This government, which in theory has “shut down,” is often portrayed to us as a symbiont. We hear of it often: “Government, in partnership with business, will do whatever.” This is fraud. Government has powers businesses do not have, and so must leave the generation of wealth to businesses. If it does not, then it competes, and by competing on this uneven playing field it causes injury.

Government is supposed to HELP us. Best case scenario, it is a necessary, benevolent parasite. Not a symbiont. We feed it.

Government that will not defend us from foreign invasion, is worse than a parasite. It is a derelict.

Government opening a sumptuous gourmet of social programs for non-citizens, is a corrupt trustee.

Government importing foreign nationals, enfranchising them to alter the character and makeup of the electorate, for its own self-preservation as it acts outside the consent of the electorate as it exists currently, is a usurper.

Government giving away resources to foreign invaders, and resisting all efforts to protect ourselves from such invasion, is worse than all of the above: It is a TOXIN. It will kill us left unchecked. We can’t have this. Give away our loot to whoever comes asking for it, and let in anyone who walks up and asks. No nation can survive that. And that’s the plan.

Keep it shut down. Until the priorities change, once allowed to resume its operations it will shut down all the rest of us. It’s the scorpion being given a ride across the river by the frog, and we’re the frog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today:

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

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

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

Helen Andrews tells of her personal experience…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Office Space relates:

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

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

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

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

Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.

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

Peter Gibbons: Good point.

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

Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?

Lawrence: Well, yeah.

Peter Gibbons: Nothing.

Lawrence: Nothing, huh?

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

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

Related: Womens’ brains are far more active than mens’ brains.

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

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

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

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

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

Sadly, I think that’s it.

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

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

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

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

Hirono:

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

Reagan:

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

I have nothing to add.

But Laura Ingraham does.

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

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

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

Surber:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five double-X chromosomes are no better.

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

Softracize (v.)

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

In the manuscript, Chapter Two, I describe…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So don’t shoot the messenger.

Allie Stuckey writes at Townhall:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leftism’s god is a jealous god.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monica Showalter writes in American Thinker:

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

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

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

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