It happened Wednesday.

Liberals are showing new strains of ignorance, hitherto uncharted intensities of it. Yes, I’m fully aware that they’re saying the same thing about people who see things my way.

But once again, I see their own ignorance is unique because it mixes in apathy in equal parts. When you blame Republicans for the shutdown, for example, which we’re repeatedly told most people do — this comes at the end of not any kind of critical analysis, but mere word selection. This side is “holding out” or “refusing to budge” on something; the other side is “blocking” a continuing resolution. So-and-so is “standing firm”; the other guy is “holding government hostage.”

People don’t dissect these word-choice burbles. For the most part, they think what they’re told to think. Then, if there are any doubts, they might ask people like me “What news sources should I watch/read?” Watch or read? You mean, follow? Believe uncritically? None of them, of course.

I notice a lot of people can’t even process that.

Another thing I notice, since this shutdown began, is that there is a whole array of topics on which liberals display a special ignorance. Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying “The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

That’s because a lot of it is not based on fact. I say something like “The mainstream media is biased, to the left” — a leftist liberal might hear me say this, and figure, incorrectly, that I’m saying this just because I lean the other way. So he’ll retort “No, the mainstream media is biased, if in any way at all, to the right.” Just like returning a volleyball serve. But, no. If he bothered to discuss and debate, we’d get into some of the examples I might have to offer, and then he’d be obliged to come up with his own. But we don’t get that far. Such an exchange devolves into a shouting match, just like a volleyball match, or a racquetball match, or a ping pong game. I serve, you return, I return the return, etc.

They don’t argue to learn. They argue to win.

So they end up not knowing very much. About a great variety of topics that are supposed to be interesting to them.

It occurs to me that if you make a list of such subjects, and then make another list of subjects on which they want the final word…refuse to take no for an answer. Subjects on which you must must must, do it their way their way their way…

…or else like a socially arrested eighth grade schoolgirl they’ll just hate you for-EVER!! Can’t be friends! Because you didn’t do it their way…

The two lists would be exactly the same.

The economy.

The presidency, Congress and the judicial branch.

The rest of the U.S. Constitution.

Rights.

Privileges.

Responsibilities.

God.

Guns.

Hunger, famine, poverty.

Capitalism.

Socialism.

Education.

Bigotry.

Tolerance.

Civilization.

Societies.

Cultures.

Defense.

Immigration.

War and peace.

Surpluses and Deficits.

Marriage and family.

Work and play.

How pretty sexy blonde girls sell blue jeans and what we are to think of that.

And, discussing any of the above.

In fact, out of the many things on which liberals maintain an ignorance, there is only one item that does not appear on the list of things over which they demand control, and that is: The motivation of their opposition.

This is something they don’t understand, and at times, it seems they know they don’t understand it. They don’t care to learn about it. They’re proud of not knowing and they’re proud of not caring.

But at least, on that one particular thing, they’ll allow us to do as we will. It’s part of their final dismissive gesture as they shut us out of the village gates to starve in the winter. Or, to modernize the metaphor, intone to us that we can’t sit with them at lunch.

If we all have rights, and liberal politicians are free to add to this list of rights on a whim, then primary among these rights would have to be the right not to be defined out of existence by way of specious arguments. That would be necessary for enjoying any of the others. And yet liberals violate this routinely, and flippantly, with “It’s a clump of cells” or “It’s a parasite” or “not capable of surviving outside the womb therefore not a person.”

If cops are harassing black people and shooting them and killing them without justification and this is happening all of the time, and whenever someone finds an example of it someone somewhere is deciding we should be hearing about it everywhere we go for months at a time — sooner or later there should emerge an example of it that doesn’t crumble and fall apart on inspection. Like Trayvon “Skittles” Martin fell apart, or Michael “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Brown fell apart. Why can’t the activists find an example of this that’s any good, that endures?

If there’s a “wage gap” that’s so reproducible we can count on men being paid extra for doing the same work as women, who are consistently being paid less — we should expect all of the jobs to go to women, every single one of them. Any exceptions wouldn’t make business sense, and thus, wouldn’t happen.

And if men are running the world because of “patriarchy” in spite of the fact that women are just as smart and strong and fast and capable of doing anything men can do, something must have happened to put the men in charge. Consistently, In all the continents, as civilizations evolved…separately.

If we were under a king and in need of holding a no kings protest, then we would not be able to hold a no kings protest. Said king would surely stop us. Furthermore, the government would be open. The king would simply make it so and that would be that. Clearly, this is not what is happening.

If masculinity were toxic, and for the past several years we have increasing numbers of kids growing up in fatherless homes, we should be able to expect those kids to be earning better grades in school, and coping with fewer head-case problems, getting into fewer conflicts with others and with the law, compared to the kids with a father or other adult male figure in the house. Somehow, it is consistently the opposite that is the case.

If such-and-such an oppressed group has only just now achieved equality, there’s no more achieving to be done because they’re equal. If there’s still work to be done there, then they must not have achieved it yet and whatever “progress” was made in the past, was illusory this whole time. If the progress they made in the past achieved equality, then everything taking place in the here and now is nothing more than idle bitching.

Over and over again, it is liberals versus logic.

We explain this by taking note of the futility of talking to them. We notice how few ideas are actually exchanged when the true believers come in contact with the non-believers. We see again and again that it’s “Conservatives debate, liberals diagnose,” as in: “If all the guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns” — “Oh, so you’re in favor of outlaws and non-outlaws killing each other, huh?” So we figure liberals controvert logic and common sense, because they only pretend to discuss things, only pretend to consider opposing views, but actually persist in living in their hermetically sealed echo chambers.

That works, for the most part.

Until this “no kings” thing. Here, there are new problems.

If you hold a protest and you’re living in your echo chamber, only pretending to debate or discuss anything, so that things make sense to you when they shouldn’t; in the aftermath of the protest, you have to put in a little bit of honest deliberation as to whether the protest accomplished something. Right? Before you even so much as acknowledge the existence of a conservative, let alone debate anything with him. You have to wonder if the protest was effective.

We needed the protest because Trump is a king? But you didn’t get rid of him.

Or because he was acting like a king? So you taught him a lesson. His behavior has changed, then? It really doesn’t look like it, to me, but what do I know.

Or it was a warning, that this country has “no kings” and we want to keep it that way? Why bother with the protest then. We have had a Constitution. We still have it.

After all these years of watching liberals and trying to figure out why they do the things they do, I’m still learning.

I think it’s about feelings. If the “No Kings” protest accomplished anything at all, besides just a group or team building exercise or a way to meet people; then it, like many other protests, must be put into effect simply to make feelings visible. Just that. Nothing more.

This clicks things into place, as many other explanations have failed to do. Feelings. These must be people who make their feelings highly visible and known to many, and as a consequence of making their feelings highly visible and known, get what they want. These must be people accustomed to that. Maybe since childhood. Mommy found out they were feeling such and such, and so gave them a thing. Gave ’em what they wanted so she didn’t have to listen to it.

They accomplished this much, then: Elevated the sentiment “I feel like I’m living under a king even though I know I’m not,” to widespread visibility.

They accomplished something?

So, in 2028, or in 2026 with the midterms, a lot of people are going to vote according to: So many of my fellow citizens feel like they’re living under a king even though they’re not — so I should vote democrat?

We’re back to it not making any sense. If we had seven fewer democrats in the Senate, for example, right now the government would be open. The shutdown wouldn’t have even happened in the first place.

Once again, it’s liberals versus logic. If one is up, the other is down. If one wins, the other loses.

I guess, if you grow up with the sense of normal that you act like a goofball and then mommy gives you whatever you want, you’ll end up in conflicts with logic most-to-all of the time. Thinking like a responsible adult would be a constant challenge. After awhile, you’d let it go for good.

I end up where I’ve been so many times before, watching these people, wondering what makes them tick; Bewildered. Unclear as to how they can get out of bed, get dressed and function.

And so many of them do not only that, but become university professors. And then retire. And then protest.

And, we need it urgently. Higher ed as well as K-12.

When I went to school my class was taught that “protests” had a lot to do with the freedoms we enjoy, although there were very few specifics provided as to how this could be. So in a way the current violence was my fault, because I should have raised my hand and started asking the questions that were already popping into my head about how this didn’t make any sense. In the years since I’ve come to realize I was “senior” among the generation being taught this nonsense, although the line is fuzzy.

No, the nation was not built by hooligans rioting in the streets. It’s absurd. We don’t get any rights from them. Protests don’t do anything to take into account the wishes of those who aren’t down with the protest. They don’t include people. They exclude people. They’re supposed to do that. They’re “Do it our way and stop jawing about it, just do it or else.” They’re terrorism.

It’s true the protests of old did have causes. It’s true they were offering a voice to the voiceless. It’s a question of demand preceding the supply. That’s not what we have now. This is mass production of a great army of good little rebel foot soldiers, looking for a cause, and then maybe-maybe-not they’ll find such a cause; demand coming after the supply.

Putting it in simpler terms: The last two or three generations have been churned out by our educational institutions, under this premise that a society growing properly is a society artificially made unstable, with a youthful, energetic, “educated” layer of humans ready to riot. It’s not a scientific experiment; they’re not testing the hypothesis. It’s just expected by the practitioners to work, although it never has and never could. The theory that destruction equals creation.

People should have figured out this is unworkable.

They should have figured out it’s dangerous.

Building something is not the same as wrecking things. It takes a lot more discipline to build. You have to measure things, find centers of gravity, select materials and tools so things last. And then you’re liable for the results. Not to begrudge the noble occupations of people who break things for a living, but if you’re struggling to figure out what to do in life, you get equal credit for either one but you’re inclined to pick the one that takes less work, you’re going to be a destroyer.

Every time. And that’s what has happened.

This has changed things. A lot. And we should be talking about it. Could we land a man on the moon today? For the first time?

Build the Hoover Dam?

How about Operation Overlord, could we do that now? Land on Omaha Beach and start cleaning the Axis Powers’ clock, facing down those machine gun nests and turning the tide of the war?

Doubtful. We have to file environmental impact statements to build anything nowadays, and with masculinity being toxic, we have to defer to wives and girlfriends about every little thing. Today Hitler wouldn’t be worried. He’d know exactly where the allies were planning to touch down in Normandy, while Eisenhower and Roosevelt were still waiting to hear back from Mamie and Eleanor about what they decided their husbands should do while out shopping together.

As for the moonshot? Too much carbon emitted. Think of the climate change. No can do.

No engineering triumphs like Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge…but boy howdee, we sure can assemble a bunch of losers in the middle of a heavily populated city with a palette of bricks to throw through the windows. And then go on the idiot box and lie to everybody about “It’s not an organization, just an idea.”

We can do that.

But, that isn’t how we came to enjoy all the freedoms we have, or the privileges, the standard of living, the technology. It’s a cul de sac. We entered it a long time ago. The time has come to think about beating a hasty retreat. If we’re ready to start that, we’d better be in it for the long haul because it will take awhile.

First step would be to staff up our schools and universities, with people who are ready to train builders, not destroyers. That’s going to be a long hard slog all by itself.

We have these radio PSAs from the Teacher’s unions about how “bullying has no place.” If anyone in a position of import were listening, I would humbly suggest everyone keep their ideas about bullying to themselves, unless they themselves had ever been bullied. We’d be headed off in a wholly different direction in our dealings with bullies if we were to successfully implement such a policy, and it would be better than our current one.

Haven’t you noticed; all the people complaining about being “prosecuted/persecuted by Trump who is going after his enemies/opponents” — are complaining about just desserts? They’re complaining about being legitimately prosecuted for crimes. And, about being put on the business end of various maneuverings that they had been doing, just a few years ago, themselves.

This is how bullies operate. They whine about being the victims. They make their targeted victim look like the “real bully.”

Bullying is a reflection of us all. People don’t think of it that way, but that’s what it is. People think of bullying as a bigger kid tormenting a smaller kid, and that’s it. Actually that’s 5th-grade bullying; bullying in elementary school. A bully in middle school has figured out our social fabric, how it’s woven, how to manipulate it. How to propound a narrative and then micro-manage it.

“Mr. Smith, he’s hitting me!!” No way you can be a bully if you’re an annoying tattle-tale, right? Oh yes you can. Absolutely. That’s how it works, how it’s done; tell your story, leave out the part about all the things you’ve been doing to earn what you’re getting. Just squeal like a sissy and hopefully your “real bully” will be marched off to the Principal’s office, and on his way past, you can smirk at him.

In the past few years, I’ve seen a concerted, grandiose effort to drive bullying from the planet forever.

It hasn’t work very well.

Oh, it sounds nice to intone, so forcefully, “Bullying has no place here!” But when you’re being bullied, what really matters is not the speech-making, but the situation in the aftermath of the speech. And the fact is that no one who resolves to eradicate bullying forever, has actually done it. No one’s even come close. They make their speech, then things go back to the way they were, bullying and all. That’s what has been happening, in the grade-school world as well as in the grown-up world. We can work hard to avoid admitting it, but that doesn’t change what’s true.

And this shrieking about “He’s hitting me!!” has ridden a crescendo, during that time, up to today’s constant and fevered pitch.

We who were bullied, know what that means.

What’s sad is, if you weren’t bullied, you don’t see the pattern and there’s a very good chance you’ve been consumed by it, and become the bully yourself without even realizing it. That’s why I say anyone who wasn’t subjected to it in the grade school years, should probably sit down, shut up…just work the crossword puzzles on this one while those of us who know something, work out the details.

Bullying is deceit. It is acting. Off-stage theater. “I’m so abused!” It is cowardice in its purest form, whether you’re being a coward by picking on a weaker guy, or being a coward by staging a theater-play to avoid consequences you’ve earned. It is swiveling, like on a weather vane. Aiiieee, why are you picking on me?? It’s all part of the same cowardly stuff. And it is us, because we’ve built a cowardly world.

The weather vanes are spinning. Spinning like mad, and everywhere.

Trump is “coming after his political enemies”…after…all that stuff we’re supposed to forget. All of it. Impeachment over a phone call. Impeachment ceremonies. Impeachment gift pens. Rigging the 2020 election. Attempting to assassinate him — twice. Raiding Mar a Lago. Sifting through everything, including his wife’s underwear drawer. Faked up photographs of “classified documents.” Steele Dossier. Lying about the server hardwired into the Kremlin, nestled deep in Trump Tower, remember that?

He’s hitting me!! The real bully!! The weather vanes spin. Middle-school bullying.

We can pursue justice. Avoid injustice. We can try that…which raises the question, what’s the difference between the two? How do we tell the real bully apart from the real victim? When is a sanction proper and when does it become real-bullying? This can be tricky. To demarcate correctly, we can ignore those who don’t care what justice is. Or who are trying to avoid it. That’s a good start.

Unfortunately, there’s not much to come afterward. This about the best we can do.

Apart from just one other thing: embrace “toxic masculinity.” Haven’t you noticed, since it became popular to treat masculinity as some kind of blight, the bullying has gotten so much worse? That’s because there are no protectors. No one nips bullying in the bud, on the playground, anymore. No one steps in to intercede. All disputes have to be elevated to the level of the administrators, for arbitration. Who do a terrible job.

But we’re not going to drive bullying from the planet forever, like it’s smallpox or something. It is a window into us. Humans are corrupt.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, while I’m waiting for the various falsehoods to stop flying around and get exposed, I’m struck by the parallel with another, entirely unrelated, set of issues. Every now and then a man will complain “A woman did something” or “Women do this thing” and, sure as the next sunrise, someone will emerge — not necessarily a female — to say “But all women aren’t like that” and/or “Oh yeah, well men are just as bad.” Or, “He made her do it.”

Answers no one wanted or needed, to questions no one asked.

These don’t move the conversation forward. They’re just defense mechanisms. Because it’s not a contest. You may assert that men are just as bad, or even worse. You might prove it, too. The problem is that 1) men have problems, 2) women have problems, and most importantly, 3) men and women got to where they are by way of different paths of travel. To ignore the problems with women and concentrate on fixing what’s wrong with men, in hopes that said fix will somehow spill over and improve women because what the heck, they’re all people, no different from each other — this is a false hope. It’s fallacious thinking. “The watch went missing over the ditch on that side of the road, but there’s no light there, the light’s much better on this side so let’s look for it over here.” People don’t want to criticize women. So they do this fix-men-instead thing. They do it a lot. They think they’re on the right track. They aren’t.

Enough about that.

This has been an awkward week for dedicated liberals, many of whom become liberals in the first place because they want to think better of themselves, as people. They want to be on the positive side, the peaceful side, the “look out for the little guy” side. And if that doesn’t work, a lot of them, I notice, are enchanted with the prospect of becoming perpetual victims. Oh, I can’t win. Oh, they’re doing this to me, they’re doing that to me.

So now one from among them has settled scores with a 30-06. Charlie Kirk lies dead. Having done nothing to hurt anybody anywhere. What to do?

This is where the defense mechanisms kick in. All left-wingers are not like that. Right wingers are just as bad. And your side — somehow — made him do it.

The desire among those who are on The Right, for The Left to press for much needed internal reforms, is sincere. Nobody wants to get shot. And The Left does need these reforms. This isn’t an issue with isolated incidents of dehumanizing and name-calling; the not-real-people lashing out against the opposition, has been coming from the top, and for many years now. Bitter Clingers. Baskets of Deplorables. Not welcome anywhere. Follow them to restaurants and yell at them. Fascists. MAGA Republicans. Garbage. Bigots. TERFs. Racist, racist, racist.

This kind of stuff stifles discussion. Ultimately, it gets bullets flying, because there’s bound to be a “follower” with a screw loose. But to concerns like these, I see The Left has a ready response in “The January Six Insurrection.” A little bit of look in this ditch where the light is better, not in that ditch where the watch was dropped. They don’t want to fix things where they’re actually broken.

Again: It’s not a contest. Also, it isn’t the same. If you take the time to actually listen to what conservatives have to say about January 6, they’re arguing against the setup, the hidden evidence, the various criminal missteps by the January 6 committee. And, the lying. The police officer pummeled to death with a fire extinguisher — sorry, it didn’t happen. Also, what kind of “insurrection” begins with the officials leading the insurrectionists on a guided tour through the building?

When you pin down what this-or-that insurrectionist did, that is violent, inexcusable, and most important of all, verified — the conservative will agree, yes, that person should be punished. I’ve not seen any exceptions to this. So no, it’s not the same. And it doesn’t work as a rebuttal against the Kirk assassination.

The fact of the matter is, this angry-little-lefty trope has been around for a long time now. We’ve slowly been adapting to it. Bullets are flying now, because of that. And it never did anything positive anywhere. A lot of these activists are out there flaring their pierced nostrils, balling up their little fists and stamping their little feet, anxious to show how they’re just about ready to lose it. Ready to show that what little control they still have over their surging emotions, is about to be overwhelmed and the dam is just about to break. A good chunk of the time it’s likely true, strung out as they are on their psychotropic meds and SSRIs.

Charlie Kirk showed the way. Unfortunately, it looks like those sorts of discussions are going to have to be had indoors from here on out, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the other side veer off more in that direction, discussing things coherently and courteously the way Charlie did, and get away from this “I’m so mad things aren’t being done my way” stuff. It’s unseemly as well as dangerous. If such a reform could be possible, I’d be all for it although I’d fall short of purchasing it at the expense of martyr’s blood. It’s valuable, but not that valuable. Be that as it may, what’s done is done, and Charlie is gone. My hope is that this era of the “non threatening but aggressively so” Hawkeye Pierce foot-stomping thing-throwing liberal, comes to a stop right about now. I know best case scenario, there will be a deceleration curve, and it’s going to take awhile. Things were tempestuous in our government and in our culture in the years following Lincoln’s assassination, and JFK’s. But there was some restraint kicking in, that had been lacking in the years previous, as well.

Besides, it’s tedious. I really don’t care how angry David Hogg is today or any other day. His various temper tantrums doth not an argument make. That goes for Greta Thunberg, too. These well-broadcast and thoroughly-replayed hissy fits are embarrassing to watch, embarrassing by proxy.

The Director of the CDC is refusing to step down after Trump has fired her.

I’m picking up a pattern here, what with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass pledging not to be intimidated by President Trump…um…attempting to clean up her city?

Defiant liberals who refuse to be intimidated, are all over the place. We could use them as landfill. But I notice you haven’t got long to wait until you see the next one, being defiant, refusing to be intimidated. And I also notice they’re never up to anything good.

In fact, it occurs to me. When a duly elected President fires your ass, and you defiantly refuse to move out of there for whatever reason. That’s a “Deep State,” right? That’s what it is. Unaccountable to The People. Can’t dislodge it. Not going anywhere.

Are they really committed to these bad policies they want to keep going, by refusing to budge? Because if not, and all they really want to do is show how defiant and hard it is to intimidate them, maybe we could come up with some special environment like a deserted island, or an empty lot, over which they can do their ruling and reigning and whatever. Then out here in the real world, we could enact some sensible policies and lower the crime rate, with them out of the way. They could lord over their little bottle-worlds and continue to show anyone paying attention how defiant and not-intimidated they are.

Just an idea.

“For now, the big fight is Democratic anger vs. Trump accomplishment” says the Washington Examiner headline. One of the things under discussion within the linked article is the “Democrats’ 33-63 rating — the worst for the party since 1990.” This is discussed in greater detail over here. It’s a good time to pay attention.

Sympathizers to the democrat party — self-identifying leftists and “liberals” — are behaving a bit differently. They’ve gone hyper on detecting and calling out various sins, like the supposed white supremacist “dog whistling” of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ads.

Just a couple quick observations here.

“This means that”…as in, the jeans ad means Nazi stuff…is delivered with the same tone as “wet paint,” “thin ice,” “you have to wear a COVID mask,” etc. One person is calling it out to another. It’s the establishment of a relationship: I’m yanking you in, from the edge of the cliff, where the railing is less reliable than you think. I’m saving you. There’s a relationship being established here: Now you owe me. So really, less a relationship than a debt. Good thing I happened along here and kept you from doing something self destructive.

You had no idea the jeans ad had these racist undertones, so I saved you from making a pariah of yourself.

But really, if this was all on the up-and-up, there would be a moral differential between someone blindly tooting on the “dog whistle,” versus someone huffing and puffing away out of pure malice. Things the way they are, it’s all the same: Everyone who likes the ad, appreciates the ad, admires the ad, fails to call out what’s wrong with the ad, is a Nazi. It doesn’t matter if it’s out of ignorance or intent.

So that’s a little odd.

Also, there’s no difference between someone possessing this keen insight, figuring out “good jeans” is a Nazi slogan, versus someone who heard it from someone else and is passing the word along. If you’re merely passing the word along, you get to strut and swagger as if you figured it out yourself. That’s a little odd too.

I think what we’re looking at here is a phobia against co-existing with others — as peers. That’s odd too, since these are the people driving around with “coexist” bumper stickers on their cars, right? But the reality is that being around others is an intolerable ordeal for them, unless they have some device available they can use to establish their supremacy. This is what makes them the way they are, everlastingly warning, horn-blowing, tooting, scolding. “That’s a racist ad.” “Where’s your mask?”

What an awful way to live. Even to friends, family and lovers they have to constantly signal how worthy they are. “Good thing I’m here, to warn you away from visibly liking the blah blah blah.”

I think you’re going to find overall, this generalization holds as well as any other generalization — not perfectly, but often. Conservatives have given up on the whole thing. “If you think I’m a bigot, and the Lord grants us both another hundred years on the planet, at the end of it you’ll still think I’m a bigot no matter what I do.” So…heck with it, all of it. Trans women are men, and I’m going to think of Caitlyn Jenner as a dude because why not?

Liberalism is a religion without redemption. The condition is laid at your feet, and you meet it; “Oh yes, we have twelve years left to save the planet” or “Oh yes, trans women are women” or “Oh yes, choose the bear over the man.” You don’t get saved. You’re still damned until the next condition arrives and then you’re supposed to lunge for that too. It’s all about the lunging. You might compare it to an unarmed man in a cowboy movie being made to dance by the bad-guy psycho cowboy firing rounds at his feet; kind of a lot like that.

Whereas, since it’s a transaction, conservatives demonstrate superior intelligence evaluating transactions as transactions. You don’t get anything for this one. So, they say: F00k it. If you cram your absurdity down my throat and I let you, and repeat it back to you, I don’t get anything for it so why bother to go down that road? So they end up keeping the gas powered car. And, in the spirit of rebellion, maybe even revving it over 5000 rpm a couple times.

It’s funny. This late in the game, the “rebels” have moved to the other side of the political spectrum, because the political spectrum has ceased to be political. It’s become religious; fake-religious. A false, all-damnation no-salvation religion.

Where there is effect, there must be a cause. My current operating theory is that the liberals are breaking out with these social-warnings, like mad, in overdrive. They’re doing a lot more of it because it’s become futile. They’re losing their grip. It’s linked to this downslide of their popularity. Whether it’s permanent, or temporary — I hope it’s permanent — doesn’t matter, because it’s stirring up these feelings of apprehension in them, calling on them to cohabit with the rest of us as equals, which they don’t know how to do, never learned how to do.

So they’re going full tilt on this “Good thing I’m here to warn you not to like that thing” stuff. Pedal to the metal, to compensate for the slippage under the tires.

I’m struggling to remember where I saw this, but somewhere the “woke” kids were ‘fessing up to the real agenda: They want to problematize things. There’s a priority behind making more things problematic and it’s more important than the problematization of each individual thing. They want more problematizing. More conflict, fighting amongst ourselves, more squabbling, more back-and-forth.

Greater instability.

Problematic is a word, but problematize, problematizing, problematization, these all have the tell-tale red squiggly “you misspelled it or else it isn’t a real word” line under them when you type them into a text box or word processor. I’ve said before (somewhere) that this should not be the case; not only are these real words, but right now they’re important words. The words of our times.

Or…that’s the way it has been, up until now. Now they’re problematizing Sydney Sweeney and the American Eagle jeans ad.

I could be the one living in an echo chamber here, but it seems to me like the wet fire log isn’t catching. That’s steam, not smoke. This is a dud…the jeans ad isn’t being made problematic; not only that, but the whole trend is coming to well-deserved ruin. One can hope.

The impression given off is that these are ugly chicks jealous of Sweeney’s beauty. I came across one who insisted this was not the case. But she was fed up with these ad agencies telling us who to find sexy. Being a quiet and reserved gentleman concerned with salvaging what little dignity I have left, I let that one go — oh no I did not. Nope. I set her straight on the spot. How couldn’t I?

Doesn’t matter if Little Miss Indignant is gay or straight, whether she swings that way or not; what matters is that I swing that way, and I most certainly, definitely, emphatically, do not need an ad agency to provide me instructions to think of Ms. Sweeney as sexy, any more than I need instructions to get wet when it’s raining. That there, frankly was just a dumb thing for her to say. In fact, “ad agencies telling us what to find sexy” is exactly what has been happening with the opposite, with the two-ton lardasses waddling around in politically correct Victoria’s Secret ads.

Fit beats fat. But apart from that, there’s a healthy course correction taking place here: Men — remember us, right? — find this-and-that sexy. It’s supposed to be called “male gaze” and it’s supposed to be, well there it is again, problematic. But it isn’t. It is life itself. We are all here, I’ve mentioned a few times before, because of it. If you’re not a test tube baby, you exist because your bio-daddy thought your bio-momma was good looking. Probably not because an ad told him to look at her that way. It’s 100% natural and it is how we propagate the species.

Ads follow the men. Yes that’s right, that’s how it should work. Ads figure out what the men find sexy and the ads follow suit. Ads do not tell men what to find sexy. That whole notion should be buried a.s.a.p., zombie style with eight tons of concrete over the crypt so it never sees the light of day again. That’s another trend we’ve been practicing that just plain stupid. The male libido is a force of nature. Fashion magazines do not program it. They follow it.

Sweeney 1, Wokesters 0.

Over the last twenty years or so I’ve observed much and taken copious notes on narratives. Their importance continues to emerge, and surprise me, for I keep underestimating this. I think it not an exaggeration to say people are narratives, and narratives are people. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, if you meet someone for the first time and are compelled by business or romantic ambitions to ensure things work out well, in order to get to know them, you figure out the narrative that drives them. It’s like a pulse. Everybody has one.

Some people can’t be around each other, even for a temporary term of time. That’s because they’re devoted to narratives that conflict. The narratives being incompatible, for the two to co-exist, one will have to give up the narrative so the other can keep theirs, and when neither one is willing to do this, that’s when people are incompatible. When their narratives are incompatible.

I noticed earlier that a narrative is a blend of the proven and unproven, of the true and not-so-true. But there has to be at least some truth. This is their seductive power. You don’t know for sure it’s a lie, and you don’t know for sure what parts of it are true; but there has to be at least something. If there wasn’t some truth to it, it wouldn’t come to be. On the other hand, as I mentioned, if it’s all the way true and all the way proven, it ceases to be a narrative. So there’s got to be something missing.

Does that mean a part of it has to be false?

I think the answer to that has to do with whether you perceive reality in the instant, or across an expanse of time — the static versus the dynamic. That’s a mouthful. I’ll explain.

The dictionary tells us a narrative is a story. It doesn’t go so far as to say it’s a synonym, but it comes close. Some dictionaries say the narrative has a point to it, and it’s presented in story form. This is one of those cases where the dictionary doesn’t work for us. It’s wrong.

Because the dictionary — correct this time — tells us a story is a sequence of events. An event is a meaningful occurrence, meaningful in the sense that the situation is changed. Imagine yourself writing a story. Hero walks into the room. Is that an event? No, not really. Now the hero is ambushed and taken captive. That’s an event. Prior to it, there was a situation in which the hero was free; subsequent to that, he is not. That makes it an event. Stories have to have events. If they don’t have events, they’re not stories.

A narrative is not a story, because if it has any events at all, they are antecedent. There is a narrative that we stole the land from the Indians. That’s an antecedent event. But we only care about the situation subsequent to that, which does not change. Narratives are mono-situational.

And this is where they fall apart.

There is a narrative that says women have been unfairly subjugated by men, and are now achieving equality. Have they done it yet? Are they going to be doing it a little bit off in the future? Maybe way off in the future? Back in 1974? In 1965? The narrative is fragile because if one of those answers is the right one, all the others must not be.

Narratives in general are not to be trusted because they’re static, while life is dynamic. Real life is a story, fully qualified as a story, with situation-changing events. Things are significantly different in the running-up to the event, than they are in the aftermath. We are dynamic people living dynamic existences in a dynamic universe. And that’s where narratives depart from reality.

“We’re prisoners today, but tomorrow we’re going to win our freedom.” That’s popular as a general form, but if it’s really true then there’s a win-the-freedom event, after which come some responsibilities. And you’ll notice, if you watch closely, very rarely do people accept those responsibilities. In the aftermath of Yorktown in 1781, they did. And they went on to settle other questions, Constitution, Great Compromise, Judiciary Act, Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, all that good stuff. It was a right-wing, not a left-wing, revolution; had the balls to admit it had won.

The way things play out far more often, is that the revolutionaries — left-wing — continue to cling to the narrative. They refuse to accept the responsibilities that would materialize in the aftermath of the event. Haven’t got the balls to admit they won. And so we all find ourselves in these absurd situations, where some oppressed group is supposed to continue to win new rights it’s supposed to have won already.

It’s a static narrative measuring dynamic things.

A dead narrative assessing the situation of living people.

The truth is that activists love this weakness of narratives. It assures they’ll never have to give up the power that was entrusted to them. We’re winning the new freedoms…still winning ’em…winning ’em some more. The years come and go.

And the situation does not change, because it’s a situation sealed up inside a dead narrative, like a dead insect pinned to a wall in a collection. The situation remains, for anyone who asks about it, endlessly, C.A.L.W.W.N.T.Y. — “Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet.”

“Pride Month” is starting in less than two hours now.

I’ve been mulling something over, and I think I’ve hit on the most ridiculous idea. I mean, out of all of them. It may not be the most out-and-out risible idea but it’s the most deceptive, and probably the most damaging, out of all the ideas in current circulation.

Burdening a true believer in this idea with a few laps around the track of the “Explain it to me like I’m five” game, can be a source of amusement. You have to laugh because if you don’t, you’ll cry.

Explain…like I’m five…the “LGBTQ+ Friendly” badge festooned upon some businesses in Google Maps.

Queer friendly businesses, as a concept, presuppose the existence of queer-hostile businesses. This is where the damage is done. The existence of this mechanism both relies on, and promulgates, a narrative that LGBTQ hostility must exist substantially in both businesses and in their clientele. Notice that no one anywhere is taking on the responsibility of actually saying so.

The entire thing takes advantage of people’s good nature, while at the same time exploiting hasty, low quality thinking: If I don’t have any first hand knowledge about LGBTQ+ people or their plights, going by this as a clue, I would have to presume they’re in a lot of trouble. Needing a special icon so you know what businesses you can patronize, without getting beaten or otherwise abused? How awful.

But meanwhile, every business I can recall ever having patronized — all of them, throughout my entire time on the planet — operated, and if they’re still in operation still operate, on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Does someone somewhere have a different experience? You walk into a bar and the bouncer pointedly inquires “Y’all ain’t one of them homersexuals, are ya?” and makes life tough for you if you can’t answer no. Where has that ever happened?

It’s divisive. For no good reason. There’s no necessity for this.

It just helps people act like victims. Helps them think of themselves as victims.

But we put up with it. Doesn’t affect us in any way, right? Just “tolerate” it.

But then we have to wonder why we’re all so divided.

Well, it’s because of gimmicks like this.

Entirely unnecessary ones.

Press conference for Elon Musk’s last day:

Many exciting things happened this month, but this is probably the most significant one.

Although it changes little. But there’s so much happening here.

Elon Musk — and by extension, DOGE, and President Trump as well — has been at the receiving end of a great deal of criticism, not all of it crystal clear or earnest. We should expect “big government” types, some of whom identify as big-government types and are proud to do so, to come up with some arguments against shrinkage of the government. But how is anyone opposed to eliminating waste? That’s the key question.

If you’re a big-government type, or if you’re neutral on where the size of government should go but you have some favorite pet program; you might come up with an argument against a specific action to cut the program, or to gut the program. But if Elon Musk and crew find out about Social Security checks going out to dead people, you should be all in favor of reclaiming that money. Right? If your own program is so important, you shouldn’t be wanting another program stealing money from it. Government can only spend so much.

It’s surprising how many loud people don’t seem to understand this.

But behind all this criticism against Musk and DOGE, which comes off looking like a critique against the second-wife’s evening dress coming from the first wife…it seems like there is something else.

These claims that Musk is “not a scientist, not an engineer…[just] a billionaire con man with a lot of money” ignore his many achievements, which have not been low-key by any stretch of the imagination. The intended audience for such remarks would seem to be people who are unaware of what he’s been doing, and those people would have had to have been living under rocks for the last ten years or more.

He lands rockets. Lands them. NASA has been launching rockets for years and decades, but landing a rocket on a target the size of a pie plate is a different thing entirely. And to ignore or to criticize such an achievement, with the criticism coming from someone who can’t even parallel park, is in bad form.

I think what really changed yesterday — culturally — was the nerd earning genuine respect, legitimately, from President Trump who is the guy on top of it all, the seat at the apex of the power pyramid. Our sense of normal for nerds, as I’ve noticed many times before, is very far removed from that. The way we’re used to doing it, the nerd may achieve a grudging acknowledgment that he’s capable of doing something the rest of the team needs to have done, and there’s no one else who can do it. And that’s the best a nerd gets. Like, ever.

You see it in our police procedural programs fairly constantly; it isn’t even worth the trouble to go out gathering links to provide examples. Just about every single episode of every single show has this scene. The nerd starts to explain what “ambient data” is, or how a key logger works, etc. Someone much cooler than the nerd lets him get five to ten words into it, then interjects to remind the nerd to speak in English. Then the nerd starts over again. It only burns off five or ten seconds or so, but ten seconds is ten seconds. They keep doing this. it’s become all but mandatory. Why?

To remind people: This nerd can do something you can’t do, in fact it’s something you need to have done, but never, ever forget, your objects of veneration are elsewhere. Not him. Those other guys. The ones who can high-kick and crack safes and hot-wire jeeps…but don’t know computers. Don’t learn the computers, kids. Learn the video games.

As one dating-age nymph commented in a thread I remember seeing some twenty years ago: “Everything worth inventing has been invented already. Learn to rap and do your crunches.”

This is cultural. Don’t be the nerd. That’s the social milieu to which we have become accustomed, and we’ve been getting accustomed to it for a long time.

“Fact checks” abound claiming Elon and his team haven’t actually found anything. It’s too bad we’re now living in the post-credibility age of the fact check, and everyone paying attention has figured out fact checks are just feelings-checks. From where come these feelings?

Part of it is the mission of DOGE. People don’t want elimination or reduction of fraud or inefficiency. There’s a distinct “Not anti-war, just fighting for the other side” flavor to this: People want the fraud to continue because they’re benefiting from it.

But also: To watch the nerd sail off into the sunset, with his significant contributions acknowledged by the guy on the top of it all. Gratitude expressed, earnestly, meaningfully, and with merit. To actually focus on the idea that the nerd got something done we needed done. He actually traced the carpet fibers on the dead body to where the murder took place, or decrypted the drug sale inventory, guessed the password, etc. He actually did that and it was pretty cool.

People aren’t accustomed to that. It’s more than they can handle.

To me, this is what Making America Great Again — is. It’s a renewal of focus on the objective of actually getting something done, of achieving the mission, in whole or in part. We have been needing that, for awhile. We’ve gone too long allowing the nerds to be upstaged by these hot sexy men and women who swing their big hair around and get in arguments about nothing, between the action scenes of karate-chopping bad guys. It hasn’t worked out well for us. It’s translated, by and large, into potentially talented, capable people doing next to nothing, because in real life there aren’t that many occasions to hot-wire jeeps, stow away on helicopters or karate-chop bad guys.

But we are surrounded by computers and other high tech devices, and someone has to figure out how to make them go. And then there are those rockets.

John Hawkins, writing at Culturcidal, offers five reasons.

As you’d expect from the people who invented the concept of “microaggressions” and “safe zones,” liberals have a tendency to wildly overreact to things most people would barely notice. They also tend to spend their lives terrified of imagined dooms that never happen…Really, it’s no surprise so many liberals mentally break when they spend their days endlessly being spoon-fed imaginary apocalyptic scenarios…

I have noticed, in my dealings with dedicated liberals outside of politics, there’s often this tension arising where I’m waiting on them to make a delivery of some kind. And rather than the product or service, what I see them bringing is drama. It gets to the point where I start wondering what the drama is going to be, and stop wondering if I’m going to get what I contracted to have delivered. The initiative is lacking, and they seem to be drawn to distractions like a moth to a flame.

These “apocalyptic scenarios” seem, to me, to be conjured up for exactly that purpose: To distract from an ordinary, humdrum delivery. It’s like they can’t accept that life, for today, this block of hours, is all about fulfilling the expectations of another. That would be a boring existence. But if they’re among the final “survivors” who get to watch the mushroom clouds right before everything is consigned to oblivion, that would make them much more important.

I saw it during the 1980’s when Reagan was going to blow up the world. That would have made Reagan a very bad man, a fun thought for them to have. But even more fun was the idea of their own significance. That they’d hang around to sing Amen. The final extinction of the human race, after these hundreds of thousands of years…and they’d be in the middle of it. Burned a crisp, but at least, here to see it happen.

They didn’t say so outright. But it was plain to see they were unprepared for the alternative: Life will go on, tomorrow is just as important as today, and there are many tomorrows ahead of you…and in each one, someone is expecting something out of you that you have to fulfill. Something mundane.

The work they put into avoiding that mindset — it’s off the charts. Looks like a phobia to me.

The report is in on the cause of that deadly helicopter crash over the Potomac.

“Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course”…The report further blames the air traffic controller for lacking both clarity and urgency in its communication with the chopper.

Captain Rebecca Lobach failed to follow her co-pilot and instructor Andrew Eaves’s order to turn left in a bid to avoid the descending aircraft, ignoring his instructions just 15 seconds before the crash.

Just ignored? For fifteen seconds, before it’s lights-out for everybody. Yeah, I wasn’t there, but sometimes speculation is safe. That’s a snub.

Our social reformers who want to regulate everything, and invariably get their way, remaining everlastingly unhappy with results even as everyone bends over backwards to do what they want — introduced quite awhile ago a new sense of normalcy: No “mansplaining.” If you need a man to tell you about it, it must not be worth knowing.

Somehow, we just accept this. Well, how acceptable would it be if it were a petulant middle-finger against “blacksplaining” or “gaysplaining.” That’s exactly how prejudiced is this recent campaign against mansplaining. And, it turns out, every now and then, the men do know something.

Now we have dozens of people dead. Completely avoidable — at the time. But no longer.

So right now, the huge back-and-forth argument taking place is whether the whole tariff thing is worth the present-term unpleasantness.

There are two arguments against: 1) There is no gain for the pain. The investor uncertainty that plagues us today is going to stay with us for the foreseeable future, and there is no benefit over the horizon offsetting it. Or 2) This is America, and we do not fix problems when the fix involves short-term unpleasantness. We only fix the fun problems.

If there’s truth to 1), then somebody had better get to work finding an alternative solution. President Trump’s antagonists may have not been paying attention, but he did an excellent job summarizing the post-WWII history, Bretton Woods, gold standard, etc. and how it leads to the current situation. It isn’t sustainable. We have to do something to fix this. Trump’s critics have had a lot to say about a lot of things, but I haven’t seen any of them propose an alternative. Closest I’ve seen is that some of them will deny there is a problem.

If 2)…we may as well just close up shop right now. What country, or company, or family empire, or organization of any kind, survives for any length of time only working on the fun problems?

I haven’t blogged much at all, because everything worth talking about has something to do with Trump. And the whole Trump thing is in that uncomfortable part — where I’m no longer in the minority. That part where the thing I want done, got done, and people are in the process of seeing it was the right thing to do all along. That Biden really was senile the whole time, he wasn’t running anything, and whoever was making the decisions was making them contrary to the interests of the country. That firing Trump was a mistake from the beginning. And the legitimate electorate might not have ever done that anyway, that the 2020 election was indeed rigged.

What more is there to say?

But this Signal thing. There is one thing worth pointing out about it. And I’m still not the first to notice it, but it’s worth talking about it a bit more:

Democrats were quick to seize on the Signal story as a case of Trump officials poorly handling classified information and as an excuse to call for terminations. But DNI Tulsi Gabbard quickly poured cold water on the notion that this unforced error was some major national security scandal.

“The conversation was candid and sensitive, but as the President, National Security Advisor stated, no classified information was shared,” she explained. “There were no sources, methods, locations, or war plans that were shared. This was a standard update to the National Security Cabinet that was provided alongside updates that were given to foreign partners in the region.”

Sure enough, the new texts revealed from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg went on to prove that. Remember, he claimed he originally didn’t want to publish them because “the information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.”

Only that didn’t end up being the case.

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,'” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded on X. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

Vice President JD Vance went on to note “It’s very clear Goldberg oversold what he had.”

With these developments, it’s no surprise how Democrats are changing the narrative.

Top secret war plans — to classified information. To, sensitive. Now it’s sensitive information.

I part company with those who are stridently defending the administration, in the sense that sensitive information is still sensitive. In fact the adjective is typically used to discuss information that isn’t classified, but isn’t a free-for-all either. You shouldn’t let it go just any ol’ place. It’s the term that should have been used from the very beginning.

And I’d still like to know what’s going on here, why Goldberg’s name got added in the first place. That doesn’t necessarily mean the administration botched it. But it does suggest someone is still friendly with someone else, who shouldn’t be. The swamp still has some swamp water left in it.

I used the analogy on social media — Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby Doo using end-to-end encryption to discuss how they’re going to trap the monster. Monster contributes to the discussion: What the hell are you meddling kids talking about here? And zoiks. How did that happen? Someone forgot to uncheck the little box by the monster’s name?

See…that doesn’t cut it. The question remains. How did the monster’s contact info get added? What’s he doing in there? To me, and many millions of others, the whole drama is Trump draining the swamp. See, we don’t trust the swamp. We don’t trust these little “Rolodex” connections, this web of strands connecting this person to that person. Someone was friendly with the monster, Mr. Goldberg. Best case scenario is, for convenience sake, someone borrowed someone else’s contact file and there was benign intent all around. Even with that, there’s still something worth investigating here.

It’s too bad our media sucks so much. All we get to hear about are a bunch of zany theories about Trump being unfit because Trump did this or Trump did that. But there’s another layer here.

For many years I have noticed that people lose their ability to discuss issues with clarity and focus as their quality of life improves. When you’re hungry, you’re not going to lose sight of your goal. If you can’t breathe, literally nothing else matters. With your purse and your pantry packed full, you start getting distracted by all sorts of dumb sketchy stuff. What makes it so? And are people aware? If their behavior changes, they must be.

But the people who are so privileged by present circumstances that they lose their direction, seem to lose awareness as well. You can just listen to them. They really think they have it so tough.

Now that Elon Musk is asking the federal “workers” to list five accomplishments they made for the week just ended, I’m seeing all sorts of blowback against this about this rich guy somehow in this position to pass judgment on what the ordinary people are doing. With some ricochets from those of us who’ve had to fill out such reports for years, and never questioned the necessity. And you know, suddenly, the thought occurs to me:

“So-and-so shouldn’t have an opinion.”

For the last several years I’ve been hearing an awful lot of supposedly strong arguments, built around that weak core framework. No uterus, no opinion on abortion! Trump shouldn’t ever be in a high political office again! If you’re white, sit down, shut up and listen! Etc. etc. etc…it’s fake and phony because, if such people who aren’t supposed to have opinions happen to have the “right” ones, you know the muzzle-obsessed person who wants them defrocked of any influence, suddenly will swivel 180 degrees on that. Oh that’s the right opinion. Everybody listen to this guy.

Also, we’ve been asked to consent — and apparently already given our consent — to living in a world of bureaucrats. This-or-that open question, the resolution of which will impact people’s lives irreversibly forever, will be decided by such-and-such a commission populated by strangers whose names you aren’t allowed to know, whom you’ll never meet. And their decision is final, there is no appeal. We keep running into that, over and over again, and have accepted that as normal. So against that backdrop, getting all particular about who can & can’t have an opinion seems a bit odd.

But back to my sudden thought. If we’re so privileged we’re unaware of our privilege, and we’re lacking a an altimeter, flying blind, with little instrumentation to reliably assess that we’re hovering so high that we can no longer focus on what’s important — wouldn’t this be a good tip-off? If you’re wondering where your next meal is coming from, you’re not going to be too concerned about who’s got an opinion about it or who’s allowed to pontificate about it. “So and so shouldn’t be in a position to say” is something you’re only going to hear from spoiled people. Spoiled, sight-impaired, tin-eared people.

Because the truth is, just about everyone has opinions. You can shame them into silence, but they’re still going to have the opinion. What, you thought because you couldn’t hear the opinion, the opinion simply went away? Or the person holding the opinion just evaporated into thin air? You’re even more spoiled than I thought.

Our concern should be about whether the opinions are correct.

So Elon Musk is going to scour over these five bullet points about what “you” managed to get done this week. Him, or some delegate of his. And form an opinion about whether you’re worth your weight…which may go one way, or the other way, and it may be right or wrong. He might screw it up and fire you even though you’re a vital cog in the machine. That’s the fear. But the fear-mongering isn’t about that. It’s that Elon shouldn’t be deciding this.

And that denunciation, in turn, doesn’t offer anything by way of a substitute person to decide this instead of Elon. There should be no decider. This is why I see it as a first world thing. “Nobody should have an opinion about the blah blah blah” — means — I have a cushy lifestyle, or lack of accountability, built around the blah. I have people slaving away for my benefit when I’m not doing anything to earn it…and it depends on blah. Or I’m doing things I know are wrong, and I get away with it…because of blah. The blah blah blah is the bough over my cradle, and I’m the baby, so I don’t want anyone screwing with that. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE AN OPINION.

Without “civilization” having advanced to the point of decline, and the spoiling effect it has; the lion chasing the gazelle, who will starve to death if the chase doesn’t end in his favor, doesn’t care who has an opinion about it. The gazelle, running for its life, isn’t too spun up about such things either. The farmer who has to get the work done, cares only about whether all the hay bales can be loaded into the truck in so-many-minutes so he can get on with the rest of his list. He’s not going to care who has an opinion about it.

Things like this matter. They limit the advance of civilization. If civilization can advance, but in so doing inspire the rise of these phony arguments, then the advancement of civilization is limited. Just like the speed of a rocket car is limited by the inertia and the headwind pounding on the nose cone, as the greater speeds are achieved. That’s us, we’re the car. Or, our civilization is the car. Our government, for the time being. If we want to go any faster, maybe the time has come to stop working on a hotter and mightier rocket engine, and take a look at the aerodynamics involved.

The concern is that our government has become a jobs program. Elon Musk is behaving as if it is one. The rebuttal is “Elon shouldn’t have an opinion about that,” and that’s a very silly, very counterproductive rebuttal. It protests too much, suggesting that all or most of the angst and vituperation against Mr. Musk’s efforts, are inspired by a situation which finds him correct. And his efforts overdue.

They’re arguing against him, the way people argue when they’re fat, dizzy and disoriented, inebriated from the elixir of long-standing affluence. The way people argue when they haven’t been wondering where their next meal is coming from, for a very long time. If they’re so sure Elon Musk is in the wrong, they need to figure out how to argue like a starving lion. Focus more on where the meat is. Not leave it up to the richest man in the world to ponder such things.

So, we did it. We elected Donald Trump to a second term. A second, non-consecutive term, which makes him the first President since 1892, and only the second one in our nation’s entire history, to be re-elected in such a way. I saw someone somewhere talk it up as “The Greatest Political Comeback in All of Human History” or some such thing…it probably is that, without exaggeration. Matter of opinion, I suppose.

Descriptions of the first week have settled into a comfort-zone of most frequently used adjectives, nouns and metaphors, like “whirlwind,” “sweeping,” “pushing the envelope,” et al. Killing off Diversity Equity and Inclusion, or DEI; launching the opening salvo in what is sure to be a protracted legal battle over “birthright citizenship”; declassification of the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King assassination files; many others.

From his detractors, surprisingly — total silence. Maybe I should call that “near total,” since there is no such thing as total silence in our national discourse. Starting sometime in the weekend just past, during which this incoming administration was around five or six days old, there began to emerge a leitmotif of steadying complaint which consisted of:

1. If you’re a man, women aren’t going to have sex with you because you supported Trump;
2. Elon Musk made a gesture during the inaugural festivities that resemble(s/d) a Nazi salute;
3. Okay so now he’s President, and these egg prices you were complaining about, haven’t gone down.

That’s listed in roughly the order of frequency in which I’ve been hearing these. I don’t know if I’m “hooked in” in my reading sources, or in my contact with social media, to glean a perfect reading of it. Is there such a thing? Probably not. I can only assume my reading of it is satisfactory, and to be that, it has to compare with the typical reading of others who’ve tried to similarly assess. It probably fulfills at least that much. All I can do is assume.

I see the word “incel” has emerged as a synonym, and not entirely appropriately or accurately, for one who supports President Trump and his reforms. It’s supposed to mean involuntarily celibate, as in, a heterosexual man who can’t get any action with the women. Conflating this with Trump support, to those who can think through such matters with discipline, would suggest Trump opposition is on balance insincere, merely a first step toward “success” with dipping the wick. That strikes me as rather sexist; women are just Trump-hating whores, ready to provide the wetness and the 98.6°F for the lads who sound off or vote the right way?

When a woman uses this word to describe Trump supporters, she presupposes all other women are going to apply the same filter. And, one must anticipate, provide the same conditional reward. I’ve noticed, since my first wife’s final round of good-byes, that this presumption of “All women are going to behave and prefer the way I behave and prefer” is the signature of the woman who allows her mouth to out-perform her brain: “No woman will ever blah blah blah.” Women should be the first to understand women are unique. They decide on an individual level. We think, anyway (occasionally we men have our doubts).

Now. When a man conflates “incel” with Trump support…it’s even worse!

1. I forbid any woman from having relations with you, ’cause you’re orange
2. They’re all going to do as I say!
3. That makes you incel

Not only is such a man stupid, but sexist as well. Stupid and sexist in such a way, as to suggest his lifetime contact with the opposite sex is sparse and unedifying. He acts like what he calls others.

The “I” word, over time up to now, but especially now — has been worn out to the point of uselessness, and rather thoroughly.

Regarding the Musk thing, what strikes me about it is that the comparison is far more convincing in still photos, than in motion pictures, in which Elon’s gesture can be clearly seen as one of “From my heart, to all of yours” or something. Moving film footage exists of Der Fuhrer making his own Nazi salute, and…it’s not close. Not even convincing. Still photos are another matter, but we’re not living in the age of still photos, are we?

As far as the egg prices, well…I guess we’re all going to have to hunker down and see how this plays out over time. If opposition to Trump has centered itself around “Egg Whataboutism,” it has done so only with limited enthusiasm for this new rhetorical tactic, and with limited credibility and limited success. As of this writing, the administration is early into its eighth day. Any shopper who’s sufficiently savvy to see what’s happened to egg prices during the Biden regime, will probably figure out it takes longer than that to bring the prices back down to sane levels again.

Bottom line to all of it though, is this: The first week of Trump 2.0 is arguably history-making, in terms of the wave-making and the frenzy of activity. If I were in the business of conjuring up opposition to Trump just for the sake of conjuring up opposition to Trump, and it’s clear many are engaged in just such an endeavor, for exactly that purpose, nothing more — and I managed to come up with these three arguments? I’d hang my head in shame. Back to the drawing board. An obvious decision.

Find some other complaints that might resonate. Come on, there have to be some. There’s been so much activity, this is the best I can do? Looks like Nazi salute in still photos, eggs still cost, and won’t-screw-you? And then the barrel is empty and we’re scraping the bottom. That’s just stunning.

This End-DEI thing alone, all by itself; that’s thousands of jobs. Dumb stupid jobs, and maybe if the stupidity of the job surpasses the stupidity of the person holding it, bushels of wasted talent. But with all those jobs coming to a certain end, you’d think the resulting resentment would give rise to something better than Nazis, eggs and friend-zone.

But it’s clear that at this point, that’s all they have.

Whatever happened to life on Earth being in danger because of our gas-powered cars?

My New Year’s resolutions are for others. Yeah, sue me.

If you so much as breathe the oxygen from a limousine or a Gulfstream jet, stick a cork in it about “carbon emissions” or “climate change.”

Don’t scold or browbeat boys or men. Relate to our hopes, fears, ambitions, dreams, the same way you’d do it with a girl or a woman. If boy has ideas, encourage him “to be the leader he can become someday” the same way you’d do with a girl. If he interrupts someone, by all means call on him to calm down a bit and wait his turn…but do the same with girls. Don’t make him feel bad just for being male. Don’t medicate him for acting too much like a boy. Don’t make him stand behind some line because it’s “girls’ turn” to succeed or be awesome. If a female really is ready to be awesome, she doesn’t require this special treatment. If handicapping the boys could lead to something good, it would’ve happened by now. Tearing down the boys doesn’t uplift the girls. Making girls afraid of boys doesn’t help them lead more fulfilling lives. Lift them both up and let them both become the best they can be.

Married women who are unhappy — go to bed. Try again the next day. Marriage involves commitment. If you have a friend who’s an unhappily married woman and “needs” to be talked into getting a divorce, don’t. You’re wrong, probably. None of your business. If there are kids involved, think of them first.

Children successfully raised by single moms — congratulations on having defied the odds. But the odds stand. You are a happy accident, not an example. Do what you can to make sure there are as few single moms as possible. Shouldn’t be happening.

Impulse control. Take a breather from this “If you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best” stuff. Show how you’re made of sugar, spice and everything nice. Make women look good again.

Boys, now that Boy Scouts has been obliterated by liberal activists, take the initiative and do the things you’d do if you were in it. Learn survival skills. Knot tying. Starting a fire. Sewing, cleaning, darning, cooking, baking…this is not “woman’s work.” You’re a better man if you know how to do these things.

If it’s organized, and it has the effect of lowering the birth rate in the western world…resist. The agenda is real, and exceedingly dangerous. Boys are boys. Girls are girls. If you feel awkward it’s because you’re in a new phase of life, and this one’s a pretty big jump. You aren’t supposed to feel comfortable with it. Talk to the opposite sex.

Discriminating against white people is racism. There’s no such thing as pointing it in the right direction. Knock it off.

Don’t let agenda-driven liberals define good manners. Ever.

Think about your role in life. If it involves someone else doing something to you, get another role. Stop fermenting and gulping from the victim-nectar. Recognize the signs of being drunk on it. Get yourself a new narrative, in which you’re the person doing things, not the person having things done to them. And then make sure these are positive things that help others. Then do them.

Regarding “science.” If you’ve read up on something interesting, be it a theory, established fact, a coterie of “experts” who believe in something they’d like to push. Yes it’s natural you feel like you’re extremely well-informed because you read up on this thing. You feel like an expert yourself. You feel like you’ve managed to get hold of some precious, game-changing nugget of information and you have to do what you can to spread it around.

Understand that this has become the common and accepted way of distributing what we call “misinformation,” that your feelings are likely being manipulated. Also, none of this means the people who disagree with you have never heard of your nugget, or don’t know very much, or are under-educated. Generally, there’s a very high likelihood they’ve come across your nugget already, have checked it out, and come to their own conclusion that it’s b.s. And, that they have good reasons for thinking so. So don’t be an arrogant prick about this. You might be right. They might be right. It could very well be you’re both right. Or both wrong. Learn to discuss things.

Throughout a great variety of misadventures, I have learned the assignment of fault is mankind’s rational thinking at its very lowest. If and when it lands on me, any attempts on my part to appeal for a change of mind, are going to represent the very summit of wasted energy. What’s at stake doesn’t matter. If it’s part of the assemblage of an “anti-Morgan” narrative that’s going to cost me a cool job if it isn’t thwarted; if it’s monumentally unfair, and if facts and logic are on my side; if they want to blame me for the Chicago fire or the sinking of the Titanic; might as well just grin, say thank you for the opportunity, you’re right sir, and be on my way. Time to go.

People who are so obsessed with whose fault it is, are the most intransigent. They’re the first to grab the boss’ ear, because in general that’s where their efforts have been going. And they don’t know anything. They don’t recognize “Wouldn’t-a happened if it weren’t for X doing whatever” is entirely subjective.

In the past few years, I notice my conflicts with very young adults have to do with what I learned since I was their age. This is a generalization, but people in their age group think the assignment of blame is objective. They think there can’t be more than one opinion about that, and if there is such a plurality, that’s bound to be cured by way of some “two go in one comes out” contest that will pare the number down to a proper one. And then everyone involved has to take that seriously.

And in their conflicts with me, it seems they’ve made a goal of paramount importance, out of reaching their coffins without ever having received any of this blame for anything. I’m not sure what happened to make it so. But this “Nothing can be my fault” thing seems to have swelled in importance to overwhelm and engulf all other considerations.

The girls are extremely pushy — even the sensible, conscientious ones — about this question of wearing short skirts to the Sacramento Rotunda at one o’clock in the morning. It’s not that they’re wanting anything bad to happen as a consequence, or are being cavalier about it. Quite to the contrary, their pushiness is about how it shouldn’t happen. It better not! “I should be able to do that.” It’s most disturbing. The conversation ultimately has to end with an implied reassurance that this particular lady, out of the thunderdome of theory and here on the plane of real lived experience, doesn’t seriously plan to do that, thank goodness. But all your warnings about “Honey, no” or “Even scary-looking guys who can defend themselves best be out of there before dark” fall on deaf ears.

They just don’t want anything bad happening, should it happen, to be their fault.

And everything is like that. Again, this is a generalization. There’s a Pareto Principle thing going on: Eighty percent of the consideration of “What might happen? And what can I do to prevent it?” is being exercised by twenty percent of the kids who are capable of exercising it. That’s a fancy way of saying, on average, the kids are mostly or entirely avoiding it. They’d rather just not do things.

They’re turned off to religion, particularly Christianity. What does Christianity say? That there’s already so much that’s your fault, it’s futile to make excuses for it; all you can do is seek redemption you don’t deserve.

I don’t need to go to church.

I don’t need to get a high paying job. That means responsibility. Responsibility opens up a possibility that some event of deficiency or neglect might end up being your fault.

Don’t need to get married or have kids. Being a parent means any one out of lots of things, can and will be your fault.

Don’t need credit cards. Don’t even need a driver’s license. Don’t need, don’t need, don’t need.

I’m not blaming the kids. They didn’t raise themselves. It’s us older people, preparing our eventual replacements, who I can see have committed a major architectural blunder in this society we’ve been molding, shaping, building and nudging through its various evolutionary changes. We’ve produced a society that meets up with every little challenge that emerges, large and small, through the diligence of some decision-making or actor who says, “Better make sure such-and-such happens, or else when the whole thing collapses, someone might think it’s my fault.”

And then we’ve produced a generation that seems to have made a paramount lifetime objective out of “It’s not my fault.” Not by way of making good decisions once they’re in the situation. But by way of entirely avoiding the situation.

We asked for this. At least, our cultural reformers did. Decades and decades and decades of, “We want to change our evolving society, so that such and such a thing is everywhere, free for the asking; or, this other thing over here, will disappear and never be heard from ever again.” And so, rather than arguing for their desired changes rationally, they said “Support our cause or else you’re a bigot.”

And it worked, because too many people said “Well, I certainly don’t want to be a bigot.” In hindsight, we can see even people who agreed with the desired reform, should have insisted on a rational discussion of the pros and cons rather than falling in line, adding their inertia to the growing and accelerating battering ram of reform. But they didn’t so insist. They added to the inertia, and after awhile that became the default modus operandi of getting anything done: Just accuse anyone standing in the way, of…stuff.

Now we have a generation of kids who don’t want to be accused of any stuff.

People my age, particularly the men, can’t talk to them. We grew up watching Captain Kirk respond to some crisis with “Contact Starfleet, and inform them that on my authority, we are crossing into the Neutral Zone.” Or, “Mister Sulu, if you don’t hear from us in ten minutes, proceed to the nearest starbase without us. There won’t be anybody left behind.” Lesson: Take the risks. Absorb the consequences. Get blamed. Those doing the blaming are probably idiots anyway.

And in real life, crossing into adulthood in the age of feminism, we found out this is exactly how it works. Everything is our fault anyway. Might as well make the best decision you can, regardless, with a wink, a nod and a grin. Yes, you’re right; I caused smallpox.

Frankly, I’m worried. We’ve been looking down on bureaucrats who are terrified of doing the right thing, because they might get blamed, and thus stand in the way of what has to be done. But at least our bureaucrats standing in the way of what has to be done, are open to the question of being blamed. At least, by being so clearly terrified of it, they’re demonstrating a capacity to be open to the consideration. They have the stones to, at least, get in the way.

The difference is, an acknowledgment that you are doing something — or, are not doing something. And that this is going to have a direct effect on the outcome.

The kids today who can’t even do that much, have toppled over the precipice into adulthood. In theory, they’re accepting responsibility for making sure things happen. In practice, they’re not. Avoiding it has become a whole way of life for them.

And more are coming.

Abolish Department of Education: Well let’s look at what’s happening here. We have, what, 45 years of data now?

It is baffling to me how quickly Trump stopped being Hitler. An electoral win should not have done that. But it did. What’s happening here? There’s a problem with the way Americans think about things, and the problem predates the creation of DOE. But I still blame the Department for this widespread errant thinking, because the problem has gotten worse, not better, following its creation.

I can’t in good conscience feign ignorance of this problem, or of its effects. I was in it for thirteen years just like everyone else who graduated from public schools.

It’s become a real elephant in the room.

The error is: Consensus as a compass. Figure out where it is. Figure out where it’s going. That way is the “right” way. The other way is fringe-kook. Avoid that. Tens of millions of people have carried this into adulthood, never going against the grain, and when there’s an election they play it like a lottery, picking the winner. They think it’s their job as a voter to predict. This time, they picked Harris, and were momentarily disappointed and fazed when they found out they picked wrong. So they did what you do when you play the wrong numbers in the lottery: They shrugged, and went on with life.

Just a few of the loud ones are clinging to the ambition of making men and women enemies of each other, in the aftermath of being informed men and women don’t want to be enemies. They’ll fail at that but they’ll give it a few more honest tries.

But the point is: The Department of Education has “gifted” us with an entire nation, 370 million strong, of people who can’t distinguish what’s right from whatever a numeric majority says. Far too many people are wholly unprepared for any situation in which those are two different things.

Teacher says: Let’s see a show of hands…and some hands go up, but before they do, heads swivel from one side to the other and back again. Everyone has to know what everyone else is doing. Public school should have taught the kids to simply ATFQ. It taught them the opposite. And it labored long and hard toward doing that: “Right” is what the majority says.

It’s self affirming. Not everybody is deluded in this way, but most of us are, and if most of us think that’s how it works…that’s how it works.

I keep hearing how we need to get rid of bullies.

I’m all in favor of cornering bullies, getting tough with them, or analyzing them, doing what it takes to make them stop being bullies. Bullying is cowardly. Bullying is also painful to the person being bullied. Believe me, I know. But we shouldn’t “end” it because it’s painful to the bullied person. Life is pain. The real problem with bullying is that it’s cowardly. As far as the effect upon the bullied, I have to be honest. Most of what I have to offer as a manly man, today, apart from manly skills, is an elevated pain threshold and I owe that to my bullies. They made me better.

This nonsense about “Let’s see a show of hands” with a subtext of “Prove to me you can noodle out a consensus and then follow it,” on the other hand, confused me for a good long time and toward no good end. It messed me up good. And it isn’t just me.

You didn’t need to read all this to figure out there’s something grossly wrong. The “consensus” droning on and on and on the way it’s been going, for nearly a decade now, about “That guy is basically Hitler,” followed by “But he’s fun to be around and we can work with him” once he’s proven to represent a majority viewpoint; that’s not the way sane or mentally healthy, non-hurting people think or make decisions. It just isn’t. So you know something’s broken. These are just my ideas about what that might be.

I’ve had time to mull this over, so I’m not harboring too much residual question or uncertainty about it. I’m pretty sure.

Twenty years blogging. My thoughts today are about the relationship between blogs, and work. So often, I have missed opportunities to do the first of those two, because the second one got in the way. Gotta keep paying those bills.

Work. Let’s think about that.

A quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson is “I am a great believer in luck, and find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

This is where people get derailed, and start running off down the bunny trail of “Did he really say that?” But I’m more concerned about the spirit behind the letter. Do you get more luck when you do more work?

I have learned, over the last twenty years, about people’s reaction to blogs: They, too have ideas about the relationship between those, and work. There is this unfounded premise that the work a person does, added up to the volume of bloviating they do online, equals k. In other words, it’s a seesaw. People who work, don’t blog, and people who blog, don’t work. It’s quite popular. So popular, in fact, that if you want to fool people into thinking you’ve been working hard, the first step is to not blog; don’t say anything or do anything. And what do we say when we’re caught languishing, being quiet, inactive wallflowers? “Sorry, I’ve been incredibly busy.”

The louder your are, the less work you must have been doing. Quiet people doing all the work.

The truth, I have learned over the years by watching and listening, is closer to the opposite.

We have rampant inflation still, that the Biden administration would like to blame on external factors. “Supply chain issues” and such. Which in turn come from the China virus they won’t allow anyone to call the China virus. Ah…they’re not entirely wrong, but what is that? People were “sheltered in place,” ordered to stay home…and then allowed to stay home. Death of the workplace. They all gathered around the home swimming pool, or the video game console, maybe with a “work laptop” or maybe not, and they “worked.” Meanwhile the government sent them checks.

These were not the bloggers. The bloggers, by and large, were blogging in protest of this. Rather ineffectively.

When did gas go up 40% in price?

When did the price of milk, eggs and butter — double?

When did the public debt swell?

We, as a nation — as the civilized half of the planet, in fact — didn’t work. And in the aftermath, we didn’t have very good luck. Here we are closing out 2024, and our dollars are weak. They don’t buy very much. You don’t work, you don’t get “paid.” Sure you can take home as many of our arbitrary money units as you did before, even “earn” yourself some increases. But the value isn’t there for us, because we, as a whole, weren’t there adding value for each other.

“Raises have not kept pace with inflation,” the news repeats over and over. Right. No work, no pay.

It is truly marvelous that this late in the game, in the digital age, what we call “communism” remains geographically contiguous. Eastern Europe is more steeped in communism than Europe overall, and Europe overall is much more into it than the United States. But we still need to worry about “the spread of communism.” It’s just like a puddle of something someone spilled on a kitchen floor; swelling. The collectives are assimilating more organisms into it — looking for someone to do all the work. The people who are already within, haven’t been doing it. Not because they’re lazy. But because the incentives have been removed. Some would argue that’s the definition of lazy. But, being human, just try living with the incentives removed for a decade or so. Try living with punishment for working.

Communism, like progressivism and Satan, has to keep changing its name, and for much the same reason as those other two: For it to accomplish what it wants to do, it can’t afford to be seen by the populace at large, as destructive an agent as it truly is. It’s the same story over and over again: Everyone understands their continuing survival depends on work, and everyone expects someone else to be doing all of it.

And then nobody does it.

And then our “luck” turns bad, and scarce.

There’s another quote that addresses this directly, one we have caught on video: “Socialist governments…always run out of other people’s money.” Margaret Thatcher.

This isn’t complicated at all. “Inflation” is simply a fancy name for what we should fully expect to be seeing in the aftermath of collective sloth. You present money to buy a thing; what is that? “Here is a dollar. It represents work I did.” That’s what you’re saying when you buy things, right? Oh. A dollar. “Work,” pffft. Right after we were all getting paid by the government to lounge around the swimming pool, participating in “zoom” meetings, and then heading inside to towel off and play video games. Tell you what; you got another one of those? If you do, then we can haggle, otherwise off with you.

And that’s inflation.

Individuals may rightly protest: Unfair! I worked as hard during the China virus debacle as I did before. Harder, even! And they’re right. But that’s the cost of living in a collective. The collective is lazy, and endures the consequences of being lazy; YOU are lazy. Unfair? Absolutely. You might have been working your ass to the bone. You might be a first-responder who’s been saving others. It’s the height of unfairness. That’s why we don’t like it.

Blame the people who have been saying something about it? “They’ve been blogging so that must mean they’re not doing any work!”

My twenty years have taught me many things, and that one thing above & before all the others: This premise is off course by about 180 degrees.

Generally speaking, experience has shown it’s the people who were quiet about the whole thing, who cashed the checks, and spread the suntan oil and continued with the napping and the video game playing and the lounging. And subsequently, were the most shocked that prices had skyrocketed as the dollar, that token of “work I got done to buy the thing,” lost its value. It wasn’t their fault. They thought they were being good citizens of the country and of their various employing entities. They went to wherever they were led. When they were led to the swimming pool and the video game console, they obliged, and when they were given checks for being idle, they cashed them.

Blogging is not work. But, it is “If you see something, say something.” And if you’re working, or trying to get work, struggling to figure out how you can contribute to society productively, you’re going to be seeing quite a lot, and much of it will have been, these past two decades, very, very wrong. That doesn’t make bloggers better people than non-bloggers. I would never go that far with these observations.

But I will say, if someone’s been existing these last twenty years, not seeing anything wrong; there must be something way heap busted about them. It’s been a rather goofy stretch of time, hasn’t it? We may disagree about what policies were good or bad, or who came up with the problems and who came up with the solutions. But we should all agree it hasn’t exactly been a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state. Blogging doesn’t fix that. But silence comes with a guarantee no one will fix anything. And no guarantee at all — contrary to popular opinion — that someone’s getting real work done.

People who’ve been getting the work done, almost always, will have something to say about it. We should make a point of listening to them.

So what I’m getting out of this, is that we get cheating if we are negligent. We don’t need to wonder about it and we don’t need to indulge in silly mind games like “Prove beyond the doubt the cheating happened or else you’re obliged to accept that it didn’t.” If you leave the hen house unlocked, the fox will have a feast, period end of story. Leave the pie on the shelf, the flies will attack; leave the fish on the counter the cat will take it, etc., etc., pick your metaphor.

If we are vigilant, the cheating stops.

This graph that was put together and put up at ZeroHedge, really tells the whole story. The room for doubt it leaves, will have to be decided by each viewer — but in any case it doesn’t leave much.

It’s just like any other field of endeavor involving a valuable asset that has to be secured. If we allow the cheating, we get it. If we get the cheating, we get rampant inflation and Putin invades the Ukraine.

If we don’t allow the cheating, the other guy wins and we get screaming liberals.

Seems to me from the last four years, that’s the whole takeaway. Am I missing anything? Remain vigilant against cheating, deal with toddlers and temper tantrums as many an adult must…allow the cheating, deal with ALL the other adult problems. At their worst. Hard to get a job, hard to keep it, month left at the end of the money, inflation, widespread poverty, idiots in charge, all the problems up to, and possibly including, World War III.

I seek only to distill down to its essentials, this binary choice that has emerged to confront us. The reader will not benefit from me saying which one I’d pick. We all have to make our own decisions.

It’s the weekend. The election was on Tuesday.

I have seen and heard from many, many Harris supporters struggling to figure out how their side lost. Many of them are reporting what they’ve seen and heard from others. Many ideas. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Not all unique, but…lots of effort to figure out where they went wrong.

Not a single one has said anything even vaguely resembling: We conjured up all these fearful prognostications about what life would be under a guy who’s been President already. We didn’t scare ’em like we wanted to. Because he’s been President already.

The most obvious theory. Just lying out there, bloated and baking in the sun belly-up, like road kill, waiting to be…theorized upon.

Not a single Harris supporter has stumbled across it.

Not one.

It’s truly amazing.

Something has happened relatively recently with the concept of leadership, and it isn’t good. It might have started with the pandemic, or maybe a little bit before that with the Disney Star Wars movies. Someone takes over something; they announce with great fanfare their guiding principles, which may be “woke,” but there may be something else wrong with them. And right off the bat they have their critics and they have their defenders, with most of the earnest enthusiasm “enjoyed” by the former as it’s already easy to see what’s going to go wrong.

There’s lots of bluster about “I’m large and in charge” or whatever, but no responsibility taken for bad results. The response to the criticism that should be expected, is a gritty determination to keep on making the same mistakes — and there’s nothing you can do about it! And, to call the critics sexists or racists. Name-calling and intransigence. That’s the rebuttal to the criticism, any & all criticism.

It’s as if the entire “civilized” world woke up one morning and decided: Leadership is nothing but being obstinate and pushy.

Meanwhile, the despair felt far and wide, from having someone “in charge” who won’t listen to anybody else, won’t self-correct or learn from mistakes, and won’t take responsibility for the mistakes made — is palpable. It thickens month by month, year by year, to the point you can almost cut it with the metaphorical knife. It metastasizes into a depression, which the “leadership” notices, and usually blames on someone else.

It wasn’t like this just a short time ago. What happened? How do we fix it?

Maybe we can hold a contest. They do seem to be competing with each other to see who can come up with the worst ideas, the fastest, or implement them with the most intense of misplaced enthusiasm, or show the greatest agility in dodging responsibility. Or, to display the most intractable resolve to maintain the bad policy in response to reasoned criticism.

Within arts and fiction, the clear winner would be Kathleen Kennedy. Whoever is the runner-up, isn’t worth mentioning because the gap between the two is so broad, it isn’t even close. It’s just embarrassing to listen to her anymore. People have entirely given up on her company, and on the industry as a whole. She’s literally destroyed movies.

Out here in the real world of public policy, it might be Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, maybe Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. This weird new brand of leadership that consists of just being stubborn, learning nothing, regretting nothing, conceding no points to their opposition no matter how valid the criticism may be, is commonly illustrated to us as women finally finding their voice. This is unfair to women, for it isn’t only women doing this. Gavin Newsom of California has come up with just as many bad ideas as anybody, done at least as much damage as anyone else, and certainly takes the cake in avoiding responsibility. Or, responding to valid criticism with that now-familiar gritty determination to change exactly nothing and keep-on keeping-on. Should I list examples? It’s hard to know where to begin. Criminal justice reform, battling the “homeless” problem, taxation, environmental — he sucks at all of it and will admit to no errors, concede no points to his critics, change nothing.

It’s like the public at large is a wild animal, and “leadership” in both arts and politics is engaged in a long, drawn out maneuver that does nothing but wound and then corner the animal, giving it nowhere to go. This doesn’t seem smart, to me anyway. Looks like just asking for something bad to happen.
It wasn’t always like this. Leadership used to listen. Maybe show a bit of lethargy in admitting to mistakes, I guess that’s to be expected. But time was, they’d eventually either admit to the mistakes, or quietly change strategy.

I guess, now that we have “social media,” the spoken word enjoys greater currency and greater agility. The criticism flows easily, but the rebuttal to the criticism flows even more easily. The rebuttal, unlike the criticism, doesn’t have to make sense. Just a theory I have to explain it. I’m not sure.
But it’s obvious, lately, when there is valid criticism and then rebuttal to the criticism, the rebuttal consistently wins. Someone is expecting it to go that way. And, it is going that way.

This does not portend good things. We know smaller problems that ought to get fixed, today, and don’t get fixed, grow into larger problems that arise tomorrow. We know cornering a wounded beast is never a smart idea.

And it’s been awhile by now since I’ve seen quality leadership. By which I mean, don’t make good decisions all the time necessarily, but at least admit it and change things in the aftermath of having made some bad ones. I haven’t seen that in a very long time. We seem to be getting quite comfortable with bad leaders making bad decisions and then showing a bad intransigence in keepin’-on the same way. It’s quickly becoming the default strategy of leadership, and everywhere. I’m really not sure what we can do about this.

The narrative is that men are replaceable. I say “the narrative is” because the desire to believe it came first. People act like the evidence came first and after awhile, someone noticed it out loud. That would be legitimate. But it wouldn’t be accurate. The desire to believe came first and we’re waiting on the evidence; that’s essentially what a narrative is.

Reasonable discussions can be had about whether the evidence has emerged, or whether we’re still waiting on it, or whether it never will emerge because it isn’t true. But that is not the point I wish to inspect. I want to look into the desire to believe that men are devoid of unique purpose and could be easily replaced. It’s everywhere, and it’s intense. From whence does it come? Seems rather useless to me. Are we all supposed to be going somewhere?

This is not an offshoot of women’s lib. It is ancient. It goes back to the days when the woman’s father reserved all the agency in screening out her suitors. “You can do better than him.” It has always run in one direction. Men did not talk about whether they or their sons could do better than the current wife, girlfriend or…obsession. They acted on it, and that’s philandering, or infidelity. Men have been at that for quite awhile. But this has always been a quiet pastime. They acted on it but didn’t speak of it. They didn’t huddle together in these groups to figure out for sure, or make dinner table conversation out of, Is it time to dispose of and replace the wife. But “she can do better than him” hangs around extended family frameworks, across years, even decades, like a bad smell. It’s common. And it isn’t quiet.

This asymmetry is reflected in our fiction, as well as in our truth. The ready made family, joining up with a stepdad. You’ll notice throughout the years, as the female head-of-household has become more and more normalized, the backstory has gone entirely missing. She has kids? You still need a man to come up with those. Where’s the bio-dad? Alive or dead? You may as well be asking where a cow got her calves. “Not in the picture” is a good enough answer, assuming the question is ever asked at all. And it usually isn’t.

This isn’t true of fictional exploits in which a stepmom integrates with a single dad and his kids. When that happens, there has to be a backstory. Where’s the mom? Usually dead. But you have to say what happened to her. Moms are not so easily replaced. A story that even weakly suggests they might be, will surely end up on the cutting room floor before anyone sees it.

“Women can do anything men can do” is a commentary on men being disposable. It’s false. “Men can do anything women can do” would be equally false, but we don’t need to worry about that because no one says it.

We accept — correctly — that women are not replaceable. We men can’t do what they do. Where they are present, and then disappear, they leave a hole. No one bothers to pretend any different.

“Your husband or boyfriend could do better than you” has always been just plain rude. Like asking a woman what she weighs, or how old she is. It just isn’t done. It’s one of those double standards feminism was built to confront, in its pursuit of “equality” — and once they confronted this one, they left it alone because they liked it. It’s always been part of western civilized society that women, and whoever cares about them, should wonder constantly if they can do better than him, but men are not supposed to wonder if they can do better than her.

Ann Landers put the pedal to the metal: “Are you better off with him, or without him?”

There are three reasons for this.

Men are protectors. It is fitting, when you have a protector, to wonder if you can somehow get hold of a better protector. But we can’t have our protectors wondering if there’s someone else somewhere more worthy of their protection. That wouldn’t be a very suitable protector.

Women are shoppers. Men don’t shop much, and when they do they shop like their pants are on fire and they can’t put it out until they’re done shopping. In-and-out. So for centuries, women have monopolized the experience of shopping, and the natural sharpening and honing of skills that comes with engaging the activity. It’s natural for a shopper to wonder if she’s acquired the correct product in the correct quantity, and then wonder about it some more. Even after the sale is closed, the question remains open. But we can’t very well have our merchandise wondering if the shopper is good enough.

And, eyelash-politics. Men just aren’t as cute. You have an opportunity to climb the social ladder when you reinforce a woman’s questions, or inspire her to start pondering the questions, about whether her current mate is good enough for her. Women have longer eyelashes and they’re easier on the eyes. People relate to women. You don’t slog your way up the food chain by looking out for a man’s interests. We pretend men run the world and have been running it throughout the centuries, like the men have been on top. Men have actually been on the bottom this whole time. It’s true in the animal kingdom as well: You work your way up through the social hierarchy, not by looking out for a man’s interests or defending his status in his household or in the tribe, but rather by challenging it.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Modern society wonders aloud if it can do without men, or if it has to have men, how interchangeable they are. As this question has intensified, the men have been wondering more and more if they can do without society. That is a turn of events entirely unanticipated by those with the most strident opinions, the ones who insist that since men are so replaceable, it’s up to each man to work continuously on improving himself, to make himself the best, so that no one will think of replacing him — even though they could, on a lark. Men are responding to this with a pointed question about why they should bother, with the criteria for keeping versus replacing being so arbitrary, and the decision to replace being more and more a fait accompli.

Perhaps I’m biased, but it seems to me that this fad of man-ejecting and man-swapping, or of casually thinking about doing it, where it was destined to bring some positive deliverables to society at large, has already brought them. That we’ve crossed the point of diminishing returns. I think we crossed it when men started to hesitate to sacrifice things to build up their careers, which could come to an end on someone’s arbitrary say-so. And were no longer being relied-upon to feed, clothe and provide for others.
We have been building advanced “societies” for many thousands of years by now, and in doing so we’ve lost our innocence, lost our excuse for having not learned some rather plain lessons. We know now that a society has to value the people in it, all of them. All of the people who contribute constructively to it, anyway. If it doesn’t, then those people will not value the society, and society loses value overall. Then everything becomes a little bit less functional than it was before.

There’s no advantage in asking if a specific demographic is disposable, or replaceable. By all means, feel free to ask that of individual people, based on their individual acts. But don’t ask that of groups based on their immutable characteristics. That’s bigotry and it doesn’t help anybody.

Kamala Harris could still emerge victorious in this thing, but she’s not doing quite as well as she’d like, I think. There’s no one single misstep to point to for the bulk of the blame. I perceive that the American public is belatedly catching on to what’s long been obvious to just some of us: Liberalism is not about solving problems, or even about making anything better. It is rainbow-chasing and complaining. It is just like a rainbow in fact. Most coherent, definable and relatable when distant, losing any semblance of structure upon the observer’s approach.

Every single issue follows the same pattern. The liberal agitator states the case for reform, and it isn’t tiny-step reform, it requires societal overhaul: Oppressors are oppressing victims. The victim’s situation is this, and that, and this and that, and such and such and so and so. “And we think that’s wrong!!!” Stating this case, they capture all they want to capture. Hearts, minds, votes, emotions. And then there’s some kind of incursion, involving some combination of force and guile. The movement becomes an actual movement, with the good guys making good-guy movement into bad-guy territory. Like the Trojan horse into the city’s gates. Activists, and their sympathizers, go to where the problem is, where the slope-foreheads occupy, those undesirables who have yet to be enlightened.

And then…?

Confront the problem-people. And…?

Convert them? Isolate them? Banish them? Obliterate them? What are we doing now?

Each single individual curled up in the belly of the great wooden beast, might have a good solid understanding of next steps. But a consensus has yet to emerge. And it won’t. If such a consensus were necessary, it would, but it isn’t. And that’s the embarrassment right there. In the end, it turns out to be all about the bitching. And the incursion. The posing of an inconvenience onto others. That’s all.

Just the tiniest sampling of available issues confirms this…

America is a racist nation! Easy to say. But then the position is…no wall at the border. Everybody is seeking asylum. From what? Uh, something, so okay. Remain here. Everyone ought to be able to get in, and stay, and “path to citizenship,” and vote, and we will mock and ridicule you if you so much as suggest it shouldn’t happen, or that some further case evaluation has to be done even on an individual level, that some of these might be terrorists. That’s racist! They all have to be here! Well if America is a racist nation, why are we doing this? You won’t let us take a closer look at these people, because if we want to do that we’re racists, even though it’s confirmed we’re that already, and the people we want to study are brown, so you want to be nice to the brown people and keep them in a racist nation. The logic falls apart.

Next issue. Patriarchy! Put a woman in the White House! Okay. But we already have woman governors and legislators. We’ve actually had quite a few of those, and for quite a while. Have we gotten rid of patriarchy? Dissenters and reform sympathizers alike would agree, no we have not. Wasn’t so long ago we were going to get rid of racism by electing a black President. That guy is term-limited out now, and following His eight years, have we cured racism? It’s noticeable how far backward we’ve regressed, and how quickly. There’s more bitching about it in the aftermath of His presidency than there was before. Race relations have noticeably deteriorated. That administration was lots of things, but the resolution to any sort of a problem was not one of the things.

Next issue. Capitalism! How terrible it is! It exacerbates inequality! Exploits the masses! Alright…so what do we do? Once again, liberalism turns out to be all about putting the horse inside the gates, going to the hated-thing and — what? Take it over? The liberals have invaded corporate America through the “human resources departments,” forcing the diversity-equity-inclusion nonsense upon the businesses. And? C.A.L.W.W.N.T.Y.: “Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet”…forever. Again, we do not solve the problem. We don’t even chip away at it. And, again, that’s after giving the liberal reformers every little thing they want, no exceptions. Everything they want plus a few things.

It’s rainbow chasing. They approach the goal, and as they get closer, the goal loses composition and deteriorates. Every time.

What they lack in problem solving, they more than make up for in reducing and berating. They’ve got men apologizing for being men and they’ve got white people apologizing for being white. Then what? When the white guy appears before you offering his regrets and his atonement for being white, what do you do then? Forgive him? Welcome him into the fold? Execute him? Certainly, you hold him up as an example of what other white people should do, but after that? Nobody seems to know. Or, to be precise about it, I suppose I should say: A few individuals “know,” but nobody seems to agree.

Like a small child, they’re excited by the approach. The junction point between rainbow and ground, is fixated on a tiny spot, over there! Half an acre, maybe less. Maybe I’m already familiar with that place, how exciting! It’s practically riveted to that spot, over by the tree stump!

And…we approach. Everything changes. It’s not supposed to happen that way, but it does.

Because things change upon approach, the “overhaul” becomes all about the incursion. It becomes purely binary: We go into the bad people’s territory, that’s good. They make an incursion into ours, that’s super duper duper bad. The college kids protesting when a conservative speaker comes to talk, confirm this direction-sensitive passion. It’s quite intense.

The longer I watch conservatives and liberals go at it, the more it looks to me like we’re having a fundamental disagreement about the nature of problem solving. Conservatives are into presuming the worst, so as to engage preventative plans while those plans can still be effective and preventative in nature, thus less invasive and less costly. But they’re also into learning from experience, and experience suggests the conservatives don’t have it completely right either; it consistently shows the liberals are invested in putting the horse inside the city gates and then just sitting there, divided among themselves about what to do next. An argument could be made that this infighting is so all-consuming, that perhaps the horse isn’t a threat after all, and the problem is limited to an object simply being where it doesn’t belong. So the great conflict is about stopping the horse from entering the gates.

As far as what the liberals, and their fresh recruits, need to worry about: It’s a betrayal. The liberals do their complaining about patriarchy or white supremacy, and they pick up the support of those who don’t care too much about ideology and just want to be compassionate. People who want the problem solved. Once the recruitment is done, the rainbow chasing begins. The liberals don’t solve the problem. They don’t even get to the part where they eliminate people, subjugate people or convert people. They just do a lot of bitching. You know. The fun part.

They don’t catch the rainbow. They don’t get to the massacre. If they were so disorganized as to remain completely ineffective, the rest of us could just ignore it all. But along the way, they govern ineptly, and do a lot of damage.

Among those who have figured this out, if only partially, there seems to be a myth that has become entrenched — that the worst betrayal the liberals can inflict, once empowered, is to do nothing. But just look at the large, dense cities laboring away under their tutelage. The poverty, the blight, the vices, the dereliction among living things and inanimate objects. The common theme permeates, achieving a consistency up to and past the point of monotony. Dozens of examples, surely hundreds, maybe thousands. All those cities, run by liberals, looking the same. You don’t stay still with their kind in charge. You lose. Their leadership is toxic. It makes the problems worse.

Regardless of how the election goes, I’m still concerned. Things are good, but broken. They are good in spite of being broken, and may not remain good for long because of the breakage. And the breakage didn’t happen overnight. Things got broken in phases, and they’re still breaking.

I’m seeing a lot of people “winning arguments” by saying “I don’t care.” What is that? If you don’t care about something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you shouldn’t care about it. Maybe you should, in which case, if you still don’t care about it, that makes you something of an ignoramus. It doesn’t make you superior to anybody. Really when you get down to it, apathy is just a feeling. That’s the problem here. People making important decisions based on feelings, not taking into account all the things they should be taking into account because they “don’t care.” It’s incompetent decision-making. And it’s seemingly become the default.

I see people brushing aside evidence of something by saying “There is no evidence of that.” What they really mean to say is, although this is just the latest circumstantial evidence of something, there hasn’t been any direct evidence. They’re refusing to consider trace evidence of something, suggestive evidence. They don’t like where it points. So they’re laying down a new rule, of sorts, that you have to prove things beyond any reasonable doubt, in order to merely consider them as possibilities, and if you can’t do that then you’re not allowed to even mention them as possibilities. That’s quite absurd. More incompetent decision-making.

I’m seeing there are people elevated to these platforms of “expertise,” as in, “Let’s listen to the experts” which means just do what they say without question. We see a lot of this in tech. The “experts” often turn out to be kids embarking on adulthood, who’ve been hailed as “technophiles” and “techies” because they know more about tech than anybody else in the family…and more often than not, that turns out to be computer games. They knew how to deliver a killing blow in Mortal Kombat involving four, five, six or more buttons pushed in rapid sequence. It’s a common confusion: People who use the tech, are worshiped by others as if they built the tech, and they come to believe that this is the tech they’ve mastered, building what they in reality merely know how to use. Kids who’ve been gifted with smartphones too early in life, hailed as if they’ve mastered all it takes to engineer the phone.

Learning disabilities: We just diagnose them, medicate and move on — leaving the child handicapped for life. Because again, “the experts” have spoken. This is a particularly pernicious habit we have, for the effects are long lasting. “Experts” are people who profit from the prevalence of this hitherto undiscovered learning disability, and yet once they say someone has it, the rest of us who do not share in the profits, aren’t even allowed to talk back.

What these all have in common is an open discussion that should be happening, and isn’t, because too many people either don’t know how to discuss things or aren’t comfortable with discussing those things. Perhaps that’s the epicenter of the breakage, the original point of origin of where things started to get broken. Discussing things is something we should supposedly stop doing, because discussing is arguing, and arguing is heated. So we stopped discussing?

But we haven’t stopped arguing, and things are heated.

That’s why I think maybe, just maybe…we as a society took a wrong turn back there. Should have kept discussing things.

Someone stands up and says “Stop discussing things, just do it my way” we should have said “Sit down, junior, we’re going to keep discussing it” instead of what we did say. Something like “Yeah, sure, okay, I don’t see why not, let’s do that then.”

We should discuss things, because people are flawed. It’s easier to come up with a bad idea than a good one. But no idea is so toxic that we’ll be doing further damage merely by talking about it, or defining what it is, or defining some of the arguments against it. If people don’t know how to discuss something, that’s really their own problem and we should treat it that way.

As the radical Left and the beltway swamp continue to blame Trump for the attempts on his life, after going nearly a full decade with their constant windbaggery about what an “existential threat” he is and how he’s “basically Hitler” — a thought occurs to me. It’s a thought about a rethink. Maybe we need to do one. Maybe it’s overdue.

We have these “issues.” Supposedly, we can separate Left from Right by way of these issues. An unwanted pregnancy; kill it, or put it up for adoption? Trouble is, a lot of these issues are manufactured. Repeal Obamacare? What will you replace it with? How do we “shore up Social Security”? And hey, experts say this-or-that county is back in trouble with the Covidiot numbers. So they should repeat the ineffective rituals there? Hey buddy, where’s your mask?

And some of these issues aren’t good litmus-test issues, because the sides switch. Hawks or doves? It used to be, The Left counseled caution, understanding, compromise and appeasement, “nuanced” and “shades of gray” thinking, while The Right was more ready to rattle sabers. Sometime in either the Trump or Obama eras, this flipped. Trump supporters would say that’s the benefit of having a strong presence in the White House; confronting the belligerents properly and with effective negotiation tactics, you lose the need to rattle sabers. I notice nobody else seems to be offering any cogent alternative explanation.

The Mobius Strip Twist with “questioning authority” confounds and perplexes me. Back when housewives spent weekend afternoons cooking roasts for their husbands, who were out in the driveway changing oil in the family sedan, and beer cans were steel and had pull tabs — this was easy peasy. The Left meant questioning authority, up to and past the point of anarchy. Now The Left means fawning obeisance to St. Anthony and not-questioning any of his most questionable dictates. The Right, meanwhile, having been lied to about anything and everything over the years, and having noticed, scrutinizes everything and when they’re criticized for this, they scrutinize the criticism. The two sides have switched; they were emphatic in their positions before, and are even more emphatic about their newer positions now. What happened? I can form some a theory about it, several in fact. But none of them justify my complete confidence. I’m open to the ideas of others.

Most to all of the other issues melt down into the now familiar non-form and non-shape puddles of nonsense and goo. And that includes everything economic: Whatever you’re experiencing that’s good, our side gets the credit, and so far we’ve received short shrift on that. Not getting the credit we deserve. Whatever you’re experiencing that’s bad, blame the other guys. Both sides argue this way. The few positions that emerge that appear to be actual positions, are really just historical artifacts from this-or-that highly visible party-aligned figure, usually a President, having done something out in the open with great fanfare. And we argue about whether that was a good idea or not.

That all is prelude to my main point, which is this: Sometime over the last several years, like forty of them give or take — sometime since “supply side economics” or “voodoo economics” — positions on issues lost their definitional power to indicate to us what a party, faction or ideology was supporting or opposing. We see this now all too clearly, as “Trump is worse than Hitler and must be kept from power” has become a dominant “issue.” Then we have this derivative issue of the two assassination attempts against him this summer, and what culpability the loudmouths have in motivating that after calling him Hitler all these years. As issues go, this one doesn’t look difficult or murky, to me; how many times can you publicly call a man Hitler, before someone decides to do something about it?

And does it really make sense to evade responsibility, ducking behind the heat-shield of “one man’s words are not another man’s action,” after burning off months and years going on and on about “Trump incited an insurrection on January 6”?

But to go on all this time pegging Donald Trump as an “existential threat to our democracy” and threatening violence against him, and fight-fight-fight; watch the assassination attempts unfold; and then, monologue some more about how the target‘s “inflammatory rhetoric” is to blame for these assassination attempts. It is, as Darth Vader might have said, impressive, most impressive. Indeed you are bonkers, as the Emperor has foreseen…

What we’re looking at here is this unwritten and unspoken policy among the American Left, that you never concede anything that would stir up a headwind against the flight path of your agenda. Never say what a decent person would say: “Crazy people are motivated by a fuzzy confluence of many different factors, and the possibility exists that my words contributed. I will try to be more mindful of my rhetoric in the future.”

The cult forbids it. Instead deny, deny, deny, and on your way back from denying, do what damage you can against The Target. Inside the echo chamber I’m sure it looks like something that makes a lot of sense: Trump is to blame for the assassination attempts on Trump! He needs to tone down his irresponsible rhetoric!

Outside the echo chamber though, it looks like what it is. Nuts.

The thought that occurs to me is, maybe we’re in a new era now and we’re no longer voting on issues at all. If we reward this absolute and unyielding reluctance to accept any responsibility, we are bound to see a lot more of it. I can think of no quicker way to make all of America look like the worst of our blight-infested, crumbling, democrat-run and economically destroyed inner cities. Surveying the hundreds and hundreds of those, you find that’s the key ingredient to the deterioration: Lack of accountability among those who wield the greatest influence. Oh no, nothing wrong with my decisions. Oh no, nothing wrong with my statements or actions in office. Oh no. Can’t be that. It must be climate change.

Issues have given way to maturity levels.

These are the people who grew up telling mommy that actually, what I was doing was putting the cookie back into the jar. And unfortunately, we are left to surmise, mommy bought it and in so doing reinforced to the sneaky little shit that he can equivocate and prevaricate his way out of anything and everything.

A generation, or two generations maybe, came and went.

And now this is the true difference between the “parties.” One side, embarrassed in public repeatedly by the highly visible debacles involving Jussie Smollett, Hunter Biden’s laptop, “Russia Russia Russia,” Steele Dossier, Mueller Report…concedes nothing. Not even as a throwaway prelude, palliative packaging material to cram in before the word “but” on the way to making a stronger, opposing point. They won’t even do that. True cult thinking.

I mean, you try it. Facing down a Trump hating leftist, challenge them to concede there never were any prostitutes hired to pee on a bed. Be completely up front with them. “My litmus test for a cult is, that you can’t concede stories were told, and given high visibility, about Trump and they turned out to be false. Let’s see if you can concede just one of those.” See if they can admit it was a falsehood, even given that. They won’t do it. It’s less of a concern that the cult be exposed, than that they be kicked out of it.

And we the electorate — whether we realize it or not — sit in judgment of this when we cast our votes. We give signals about tactics, whether we should see more of them or less of them. What we reward and what we punish, determines what will be deployed in future campaigns. When I say, in politics, “cause is effect, and effect is cause,” I’m talking about that. When you see bizarre campaign tactics used that weren’t known or even imaginable just a few years ago, that’s because someone tried it for the first time, and it worked. The mud stuck to the wall.

We’re voting on maturity levels, and on cult thinking. We’re sending signals about how the country overall does its thinking. How grown-up of a society we are.

Issues are effectively dead, or are at least dying.

That’s my thought.

When I was a child, we were a nation at war although it didn’t always feel like it. It was an unpopular war. This had an effect of defining what “Left” and “Right” meant. Right was law-and-order; you did what you were told. Left meant you were always ready for that confounding moment when obeying the law meant doing something immoral, and your moral code imposed on you an obligation to flout the law. “Civil disobedience” they called it.

The division started when people on The Left stopped being ready to flout the law, and started being eager to flout it. It intensified with the Watergate Scandal, which culminated in an impeachment showdown, with Congress against the President. The Law against The Law. It was a confusing time.

Not so confusing, though, as now. The Left remains eager to flout the law, but this eagerness to apply critical thinking where their opposition had abandoned it — it’s simply not there. Perhaps it was mythical in the first place. “Joe Biden’s running, don’t even question it because Kamala is dead weight” replaced, in a matter of minutes, with “Kamala is the best thing since sliced bread and so is Stable-Boy Tim.” Nobody can sell the idea that this twisty-turn, in a single day, en masse, is the result of individual thinking. Nobody tries. They just memory-hole all the relevant events and pretend it never happened.

And the masks! It’s 2024, you’re still walking around with a mask?

How obedient.

It seems we’re learning something about civil disobedience, about rebelling. Seems the human genome can only rebel against one authority figure. Once the rebellion is entirely triumphant and the old authority figure is displaced by a new one, you get complete unquestioning obedience, up to and past the milepost of immorality, into the realm of the absurd.

I’m no longer a spring chicken. I have a head full of gray hair, my Dad died last fall and now my brother and I are senior patriarchs of the clan. And yes, when I sleep wrong I’m in pain for the next two or three months. Feeling the years. But it seems my entire lifespan has been sucked up into a single lesson about authority, law-and-order, and rebellion. I’m still not entirely clear on what I’ve been learning for it looks like nobody else is clear on it either.

But from all I’ve seen of it, the rebellion is not, after all, rigidly attached to any kind of moral code. From what I’ve seen, it’s just rocking the boat for the sake of rocking the boat. The very act of substituting one authority figure with another, is the whole point. Once that’s done, without fail, obedience is restored. More strident, unthinking and slavish than any obedience that came before.

And throughout it all, and beyond, the “rebels” think they’re rebels. Fine, upstanding, moral-code-living, stout hearted badass rebels.

It’s almost cute.