I have reasons not to trust, so let’s look into them because I’m not alone.

I am sure Joe Biden’s election was a sham, and I’m convinced of it because I was awake when the votes were rolling in to those six battleground states. I was tuned in to the daily news in the days following Fraud Day, November 3rd, and I remember the states flipping. I remember how they flipped. In short, I’m not an Etch a Sketch with my contents conveniently erased when someone shakes me. That was fraud. The other thing that convinces me is the behavior of those who want me to believe in the legitimacy of the election. They do not act like it. Their rebuttals are the arguments you use on morons. “No evidence!!” Hey, how about some evidence we have an election system we can trust? It’s too late not to shut down the counting centers, kick people out of them who should be there…and then keep counting game-changing votes. That damage is done. They shouldn’t have done it. And where’s our press asking these kinds of questions? Oh…they’re “fact checking.” Yeah that’s real convincing. So I count this as fakery.

President Biden’s message of unity is fake. He won only just barely and he’s spent his first month signing a zillion executive orders that are raising the price of gas and getting rid of jobs. Why are we pretending he cares?

His mandate is fake. It is a flaw in the design of our system that his party has the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House. All of these were won by statistical flukes and thus do not capture the public will.

The climate crisis is back in the spotlight again. It seems now that there’s real hope for curing the China Virus thanks to the Trump Vaccine, it’s time to swivel back to the Gore Scam. For the last year, there hasn’t been any such crisis. Someone, somewhere is laboring under the heavy burden of making sure we’re frightened out of our wits, and running around like panicked idiots, over exactly one thing at a time. And we’re laboring under the heavy burden of pretending not to notice. Well I’m glad everyone’s succeeding!

Oh, but scientific consensus and what not. Am I the only one who’s sat in a committee or team in a stuffy conference room and watched these consensuses get formed? The very notion of a “consensus” is fake. It’s like sausage, you don’t want to watch it being made. The consensus is fake and so is the expertise of those who have been invited to form the consensus. Mentally enfeebled teenagers from Sweden are considered, by those who decide such things, as “experts” because they have such passionate opinions. We’re not supposed to notice that?

The wisdom of those who run things, is fake. Joe Biden doesn’t know what he’s signing. We have fact checks, that interview experts who say the audio is unclear. Yes that’s where we are now. “Experts” are telling us what we heard. The sense of leadership is fake. The leaders pay no price for making the wrong decision. When the people making decisions pay no price for being wrong, they’re not leading, they’re playing, just fiddling with knobs and levers like a baby in a playpen. Again, we’re not supposed to notice? Their desire for law and order is fake. They don’t know if they’re truly opposed to destructive rioting, until they first figure out if the goal of the riot leans to the political right or to the political left. Once they figure that out, they know all about what to think of it; they don’t need to know anything else!

The protests are all fake. We don’t know for sure the five W’s of these things being coordinated last summer — I’m sure there are a lot of business owners who would love to know — because we don’t have a “free press” that asks the five W’s anymore. Our press sucks so we’re flying blind. But we can know coordination when we see it. Aggravated concerned youths in hundreds of cities didn’t spontaneously rise up and decide to use the phrase “systemic police racism” in all their isolated enclaves. Systemic police racism has to be fake because we don’t have a “police system.” The “hate crimes,” we know for sure, really are fake. The outrage is fake.

These lingering questions of “Isn’t The Right just as bad as The Left” in the aftermath of the Capitol Penetration, are all fake. The premise is fake. There is no position on the ideological spectrum that will imbue its adherents with immunity from the vices of human passion, because we’re all humans and humans are all flawed. There is, however, a position on the ideological spectrum that will make its adherents particularly susceptible — and it’s the other one, The Left. People feel emboldened to challenge that now? Yes, they do, by the millions, but they’re not challenging it honestly. If we’re arguing honestly, we can’t even argue it. The Left is all about whipping people up into frenzies and letting them break things. We spent all last year watching it.

The impeachments against Donald Trump — both of them — were fake. They weren’t serious. You can tell by the timelines. The first one wasn’t delivered to the Senate for nearly a month. Which isn’t serious. That was some sort of three-dimensional chess move on the part of Grey Goose Nancy, which must not have worked because she didn’t repeat it on the second go ’round. But the democrats dropped both of these like hot potatoes when they were no longer convenient. When it takes the Senate less time to acquit from an impeachment than it takes to get the articles delivered to them, that’s not serious, that’s fake.

Masks work to slow the spread of the China Virus — that much is genuine. Defending these “experts” whose recommendations have slid around and flopped back and forth as we learn more about this novel virus, I like to sum it up as: “We started out thinking the big danger was uncleaned surfaces, but it’sSNOT.” Hehehe. Yes, microscopic droplets of snot flying through the air, that’s the big danger, and it looks like this finding isn’t going to be in need of reform. So you should wear your mask if Trikini you’re going to be indoors in a crowd. Here’s the thing though: Why are you indoors in a crowd? Are you displaying symptoms? You should be home then. Are you not displaying symptoms? The science is wobbly on asymptomatic transmission, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. But why are you wearing a mask on the jogging trail? Why are you wearing one riding your bike? Wearing a mask when you’re by yourself is fake and phony. Stop signaling. Or keep signaling, but be aware that it looks like what it is, useless, fake virtue signaling.

The death counts are fake. Dr. Birx was crystal clear about it: If you die with the China Virus, they count that as dying from it. Then a few months later Dr. Fauci settled the matter definitively, in that way he does…

Fauci told the ABC program “Good Morning America” on Tuesday that the CDC guidance, last updated on Aug. 26, indicates that of the people who have died from the virus, “a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just Covid.” However, people with underlying illnesses also die from Covid-19, he said.

“That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of Covid didn’t die of Covid-19. They did…So the numbers you’ve been hearing — there are 180,000-plus deaths — are real deaths from Covid-19. Let (there) not be any confusion about that.” [emphasis mine]

I never did have any confusion about “If you die with the ‘vid you die from the ‘vid.” Eaten by shark — COVID death. Girlfriend’s husband blows your head off with a shotgun — COVID death. Motorcycle crash — COVID death. But our leading expert tells me to go ahead and believe the numbers. “Let there not be confusion” is, in & of itself, a fake statement. He means let there not be any doubts…and let there not be any where there should be some.

Meanwhile, Tony-The-Tyrant Fauci is the highest-paid person in our federal government. The highest paid one out of all of them, including the President. But if you want to believe bureaucrats are not incentivized in any way to exploit a crisis…go ahead and believe that too, I guess, I can’t stop you.

“We’re all in this together” is fake.

Two weeks to flatten the curve — was, and is, fake. It’s a whole year old. A year.

The WHO is fake and phony. There is a reason Trump acted to defund them. China is fake and phony, even now pushing out fantasy-porn about the United States infecting China, with their virus.

Eleven months ago all us working stiffs were pigeonholed into “essential” and “non-essential” personnel…that’s fake. If your family depends on your job, the job is not non-essential. The process of doing this was fake, since the people making the decisions about others weren’t producing anything. When unproductive people are sending productive people home, that’s fake. But the move hit hard, because a lot of these jobs were fake. What we learned is that those of us who have options, should have been asking more questions about the jobs we held — could they have been classified as non-essential, if disaster struck. I’m in that crowd too. My own job was classified non-essential…then a system crashed and I became essential.

Our new President being able to speak, is a fake idea. He can’t. Television has done this to us. We elect Presidents, and the Presidents have made their careers reading from teleprompters, so whenever and wherever the President speaks we have to put up a teleprompter. Roughly half of these guys can deal with the disaster if the teleprompter happens to fail. The other half can’t. And we just accept this. Now to be clear, the ability to speak off-the-cuff isn’t rigidly connected to having good ideas or good values. (The idea that it is the same, would be fake.) But if you really have to rehearse and script, and you can’t get away from it, you’re probably a flim-flam man and we should never have accepted this. But television is powerful, we did accept it, and so we have these fake “wonderful speakers” who are actually terrible at it, and often the reason they’re terrible at it is they’re trying to sell us fake, phony lies.

Presidents do all sorts of things with “executive orders” now. Presidents of both parties. They’re actually making laws, which is supposed to be Congress’ job. How is it they’re able to do this? It’s because Congress doesn’t do it’s job. We have Separation of Powers in this country, but that’s something that’s supposed to be invoked all of the time, be it convenient or not. The truth is, whenever everyone in power can agree that it’s not convenient to invoke it, we don’t have it. We have fake Separation of Powers.

Texas is in trouble because of fake energy sources. They’ve got these fake energy sources down there because they’ve got fake Texans. Californians voted like idiots, here in California where I am, they ruined the state to the point where they can’t hack it anymore, then they moved to Texas and voted like idiots over there. Texas came close to rolling over for Biden, which they didn’t do, but one thing they did do is manage their energy the blue-state way: Move on to phony-baloney energy sources before the phony-baloney energy sources were fully able to handle the load. And here we are.

Bill Gates’ beef is fake. No thanks! Kill some cows for me, I like the real thing.

The schools are fake. At least, that one district is…their board members were caught saying these things about the parents, because of a fluke. The “If you call me out I will fuck you up” lady asked if their session was closed and private, and she got back the wrong answer. Oops! Okay. So how many other school districts have this rancid attitude. In how many other districts have things rotted away, to this extent, and we don’t know about it because a similar mistake did not get made? It’s the question that should be on everyone’s minds. But we’re barely even talking about it, and by Monday morning it will be all but forgotten. Obviously educating the children is not a priority. And here we have a “consensus” that must be genuine, since I listened to the whole recording and I didn’t hear anyone say “Hey hey now, let’s check ourselves” or anything like that. How angry are the parents getting over this stuff? Angry enough? Are we teaching the children what they need to know to have successful adult lives, or just going through the motions?

We have this exploding, fast, busy proliferation of “learning disabilities” in our schools that are fake. They’re re-defining everything about this and what little “science” is attached to it is writhing around like a dying earthworm on a hot sidewalk — not for reasons science should be moving around. They’re not learning that much that’s new. All they’re really learning about is new ways to game the system and fool the parents, but they’re changing the definitions of everything that matters. What’s a psychotropic drug, what’s the “Autistic spectrum,” what the tell-tale symptoms are for this, or that, how to be “sure” of it. What they’re really uncovering is new ways to diagnose more kids and make more money.

Do I even need to say anything about “fact checking”? Last week I had a liberal debating me on the telephone…”winning” the argument by pointing out that a quote I provided was “missing context.” The fog of proxy embarrassment filled the room. By now, anyone who’s been paying even a casual level of attention knows “missing context” means “My fact checker bosses tasked me to falsify this, and nothing about it is false so here I am not knowing what to do.” Fake, fake, fake.

Feminism is fake. It was supposed to be all about putting men and women on an even playing field, fulfilling the grandest ambitions of both, and supposedly it would be in the interest of fathers and sons to support it because patriarchy hurt males too. That was the selling point. Did the delivery match the promise? Feminist attacks on men have become commonplace, even expected. The sales pitch worked, phony as it was, precisely because most men are not what feminists make us out to be. We have no desire for little girls to grow up into stilted, stunted, handicapped women, chained up in the kitchen cooking food and making babies. We want all children to be empowered to grow up into the most capable adults they can possibly be. However, my addendum to this is “But if your slogan follows the template ‘[blank] is female’ then you can cram it.” Men and boys weren’t supposed to have to pay a price for this new empowerment of girls and women. Indeed, those of us who worried about such a thing, were routinely castigated as kookburgers. Well, we were right, and the castigation was fake and phony. Even though it hasn’t stopped!

President Biden has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and so was his predecessor Donald Trump. President Obama actually won it…and for not doing anything. Fake, fake, fake!

Crybullies have a lot to do with why there’s so much fakery around. These are bullies particularly skilled in acting like victims. That’s a core requirement of what bullying is supposed to be, you know: Always fool the bystanders, particularly the authority figures, into thinking your intended bully-victim is the “real bully” and that you, as the bully, are the “real victim.” It’s become commonplace. Get triggered, talk about your feelings a lot, whine and cry on camera…get someone cancelled. Then puff out your chest and brag about it. Whine and snivel about your next target, repeat the process. So dishonorable. So fake. But we just accept this.

We can’t even tell hope and fear apart from each other anymore. Next time someone expresses hope, take a good long look at what they have to say. A good portion of the time, maybe most of the time, you’ll see they’re not talking about hope at all, they’re talking about fear. They live in fear and what they’re spreading is fear. They want others to live in fear. They actually enjoy doing it.

Too many among us look down upon people who ask appropriate questions about things, people who wait awhile before believing the latest canard, with the same snotty derision a reasonable person reserves for the gullible. They treat healthy, balanced skepticism as if it’s gullibility. If they take the same story to a more credulous person who falls for it without asking the appropriate questions, they find their desired audience and they shower praise on that person as if he were a robust, capable thinker…just because he’s believing what he’s told. This rubs off on people. We have embarked on this path of treating gullibility as if it’s skepticism, and skepticism as if it’s gullibility.

Back to the original, inconvenient question: Who is responsible for public trust in our officials and our institutions reaching this low nadir? Obviously the officials and institutions are to blame, directly, but indirectly — we are. We did this to ourselves. We are surrounded, on all sides, by things that are pretending to be other things…in many cases, pretending to be the exact opposite of what they really are…because we have asked for this. Our lesson here is that you can’t be neutral on this stuff. You can’t merely tolerate it. To quietly allow it is to submit to it, and to submit to it is to approve of it. We’re surrounded by fakery because we have tacitly approved of the fakery, and it didn’t start a year or two ago. It’s been going on for a long time. It’s been a process of ask for a little leeway, get back a “Mmmm yeah okay whatever,” then then asking for a little bit more. It’s a problem of life, limb and honor. Time was when your honor was at stake if you went around saying things that weren’t true, and if you believed things you were told that weren’t true, you risked life and limb. We have adapted, downward, to a newer situation in which none of those things are on the table, so we don’t value truth the way we used to value it.

It’s a worthy thing to ponder now when we’re wondering what we can do to help ourselves, and others who are worse-off than we are. We’ve got a lot of problems because we haven’t been preventing them. We as a society have not been conducting ourselves, in the middle of making important decisions, as if these decisions really matter and so now we’re surrounded by scavengers, parasites and grifters because we’ve invited them.

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Should I Even Bother Watching
Wednesday, February 10th, 2021

Seems both sides agree the prosecution did a far better job.

I think I know why: They care about the outcome just about as much as I do, which is hardly at all. I’ve yet to see it mentioned that Trump’s interested in running for President again and pulling a Grover Cleveland, if the option is available to him.

As far as legacy, it’s: Congress impeached him twice but failed to convict both times, versus Congress impeached him twice and ultimately convicted him. Either way, history shows Trump proved we don’t need our political class, and our political class was so childish about being shown up that they couldn’t handle it.

I fail to see how the Senate is deciding anything of any importance here.

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I’m a Man
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

I’m a man. I don’t know, or care, how to “identify” as anything else.

My voice is a natural baritone. I may raise the pitch if I’m trying to sing along to something, but if it gets too far away from me I’m going to drop it down an octave. I’m not going to warble away above middle-C until my throat’s sore just because you feel threatened or triggered. If your parents never taught you to listen to a natural male voice that’s not my problem.

I’m white, straight, six-foot-even and I still possess all twenty-one digits. Not ashamed.

You don’t tell me I have to “get on board” with something or else you’ll leave me behind. Go ahead and leave me behind.

I’m willing to reconsider my opinion if you have facts or a compelling argument to present. You don’t tell me what to think.

I’m not going to try to annoy you or anybody else on purpose. Not unless you or they have already been trying to tick me off on purpose. But I’m not going to try to keep up with rules, rules, rules that are being rewritten every hour of every day just to make offenders out of people who are otherwise inoffensive. Cram that.

Cram your “double masks,” too.

I’m not interested in political correctness. If you have to stick an adjective in front of correctness, you’re really talking about being wrong.

I’m not interested in social justice. If you have to stick an adjective in front of justice, you’re really talking about injustice.

The Other Woman I think men and women are different because they are. This doesn’t mean I treat either one of them unfairly. All in all, I treat both of them more fairly than any of you who are chasing your tails struggling to pretend they’re the same.

I have accomplished things and I have enjoyed advantages as I pursue my efforts. I am not at all ashamed of this. For these “privileges” I have something in place of shame that used to be a common thing: gratitude. Mind-blowing, huh? I’m grateful to my parents, my teachers, my filthy rich bosses, everybody who taught me how to do stuff even accidentally, my ancestors and the forefathers who brought forth this great nation. Hey you know what, I’ve had disadvantages too. I thought about them a lot before I triumphed over them, and after winning out over them I stopped thinking about them. That’s worked out pretty well for me. I recommend that.

I’ve been not-watching football since before not-watching was cool.

I find pretty women appealing. No, I’m not ashamed of that either. Supple, sensuous thighs, heaving bulbous bosom, I just might get whiplash looking although I’ll try to be polite about it. It’s the way God built me. I like shooting guns. I like eating meat. I prefer to fix things myself over calling the repairman. I’d rather build things than buy them, if I can. I like my jokes dirty. I like my beer cold.

Don’t even think about telling me what opinion to have about Placeholder Joe’s stolen election.

You perfect-worlders who want to build your Utopia by indoctrinating the youth, and then waiting around for the hidebound troglodytes to die off so your vision can be complete: I am of the latter. I’m not your puppet. You don’t hold my strings. The sooner you figure that out the better things are going to go between us. It’s too late to fool me about any of this. I know too much.

No sale here. Try the next. Best of luck.

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What’s Most Convincing
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

Leftists who want to have all the election fraud evidence lined up so they can knock it over item by item by item, are just adorable. It looks like they want to debunk just three to five items — to their own satisfaction, not to anybody else’s — announce their check-mate, and if they don’t get immediate capitulation, announce to everyone in earshot something like “See? Nothing will ever convince this guy.”

They don’t understand. There are five big bundles of evidence.

1. The stuff at Here Is The Evidence.com

2. Everything in Mike Lindell’s video at Michael J. Lindell.com

3. The anomalies, statistical anomalies, the failure of the bellwether counties, the enthusiasm and crowd sizes of the Trump gatherings, “Basement Joe,” counties won by Trump vs. Biden, counties won by Obama in 2008 and 2012, vs. Biden, etc….contrasted with these “official” results

4. The behavior of their champions in the White House, Congress, federal agencies, districts attorney, judicial offices, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada

5. Their own behavior

These are not listed in order of importance or persuasive effect. If anything, the bottom two are the most convincing out of all of it. I struggle to think of a single difference between the behavior we would be seeing out of those named above, given the premise that the election was stolen, and the behavior that we are in fact seeing. And I struggle to think of a single thing we would be seeing, given the premise that the election was legitimate and honest — that even vaguely resembles anything we’ve been seeing.

Their narrative says the 2020 election was squeaky clean whereas the 2016 election was contaminated due to “Russian meddling.” That would have to mean something was fixed. Robert Mueller showed us exactly what it looks like when democrats prepare and present fixes to things. That was less than impressive. We saw in the Iowa caucus last year what it looks like when democrats count things. Also less than impressive. Based on that, we know whatever confidence there must be in the integrity of the 2020 election, is all theater: How are you preparing and implementing fixes that are impressive to you, when you can’t prepare and present fixes that are impressive to anyone else?

Their rebuttal to all of this is the stuff you get when people on their side are painted into corners and run out of arguments: Threats. Orders about what to say and what not to say. Social pummeling. Ominous prognostications about some new pariah status that is about to enshroud you if you don’t DROP. IT. RIGHT. NOW.

Yeah…that’s convincing. We’ll file that in the bottom one.

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Capitol Penetration Questions
Saturday, February 6th, 2021

I’m seeing a lot of confrontation both on & off social media, in the wake of this thing that happened a month ago that we’re supposed to think of as an “insurrection.” The problem with using that word is that it presumes motive. If we stick to the facts, and define exactly what was out of the ordinary about it, it’s a penetration. Opinions vary on how much it was forced.

It’s clear there is an effort underway to associate any residual Trump support with domestic terrorism. How organized is this? It doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t have to be organized. A lot of people who voted against Donald Trump want their new world, or their old world, of no-fighting, no conflict, nobody calls anybody “losers,” soothing pastel colors, puppies, rainbows, unicorns, etc….but they still want to be able to call their Trump supporting parents, children, colleagues and fellow citizens fringe-kooky whackadoodles and worse. So they confront us with the QAnon theories — which, if you’re like me, you hadn’t heard spelled out clearly before this year started. Maybe you’re being asked “Do you support this stuff?” or “Are you trying to overthrow the government?”

This coming week Trump is tried in the Senate. We could debate the constitutionality of that, but that’s rather useless as the Senate is gonna go ahead and do it.

This is a good thing. It means we get to ask some questions back to the confronters, who are asking their questions of us.

1. How do you incite a riot, or insurrection, or whatever, to be carried out by people who already brought equipment for doing the rioting? I am of the opinion that this exonerates Trump immediately. You’re ready to do some breaking and some hurting, or else you’re not. If you’re not, but you decided to go ahead and do it because the guy standing next you wanted to do it, it isn’t going to matter what some elected official is saying in a speech. And if you are ready because you brought your pipe bombs with you, again, the speech isn’t going to matter.

2. How do you define the dangerous speech that incites this behavior? If you want to prosecute something, you have to define what it is. I like to make this point by replying to the critic (it really doesn’t matter what they said just before) “This latest thing you said makes me want to grab a brick and throw it through a window. When I do it, it’s on you. Seriously though…do you see the problem now?”

3. Have you been compelled to change your mind about anything since those flawed early reports? There have been some twists & turns in the running narratives. Any zealots who can’t entertain doubts about what they think…the rest of us will have to entertain those doubts for them.

4. Since there is less than full culpability to be placed on those who did the rioting, is this not a referendum against the electoral reforms that the states made just before the election? It’s hard to think of a more scathing indictment to be made against Vote By Mail, than this: The end result was violent rioting due to historically low confidence in the electoral results. So how should a reasonable person view this. As a success?

5. Don’t you think it’s deceptive to use phrases like “a violent protest in which five people died” without disclosing the rioters weren’t directly responsible for hurting anyone? And all of the dead were Trump supporters?

6. Do you agree there was fraud but not enough to change the outcome of the election? How and why? How do you quantify the fraud? Are you comparing it to the national popular vote?

7. Should Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be censured or punished in any way for lying? She certainly does have her defenders, but everyone arguing honestly about it would have to concede she was at least highly deceptive.

8. Is it dangerous to voice doubts about Biden’s victory, or about election integrity, even when those doubts are sincere? It wasn’t so long ago liberals wanted us to “question authority.”

9. How confident should we be about the integrity of our elections?

10. Would you say there were significant problems with integrity or foreign influence in the 2016 elections? Has anything been fixed since then? It seems to me like it’s a lot more reasonable to think the 2016 elections were trustworthy and the 2020 elections were not, as opposed to the other way around. We didn’t pick Vote By Mail because it made the best sense or yielded the most trustworthy results; we were cornered into it by the Chinese Virus.

11. Do you agree with Congresswoman Maxine Waters that Trump should be charged with premeditated murder? After all, these “Do you support this?” questions should be a two-way street if they’re going to be asked at all. And charging someone with premeditated murder would necessitate proving the existence of a plan. This seems like a rather dicey plan.

12. Do you think Waters should be held responsible for calling for confrontations against Trump supporters and harassment of administration officials? Pot, meet kettle.

13. Is there a danger here that one major political party will be allowed to call for confrontations and harassment, and the other won’t? I think most Americans agree with me: There ought to be free speech, there ought to be accountability for those who are abusing this right (just like any other right can be abused)…but the playing field should be level. But just as there are people willing to break things and hurt people, there are people who don’t want a level playing field.

14. What do you suppose the democrats are trying to hide with these repeated efforts to get rid of Trump? After all, it’s not like Washington DC is a Mount Olympus with cerebral ideas and harmony and congeniality with Trump gone.

15. Should we allow people to talk in public about vote count anomalies, voting machine problems, etc.? Should we allow people to speculate that maybe Trump won the election after all? Don’t people have the right to speak freely? If they don’t, how do we prosecute them? Gets back to the point made earlier about defining this dangerous speech. Prosecuting it without defining it would be a lot more dangerous than not prosecuting it.

16. Why do you think the BLM riots turned violent last year? If they were infiltrated by outside groups, why should we not think the Trump supporting crowd was not similarly infiltrated? There is some evidence suggesting this was exactly the case.

17. What do you have to say about the many Trump events that did not turn violent? There have been quite a few of them.

18. Do you agree with the idea that if destructive individuals in the BLM protests had been more consistently punished the Capitol Penetration would not have happened? There is a name for this: Broken Windows theory. It is, as the young people say, “a thing.”

19. Does Vice President Kamala Harris bear any responsibility for her bail fund? If this is all about cause and effect, I have some sincere trouble envisioning her skating free on this thing if Trump is supposed to be convicted. How do you square that circle?

20. Is it more serious when unproductive politicians are deterred from their activities, than when businesses are deterred from doing the things that pay the politicians’ salaries? But I suppose we should all be elated that our friends, the liberals, have finally figured out destructive rioting is a bad thing. Baby steps!

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You Can Reopen Now
Sunday, January 31st, 2021

There is no “science” that says it’s okay to reopen now, as opposed to several weeks ago. So although no one is admitting it, this is purely political. We have discovered the cure for the Chinese Virus here in California, and it’s got to do with cracking a million signatures on Guessin’ Gavin’s recall petition.

Our signatures are in there. I am so proud. It is likely the most positive and direct impact I’ve had on public policy since I voted to re-elect Ronald Reagan.

We here in California are strange. It goes beyond strange. It’s like, if someone stands to personally lose something from making the decision the wrong way, that’s a disqualification; we want these judgment calls made by people who pay no price for being wrong.

If you were to make a list of stellar examples of this, from specimens coast to coast, Gov. Newsom would make a high cut on it close to the top. He’s a cartoon caricature and I’m somewhat taken aback you have to wait this long to see cartoon caricatures made of him, like this. He’s a joke that practically makes itself.

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Showstopper Questions
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

It is in our nature, that when we hear the beginning of a good story and we want to hear how it ends, or when we get a taste of a narrative we happen to like, we overlook things that are real problems. Deep down we know they really are problems but we sidestep them to get to the part we like. It’s a universal failing, no one is immune.

Once you head down that road…a single, inconvenient question can stop the whole show. We don’t ask these, because they’re almost certain to lead to rancor — and, no answer. It’s rude to stop the show.

But that doesn’t mean they’re bad questions.

1. Why is the U.S. Senate conducting a trial declared unconstitutional by nearly half of its members, when it requires a 2/3 vote to convict?

2. Why would Batman ever care what Ma Kent’s first name is?

3. Why are California, New Jersey and Michigan opening when the Chinese Virus statistics are not good in those states?

4. Where’s that plan President Biden said he had?

5. If James Bond’s brother did all this bad stuff, just to get back at him over daddy issues, when does MI-6 revoke his double-oh clearance and access to top secret information?

6. How do we address gender disparities if people just identify as whatever gender they want?

7. Why did Luke Skywalker leave a trail of clues to his location on Ach-To if he just wanted everyone to leave him alone?

8. How do we objectively define “Incitement”?

9. What science is there to justify keeping the schools closed for the Chinese Virus?

10. If democrats represent people who are financially insecure, what is their incentive to strengthen the financial position of the average American?

11. Come to think of it, why is it so hard for democrats to win elections if they’re supposed to represent the 99%?

12. Does Wonder Woman’s golden lasso stop topic drift? Because I’d be all…wow that rack…those thighs…

13. Speaking of women, why do we pretend they’re a disadvantaged minority, when they’re not & not?

14. Where does the potential energy go when you beam Starfleet officers down to a planet?

15. How could a minimum wage increase not affect employment?

16. How much air is in Super-Breath? What makes it cold?

17. If antiwar activists represented their concerns honestly, why did they vote against Trump?

18. What — exactly — do masks have to do with “beating” a virus?

19. How big does the Incredible Hulk get?

20. How does keeping dissenting views from being expressed anywhere, foster a new national “spirit of unity”?

21. Come to think of it, if your arguments are right, why de-platform anyone?

22. How does being Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter make Rey powerful?

23. How does it work that Russians meddled in elections in 2016 but in 2020 we can trust the results?

24. Where does Iron Man keep the fuel for the rockets in his boots?

25. Why do college kids shut out their parents and just about everyone else over 30, then let their college professors dictate to them what to think?

26. How come when Han Solo is in Cloud City, suddenly he can go ahead and shoot first?

27. Is it immoral for spiders to eat flies? If not, why is murder immoral? If so, what do we do to make sure it never happens again?

28. What is the origin of Terminator/Skynet technology?

29. How do you use words to “incite” someone to commit violent acts who has traveled with gear, and other signs of preparation, for committing violent acts?

30. Wouldn’t Bo & Luke become fugitives each time they resist arrest?

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Constitutional
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

I’m not a lawyer in Constitutional Law and I don’t play one on teevee, but I’ve been mulling this thing over and over in my mind. People say I never change my mind about anything, but when they say that what they’re really wanting to say is they had a script all written in their heads where they’d change my mind for me, and it didn’t work because I didn’t correctly play my part in their script. They’re really saying they thought more highly of the arguments they presented to me, than I thought of them, which is something that happens often when people argue about things.

I do mull things over and change my mind. It just happened…I think. Unless I see or hear something that changes my mind again, I’ll have to tentatively come down on the side of the democrats and Mitt Romney, against the 45 Republicans. It’s constitutional to try a former President of the United States in the U.S. Senate. At least, in this case, only because Donald Trump was still in office when the House of Representatives impeached him.

Now. If the Senate votes to acquit, and the House of Representatives says “Oh wait we just thought of something else, we’ve got more articles headed your way” — that would be unconstitutional.

What really decides this for me is the way Article I, Section 3 is worded:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present. Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States; but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has refused to sit for this, I’m hearing second-hand, because he does not preside over impeachment trials of casino owners and real estate developers, and right now that’s all Mr. Trump is. That’s correct.

This situation is weird but it is not out of the scope of what was anticipated by the framers of the Constitution. They did think of it. The “articles” make up the mechanism within the Constitution that deals with this. The House of Representatives has to worry about what office is being occupied by the person they’re impeaching; the Senate doesn’t need to worry about that at all. They have articles. They are reviewing the articles that have been delivered to them and reaching a verdict on those articles.

We here in modern times have an obsession with that “remove” thing. The Constitution clearly lists the punishments upon which the Senate may decide. There are two, not just one. “[R]emoval from Office” is listed first because it’s more important. But here, the democrats don’t care about that, they just want to make sure Donald Trump can’t run again.

Things can be stupid and dishonest, and still be constitutional. That’s what’s happening here. Trump didn’t incite violence. The politicians who say he did, know full well he didn’t. The people you meet everyday who say Trump incited violence, often are going to believe he did because they’ve been deceived. Those who are impeaching and chomping at the bit to vote to convict, are really worried about crimes. They don’t want crimes exposed and they want Trump banned from office so that he won’t expose them. Someone somewhere said “The democrats impeached Trump for investigating a crime, then they elected the guy who did the crime.” That’s a pretty accurate summary. This is a lie within a lie. But lies are not necessarily unconstitutional.

As I said, this is a tentative finding on my part and I look forward to the insights of those who are better educated about constitutional matters to see if they agree or not, and why or why not.

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Ungaslightable
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

I am hereby declaring a word for 2021: Ungaslightable.

Yeah yeah it’s got a red line under it because it isn’t a real word. Well, someone has to get on that and fix it. It is the MOST Important word. It can save your soul.

People talk about “gaslighting” but it seems no one remembers the most important thing about it: It requires consent of the victim. You have to disrespect yourself, and rely on the inferential powers of another.

To gaslight means to make one feel that they’re perceiving things incorrectly. Feel, not think; feel. To be a victim of gaslighting, you have to rely on emotional reasoning. Just don’t do it.

Be ungaslightable. Especially right now. Rely on facts, common sense, and yes…your own experiences do count. They are “anecdotal” but anecdotal doesn’t mean “it never happened.”

If science, or the establishment, says there are black swans and all the swans you’ve seen are white, your anecdotal experience lacks value. But if the establishment says all swans are white, and you’ve seen a black one, your anecdotes become relevant.

Trump really did win.

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Memo For File CCXVI
Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

Since November I have been hearing that phrase tossed around rather casually, “not enough fraud to change the results” of the election. It gives off the appearance that someone has managed to pinpoint, or at least ball-park, two numbers and compared one to the other, something that I doubt has happened. Let’s look at it.

AZ: 1,672,143 votes for Biden, 1,661,686 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 10,457 votes, 0.31% of all Arizona Biden/Trump votes, 0.0129% of Biden’s national total.

NV: 703,486 votes for Biden, 669,890 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 33,596 votes, 2.45% of all Nevada Biden/Trump votes, 0.413% of Biden’s national total.

PA: 3,459,923 votes for Biden, 3,378,263 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 81,660 votes, 1.19% of all Pennsylvania Biden/Trump votes, 0.1005% of Biden’s national total.

GA: 2,473,633 votes for Biden, 2,461,854 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 11,779 votes, 0.24% of all Georgia Biden/Trump votes, 0.0145% of Biden’s national total.

WI: 1,630,673 votes for Biden, 1,610,065 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 20,608 votes, 0.64% of all Wisconsin Biden/Trump votes, 0.0254% of Biden’s national total.

MI: 2,804,040 votes for Biden, 2,649,852 votes for Trump. Biden wins by 154,188 votes, 2.83% of all Michigan Biden/Trump votes, 0.1897% of Biden’s national total.

Total votes that gave Joe Biden and Kamala Harris these six messed-up can’t-count-’em battleground states: 312,288, which is 0.3842% of Biden’s national total. Three eights of a percent. What would change the election? Not all six. Pennsylvania and one or two others.

Mary Trump says any discussion of this should begin with a demand of acceptance of the “fact” that Biden won overwhelmingly, and if this demand is not fulfilled immediately the entire discussion should come to a screeching halt. Which is not how we do things in America. But former Clinton administration official we’re supposed to think of as a journalist George Stephanopoulos took it on himself to do it that way anyway. It didn’t go well. It ended up with everyone on his side saying his guest, Rand Paul, “melted down” or some such thing, but if you watch the video you see it’s Georgie who couldn’t handle his end of the non-conversation conversation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Sir, there are not — there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state.

PAUL: Sure there are. There are two sides to every story. George, you’re forgetting who you are. You’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side. You’re inserting yourself into the story to say I’m a liar because I want to look at election fraud and I want to look at secretaries of state who illegally changed the voter laws without the permission of their state legislatures. That is incontrovertible, it happened. And you can’t just sweep it under the rug and say, oh, nothing to see here, and everybody is a liar and you’re a fool if you bring this up. You’re inserting yourself into the story. A journalist would hear both sides and there are two sides of a story….

STEPHANOPOULOS: There can be more investigations. The investigations that have taken place have shown there’s not enough fraud to change the results of this election…

There’s that phrase again. People think they’re quantifying the fraud, and they must think very highly of their own attempts to quantify it if they really believe there’s 0.0129% or less.

Of course that is not what people are doing when they say this. They’re doing what they were taught to do in second grade to fourth grade: Pick up a vibe that seems to represent the majority viewpoint, and act like they made it up themselves.

What’s fraud? The worst kind would be capturing a vote for Donald Trump, inside the machine perhaps, and transforming it into a Biden/Harris vote. If we’re talking about that then you can cut the 312 thousand in half, and plug in the number 156 thousand. After that, there is manufacturing votes for Placeholder Joe, or “losing” Trump votes. Then there are the honest “oopsies” like what briefly happened in Michigan. I see people wanted to get Trump himself in trouble for using the word “fraud,” and that’s not fraud but Trump would definitely call it fraud…take that to the bank. Trump would call anything that changes the results from what they should be, to benefit his opposition, “fraud.” And that’s actually quite alright. But just try explaining that to fact checkers.

Then there’s all the spurious nonsense that can arise from the Vote By Mail baloney. People whose ballots are being filled out by someone else and they have no idea what’s happening. They haven’t lived at that address in many years and someone intercepted the ballot. Ballot harvesting. Vote swapping across state lines. Double-voting. The Secretaries-of-State arbitrarily changing rules, outside the perimeter of their authority, as Sen. Paul mentioned. All the votes that were counted or discounted because of decisions like those. The list goes on and on…

“Not enough fraud to change the results” rests on the faulty premise that we can inject all of those ingredients into the stew…and expect a final concoction that is 99.6158% pure, or purer. That is where this second-grade, show-hands, swivel-head-side-to-side see-what-the-other-kids-are-doing child-thinking gets you. The honestly expressed state of affairs is that the loudest among our fellow citizens learned to “think” this way somewhere around age seven, and never refined it beyond that.

As Sen. Paul pointed out in his interview, courts don’t like to get involved in elections so they sidestep the cases by citing technicalities and allowing things to stand without a decision from them. Biden-backers like to call that by deceptive terms like “hearing the evidence and deciding there’s nothing to it” or something like that. I heard Sidney Powell in another interview say that this (at the time) never happened. I don’t know that this strong of a statement can be accurately made now but it really doesn’t matter. We have a lot of instances, most notably at the Supreme Court, in which the court reviewed the case and opted not to take it…too hot to handle…and then our media sprinted away trumpeting falsehoods about looking at the evidence and deciding there’s nothing to it.

It is a lie. It is fraud.

And this should be comforting to people, although a lot of them won’t see it that way. It means that a lot of these troublesome Trump supporters who “refuse to accept” (more honest description: have trouble believing) the “results,” far from being fringe-kooky whack-a-birds you see muttering to ourselves in the city park…we’re merely imposing standards on the process we came up with ourselves, and forming our opinions when we see things fall short. Which is not a huge disaster, it is the expected outcome. We reformed election practices all across the fruited plain, in response to the China Virus, remember? It’s going to take a few election cycles to get some quality out of it.

I don’t think much of this Mary-Trump way of discussing things. She can do it that way if she likes…others who think the way she does, can follow suit…I can’t stop them.

But when truth has something to do with what you’re doing, and you could lose life or limb by being wrong, that isn’t how we do it. In America, we discuss things. And we don’t “accept” flimsy results that we can’t measure properly and that are at odds with what we can observe ourselves, then refuse to discuss them with whoever else might see something wrong. That’s what little kids do before they’ve engaged in any grown-up activities that are potentially dangerous, and might hurt other people.

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Wounded, Incomplete People
Sunday, January 24th, 2021

Now that we’re living in the world the wounded, incomplete people have made for us, and they run everything, I should write about them more specifically. I have often used this phrase “wounded, incomplete people” to describe them but I’ve not put anything in writing to say exactly what it is that I mean by that. The time has come.

We make stupid decisions when we’re wounded, or when we’re incomplete. Being wounded means a part of you has been taken away and you’re missing it. Being incomplete means you haven’t matured yet to the extent you can make good-quality decisions. They both mean your cookie is missing some dough but one means you’ve lost what you used to have, and the other means you never had it in the first place. This is a distinction that is practically meaningless most of the time, but in some contexts the distinction does have meaning.

Since we all have the potential to become wounded and incomplete, we would do well to try to avoid it. If you really want to avoid it, you have to pay some attention to how people get to be like this.

If you go into an experience trusting, and it turns sour and you change your behavior as a consequence, it could mean that you’ve been wounded. It could also mean you’re learning lessons you needed to learn. How do you tell the difference? It matters because one means you’re making worse decisions than before, and the other means you’re making better decisions than before. In the first scenario, you are joining the ranks of the wounded/incomplete; in the second scenario, you are extricating yourself from their ranks by way of valuable, albeit painful, experience. So this requires more study, not less. It matters.

You can’t use results to assess, because the blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut. Sticking with a poor process that happens to generate a few isolated good results, is the road to ruination.

A lot of this necessary growth has to do with getting wounded. You lose the cookie dough before you build it back again. So how do you tell when the wound has closed and the growth has been achieved?

You look upon the lesson learned. And you have to be honest with yourself about it. It’s got to do with your level of certainty.

“I know he won’t do right by me, because he reminds me of whatever” — is the lesson “learned” by the wounded. They are not being wise although they feel like they are. They’re stereotyping. They’re paying forward their pain and misery.

“I do not know that he will do right by me” is the lesson learned by the learned. You see the difference? It’s very subtle. I do know he’ll screw me, versus, I don’t know that he won’t. The former is a stop, the latter is an opportunity. The former is what you say when you pick up your marbles and go home, because you’re still hurting and you’re not yet ready to share again. The latter is what you say when you’re tough because of your battle scars, and you can start making some logical decisions about how much trust to extend to a potential new friend. If you extend a little bit of trust, and it’s fulfilled, then you can extend a little bit more. You are not yet on this healing cycle, but you are ready to take your first lap. It is the difference between the negative and the positive.

This is why Biden/Harris supporters are acting angry, mean, petulant and vengeful, as if they lost, when they won. They voted that way because they were wounded, or incomplete. It’s not an accident, it’s a plan. The democrat party works long and hard to get people voting when they lack authorization to be in this country, when they’re convicted felons, when they’re angry/hurt/vengeful and feel like they want to get even with “corporations,” when they’re too young to vote, old enough to vote legally but not old enough to vote smartly — or don’t exist at all.

They are wounded…incomplete…people. They’re supposed to be flush with victory but they’re more angry and butt-hurt and hatey than they were before the election. Some of them have gotten hurt and lost some of their dough. Some of them never had it in the first place. But none of them are whole. If they were whole, they would be acting like winners, because whole people act like winners after they’ve won, and President Biden’s supporters don’t act that way.

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Our Side Sucks at Shaming
Friday, January 22nd, 2021

I see the new President held a press conference. The liberals who won’t allow me to question his election victory are squeeing over it and flapping their hands, as if we’ve seen some actual good results come of this.

Dr. Fauci’s relief that he’s now working with fellow liberals, is palpable. I hope that translates into something beneficial for all, I really do. Liberals-working-for-other-liberals hasn’t done good things for us here in California, but every day is a new day.

Meanwhile, the bad guys are testing limits. What’s it worth to them to test limits? Two assholes plus 32 deaths worth of collateral damage, and another 100 wounded. American media doesn’t report on this much. They’re more worried about Placeholder Joe’s favorite flavor of ice cream.

The Elder Abuse Victim in Chief has signed a flurry of executive orders. No more America First, no more wall, come on in COVID-infected illegal aliens, death of women’s sports. Our friends neighbors co-workers who voted blue are lining up for their congratulations and wondering why they’re not getting them. Those of us who can see what’s wrong with all this aren’t congratulating them so we’re to blame for the ensuing conflict. We’re not shaming either. No high-fives, no shaming…we’re wondering why everyone in the country is living and thinking in silos. Well maybe that’s why.

They shame our guys with the flimsy logic of, “If these assholes who stormed the capitol supported Trump then he must support them, and you must support them too.” It’s the most serious kind of category error but look how well it worked. Formerly loyal politicians, pundits and back-benchers all leaped backward. It was an explosion. It was like a barrel of Menthos tossed in a swimming pool of Diet Coke. Not me! Not me! Not me!

Our side sucks at shaming their side. We’re not political. We’re farmers, construction workers, homeschooler parents, sewer pipe cleaners, animal husbandry professionals, etc. who make time for politics under protest. Yeah just a few of us are software weenies too. We’re all stealing precious minutes and hours away from other pursuits that are more worthy, because we’re cornered and we’ve figured out if we don’t care about politics at all, politics will surely care about us. We don’t shame them because it isn’t in our nature, it’s not part of what we do, and it would require a bit of extra time on top of the time we’ve invested already. For which we have yet to see a good return.

Hate to say it, but you’re seeing the default state: People who have spent their entire lives building exactly nothing, come up with the standards, policies and guidelines to be enforced upon the people who build the things. And they do this with fancy speeches. They steal the good results from the people who build the things, like for example the Trump administration with Operation Warpspeed, and they get cheered on by other people who reason emotionally, build exactly nothing. and make a lot of noise.

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Fraudulum
Monday, January 18th, 2021

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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Voting With Your FeetFriday, April 30th, 2021

“You See…”Sunday, April 18th, 2021

Conservative and LiberalSunday, March 28th, 2021

“When does it end?”Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

Laying LowTuesday, March 23rd, 2021

“Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist”Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Morgan’s Six DollarsMonday, March 8th, 2021

Pounding the DomeMonday, March 8th, 2021

So Much Fake StuffSaturday, February 20th, 2021

Should I Even Bother WatchingWednesday, February 10th, 2021

I’m a ManTuesday, February 9th, 2021

What’s Most ConvincingTuesday, February 9th, 2021

Capitol Penetration QuestionsSaturday, February 6th, 2021

You Can Reopen NowSunday, January 31st, 2021

Showstopper QuestionsSaturday, January 30th, 2021

ConstitutionalSaturday, January 30th, 2021

UngaslightableSaturday, January 30th, 2021

Memo For File CCXVITuesday, January 26th, 2021

Wounded, Incomplete PeopleSunday, January 24th, 2021

Our Side Sucks at ShamingFriday, January 22nd, 2021

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

Voting With Your Feet
Friday, April 30th, 2021

“You See…”
Sunday, April 18th, 2021

Conservative and Liberal
Sunday, March 28th, 2021

“When does it end?”
Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

Laying Low
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

“Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist”
Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Morgan’s Six Dollars
Monday, March 8th, 2021

Pounding the Dome
Monday, March 8th, 2021

So Much Fake Stuff
Saturday, February 20th, 2021

Should I Even Bother Watching
Wednesday, February 10th, 2021

I’m a Man
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

What’s Most Convincing
Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

Capitol Penetration Questions
Saturday, February 6th, 2021

You Can Reopen Now
Sunday, January 31st, 2021

Showstopper Questions
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

Constitutional
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

Ungaslightable
Saturday, January 30th, 2021

Memo For File CCXVI
Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

Wounded, Incomplete People
Sunday, January 24th, 2021

Our Side Sucks at Shaming
Friday, January 22nd, 2021

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