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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s it.

Scary, huh?

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fellow congressman Trey Gowdy wasn’t having it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This errant thinking brings real consequences.

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

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

Deanna Fisher writes at Victory Girls:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fisher continues…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call it an Al-Gore-Rhythm, maybe.

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

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

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

Just like your average climate-change zealot.

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

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

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

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

This would be an honest sales pitch for climate change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emma Watson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they’d blame Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STANDARDS-A-PHOBIA. Or…something.

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

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

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

In short…PERFORM TO EXPEC-FUCKING-TATIONS.

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

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

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

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

Society can’t work that way.