Others have taken their shots at this. They’ve provided all sorts of answers: Bad boys are confident, they make their own rules, or you’re imagining it all, or, or, or. My own reading is that women are people and people are flawed. And it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem, because we’re just too affluent. We are victims of our own success.

One of my ongoing concerns is that following the end of World War II, life in the western world has become softer, although a lot of people don’t think so and have reason not to think so. But it’s true overall, and as a result of this softness our evolving cultures have lost focus. This can be debated, but not reasonably. The spectacle of poor put-upon people who need free health care, food stamps, job training and child care, etc. etc. etc. lining up around the block for the latest $2,000 phone is proof enough of our skewed priorities.

I came of age during the transition. My brother and I were raised in a strict, Protestant, Scandinavian-reflecting household. And I can see back then, and the moment in which I’m typing this sentence, every single minute in between, society as we have known it has been embroiled in this ongoing debate: Are women attracted to jerks? Do nice guys really finish last?

And it’s like any other ongoing debate.

We have one answer blasted at us from all directions, sustained by some unseen force, volume amped up to eleven.

And then we have the truth, which is the opposite of that.

We shouldn’t be debating whether or not women are attracted to jerks. It’s a silly waste of time. We should be immersing ourselves in the question of why.

Children, back in the old days, were disciplined. Today we think back on that with horror. Smacking in the butt. The generation before, smacking in the butt with a device built for butt smacking, like a paddle. Before that, bare butt cheeks and you cut your own branch. Welts. It’s all child abuse! Build the perfect society by getting rid of it! Well, today we have problems and the problems come from children not being disciplined.

Back then, children were disciplined, and women did not pick bad boys. They picked whoever was likely to afford them a lifetime of prosperity, or failing that, at least of some measure of security. And their fathers did the picking. Now fathers are mostly absent, reduced to child support checks, and their mothers are too distracted by their dating life as a single mom to attend to replacement-fatherhood, or for that matter motherhood. Discipline is gone and parents are gone too. Girls go after the bad boys and then deny they’re doing it. This has become the enduring symbol of the girl with “daddy issues.”

This has been noticed and complained about by others more articulate than me.

After being told for literally a lifetime “Actually, girls want nice boys” and seeing throughout that lifetime that reality is the opposite, a new thought occurs to me.

Yes, parental involvement is a factor, and has been in retreat. Discipline is a factor, and it has been in retreat. But there is something else.

“Do X, because Mom and Dad want you to do X” is not the deciding factor. It never was that.

Kids did not think “I’d better do it, or my butt will get whacked.” If corporal punishment is the source of discipline, and it is proper, it should be done maybe once or twice throughout the *entire* childhood. If it’s routine, it’s abuse — and people have always thought that. I wasn’t around a century ago. But I know of no solid evidence that contradicts this.

Also, there have always been conflicts between parents and children. It’s an open question, to me, whether back in the day children did things just because their parents wanted them to do those things. I’ve been told so, it seems to be the case, but I don’t really know that for sure.

Here’s my deep thought:

I think, back in the olden days, when your parents wanted you to do something, it was an implicit part of the message “And then you will enjoy this affluence and/or financial security.” This resonated even if & when it was entirely unspoken. Because starvation was a real concern. After we made some inroads in this battle to drive famine from the planet forever, we found this was a long slow slog and there were still hungry people. Then, the prospect of actual starvation was replaced by simple financial distress. Month left at the end of the money.

Bit by bit, generation by generation, people worried about that less and less. The consequences of running out of money and exhausting credit, were tapered down, blunted, diluted. Although you wouldn’t know that from talking to people. A lot of people think they’re still suffering. But their great grandparents aren’t around to compare notes on it.

People aren’t really worried about starving to death.

But here’s the key point: If they are worried about it; what their parents have to say about things, has very little to do with addressing that concern. Parents do not talk to their children about how to be rich. It seems selfish. In those rare households where such conversations do take place, it’s got something to do with going to college. Got your fund all saved up, get in there and pull out a decent grade point average, then get that good job. That’s it.

The rest of the parental advice is something like “So when are you going to give me some grandchildren?” The ‘rents are silly, can’t do math, I can’t even afford my apartment rent so let’s find a way to terminate this phone call and then I have to clock in at my second job.

It’s tougher for the girls, I think. We’re just gaslighting the boys into “Be the kind and considerate well dressed little gentlemen, Windsor Knot in your tie and handkerchief in your pocket, shoes properly shined and the girls will flock to you” and leaving it up to us to learn this is the exact opposite of what’s real. The girls are being hounded out of any connection between their financial prospects, and the character & ability of some man. No, those two things are to remain entirely disconnected. You must not connect them. Must not must not must not!! Men are to be easily replaced. Even after you’ve had kids with them. In fact, especially then, because each child is a claim on his wallet, which is the only good thing about him, while you go shopping for another man.

But even with alimony and child support, man-shopping and man-exchanging is expensive.

We end up with these teeming throngs of single moms, competing with each other for a “good man.” And they hear their current woes are because they chose the jackass, like all women do. You can’t blame them for retorting with anecdotes. “No, I’ve always wanted a good man. I married him and he changed.”

We’re supposed to empathize with the women. Well, that’s true, we should. And it works. If you put a little work into it, you can see things from their perspective, and it is different. They didn’t pick the bad boy. Or if they did, they didn’t realize it. They weren’t lying about their motivations. They were genuinely surprised.

But — they didn’t pick the fella the way their great great grandfathers picked out their great grandfathers for their great grandmothers. They didn’t do it out of a fear of starvation.

These modern women, who are picking a “good man, not a bad one,” as they come of age and are ready to start dating…not wanting to be a slut, not wanting to be an OnlyFans model, not up for the feminist drivel, wanting men and women to get along, wanting to marry one man and have all her children by that one man, wanting to start a sensible, sane household…how do they pick the guy today?

“He makes me laugh.”

See, we not only have lost our fear of starving to death. The ‘rents could be threatening to cut the children out of the will; or, maybe, enticing them with an implied promise to include them, or reinstate them. The attachment to future financial prospects can be that clearly defined, and the kids still aren’t going to listen. We’re too removed from starvation. Victims of our own success, like I said up top.

This is true even in right-wing, fundamentalist Christian, God-fearing households. From the woman’s consideration, as well as the consideration of parents who counsel their children about what kind of mate to pick. Parental guidance has little to do with financial footing in the future. Closest we come to that, now, is “Make sure you get, and/or that he has gotten, a good college education with a high GPA.”

But that has very little to do with solvency anymore. The diploma has been reduced to an emblem showing you’ve been properly indoctrinated to “Diversity is our strength,” “There are 53 genders” and “America was founded in 1619 to preserve slavery.”

We’ve won the war against famine.

It could be the worst thing that ever happened to us. Especially our women.

Pretend for a minute that inter-class animosities do not exist. There is no resentment felt by women toward men or vice versa, no rancor between blacks and whites, gays and straights, t.r.a.n.n.i.e.s and “cis,” management and labor, rich and poor, Christians and Muslims, atheists and pious…

People who do and do not approve of pineapple on pizza…

Marvel fans and DC fans…

There isn’t even any conflict between Bible-thumping holy-roller Republicans, and prurient South Park watching mutherfuckers like me.

There are only foreign relations issues, and domestic issues.

The United States, fully United, trudging off to the voting booth to figure out in the midterms what to do about issues concerning the United States. Imagine if you can, it’s easy if you try…

The first thing that should be of immediate concern, is in this alternate universe, what we know as The Left has entirely disappeared. We would be voting on a passive versus active approach to disarming Iran and keeping Iran disarmed. But, we would be in complete agreement that we do need to keep Iran disarmed. We would be voting on whether to increase our refinement capacity for diesel fuel, or to accelerate our shift to alternative fuels. But, we would agree we have a shortage and we need to treat it like one. Also, if we’re shifting to alternative fuels, let’s get those alternative fuels actually working first before we abandon anything in favor of them.

There would be no push to socialism. None of these absurd attacks on “the capitalist system.” We’ve become accustomed to all these angry young people and poor people thinking they could make it better and maybe even afford a few luxuries, if other people weren’t out to make a profit. But if they’re honest, that’s not a belief, it’s just resentment. Resentment doing what it does, poisoning and weakening the decision-making process.

The other thing that should concern us is that things would be awfully quiet. Like, everywhere. In spoken conversation, in printed and electronic news, in social media. It would pipe down, or be replaced by something else. And this should be a source of alarm. We have accepted, bit by bit, that it’s somehow okay for a large and growing majority of our information content is nothing more or less than a call to arms, to band together and do as much damage as possible to — that guy. That other guy.

We wouldn’t have any of that.

We would all be what, in this universe, we call “Republicans.” “Extreme right wing” people.

All of us.

Seems every state in the union is red+blue the same way. All these vast sprawling acres of farmland, populated, sparsely, by sensible red-state voters with these super tiny super dense speckles of city voting blue. The elections are contests that determine whether these tiny dense speckles of blue voters can outvote these sparsely populated sprawling swaths of red voters.

And whether or not that happens, is determined in large part by how close to the coastline the state is. Check the map. The landlocked states, by and large, are “red” states…even though each and every single one has cities that vote blue. They just got outvoted by the red. And then the coastline states are blue states. They also have their red-state farmland, but it got outvoted by the cities.

Now why is that?

I keep hearing there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties” but clearly that cannot be true. Population density has an effect on the prospects of the one party, but not the other. Proximity to the coastline, similarly, has an effect on the one but not the other.

The blue state voters say “We’re gonna follow the science!”

Do you have to neglect science in order to farm an acre of corn? This seems unlikely.

How come the blue-staters take over the places where you can smell the salt air of the Pacific, or the Atlantic? What’s up with that? Do you have to believe “Trans women are women!!” in order to maintain and launch a boat? This also seems unlikely.

Boats take work. Maintaining a city takes work. Do blue-staters work? I see a lot of them are on welfare. Some are living like Michael Stivic on All in the Family, going to get a job someday, but right now want to “help people” by protesting for Black Lives Matter and wearing pink knitted caps to the latest march on Washington. You may argue these are important activities, but they don’t seem to have much to do with scraping barnacles off a boat hull, or coordinating the traffic lights at an intersection or the collection of garbage from the dumpsters.

I watch people argue politics and I notice something.

They talk past each other. If the issue is high profile, with heat pressure and passion on both sides, along with sincere belief on both sides, you can tell there isn’t going to be any compromise or meeting-in-the-middle because the two sides are after different things. One side is concerned with the outcome of a given policy change — what is the likely end-state? And what is the desired end-state? What causes what?

And the other side isn’t concerned about any of that. They just want to look good to others who already think the same thing. They’re not even talking to the person at the other end of the conversation.

I think, when you have a certain number of people per square mile, or more, people start to fixate on how they look to others. They start to neglect expected outcomes, desired end-states, cause-and-effect. That stuff starts to go out the window. And, when you neglect those things for awhile, you start to form an addiction to services. You don’t grind and brew your own coffee; you become accustomed to giving your order to a “Barista” and waiting for your name to be called.

This addiction to services, and the desire to show off for others, makes people into liberals.

They don’t dominate the coastal areas because they like doing the work of scraping barnacles off the hulls. They’re not after the work that comes with proximity to the seashore. They’re after the perks. They like the cushy comfortable lifestyle. They like the inflated salaries — and, welfare benefits.

They don’t congregate by the sea to do the work.

They take over the place, like grubs taking over a rotting wet log deep in the forest.

Conversely, where the population is sparse, there is going to be a paucity of services. No Caramel Americano Machiatto with a shot no room for cream. No, out in the farmland you “grind” the beans with a baggy and a hammer then you strain water from a pan.

So no liberals. They want their services. They don’t want to make their own avocado toast.

And, they don’t care about outcome — unless the outcome has something to do with winning elections. Apart from that, they care a lot more about belonging. Don’t ostracize me when it comes time to figure out who’s to be ostracized. Kick out that other guy. I’m a good person. You can tell. I use pronouns and I want to legalize abortion all throughout the third trimester.

If you have a list of chores you have to do, and one of the items on your list is “plant what you’re going to be eating a year from now,” it changes you. You have to look at everything differently.

Liberals pay eight dollars every morning for their frothy hot syrupy milkshakes that are supposed to have something to do with “coffee”…then bitch and complain about how impossible it is to pay off their student loans.

You can’t be the only guy living on a 40-acre parcel, going through life that way. It isn’t going to work. You’re going to have to be more practical about things, just to survive.

And, you’re going to end up believing in God. Your dependence on Him and His good graces is going to be much more clearly defined. And there will be a lot less noise to distract you.

I remember from my school assignments, or those intelligence tests, somewhere in those years there were sections of “Too much information.” This wasn’t a reference to things like “We were so happy my husband and I had sex for the first time in months.” Or, “I have trouble buying pants because my left nut hangs lower than my right one.” Not like that at all. They’d ask questions like: Roberto has twelve marbles. He lost five. The marbles are blue. How many marbles does he have left? You’d have to pick out which bit of information was irrelevant to answering the question.

I thought at the time the point was to assess reading comprehension. But in more recent years I realize there are people who can keep drama separated from their logical thinking, and then there are people who can’t. “Too much information” is a situation that doesn’t exist, for the latter, because everything has to have an effect on the outcome.

You don’t see it with marbles and math.

But you do see it with…”Lindsay Clancy was framed. Her husband Patrick is actually the one who murdered the children. His timeline doesn’t add up. And Lindsay didn’t get the help she needed because the system failed her.”

And…”Christa Pike has been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The execution failed tonight. She is in agony.”

Twelve minus five is seven. It doesn’t matter what color the marbles are.

Granting the supposition that Patrick Clancy murdered his own children and then successfully framed his wife Lindsay…it doesn’t matter if the system failed her or she didn’t get the help she needed. If we’re accepting that her husband did it, that would mean she’s innocent. Innocent and cuckoo, innocent and sane, innocent and not getting the help she needs…it doesn’t matter. And it also doesn’t matter if she’s guilty, because getting the help she needs, or not, she’s still dangerous. But let’s not go down that rabbit hole which has been explored plenty enough already.

Christa Pike committed murder and was sentenced to death for it. The sentence will be carried out…hopefully. One less murderer on the planet. She’s in agony? So what?

We’ve gone down the road a ways, of normalizing this flailing about looking for any little piece of gravel that can be thrown in the cogs. Any wrench to throw in the gears, anything to derail rational thinking, anything to nudge people into emotional reasoning. The marbles are blue — that changes the answer. Eh, no it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. Lindsay Clancy, railroaded by her husband, can’t get the help she needs. What’s it matter? And we’re going to remove Christa Pike from existence because she’s a murderer.

We don’t care what she learns from her punishment. Or whether she’s in pain. She’s not supposed to be alive anyway.

For the past several decades, there are more murders. That’s because we treat murderers with compassion, empathy, forgiveness…which the families of their victims never consented to giving. And we look for excuses to unlink their crimes from any deliberations about their moral compasses.

Meanwhile, people guilty of lesser crimes, like littering or jaywalking, must have meant to do it. No “not guilty by reason of insanity” for them. We don’t accept the excuse that they weren’t thinking it through all the way, they’re just guilty. And we don’t care about whether they’re in pain or having a bad day. They just owe the fine, period. Or the jail term. Maybe if they show up to fight it the judge will cut it in half, but apart from that, if they’re guilty they’re guilty and they have to pay their debt to society.

It should be the other way around.

It should work like…I saw the wrapper hit the ground, and darn it, the wind was blowing it around, I’m not as young as I used to be, and I was in a hurry…I got ahead of myself. Okay. Fine suspended, case dismissed. Like that. And then as we work our way through these infractions, up to and including manslaughter, we respond to this increasing severity with — apathy. Okay, so you had a rough childhood. So? You killed someone. Your childhood is like the color of Roberto’s marbles. Doesn’t affect the ultimate outcome. Not even a little bit.

In fact, if you’re hooked on drugs or had a bad childhood and you haven’t got what it takes to get that under control, that’s all the more reason why you should be removed.

I don’t know why we have this backwards. I really don’t.

Observation: Throughout the summer and fall of a midterm year, if the President of the United States happens to be a Republican and male, we marinate in a stew of high profile “news” stories that emotionally divide males and females. And the opinions expressed about these stories would seem to weigh in on an imagined controversy about which of the two sexes should be…something.

No one actually says “Get rid of all the men” or “Get the women back in the kitchen where they belong.” But, the observations I see people making would be pretty useless, and I think even according to them, if the issue under consideration is anything other than “Get rid of this or that sex once and for all.” It’s really a sad thing. We can’t do without the one or the other, we need both. And I think anyone with a working brain understands this.

Hey…isn’t there a song about this?

Reuben, Reuben I’ve been thinking
What a great world this would be
If the boys were all transported
Far across the Northern sea!

Rachael, Rachel I’ve been thinking
What a glad world this would be
If the girls were all transported
Far across the Northern sea!

I’m seeing a lot of people comparing the Lindsay Clancy trial to the “Cornell 7,” fists-on-hips, glowering with disdain upon men who voiced an opinion about a trial that’s been grinding away all these weeks and months about a mother who confessed to murdering her own children. And are now quiet about this Cornell incident that was thrust into the news only hours and days ago, chock full of observations made by others that contradict each other. Of course that’s wrong. Sensible people are going to be quiet while the dust is still swirling, and you have to wait awhile for the “That’s been debunked” rebuttals to stop flying thick and fast.

Are women oppressed, really? Weighed down by a “patriarchy”? Suffering from some ingrained bias that’s loud about female misdeeds like murdering your own kids, but silent in other situations where males are the transgressors? Hmmm. It’s hard to see any group of people as oppressed, when some among them seek to win arguments simply by scolding, clearly accustomed to their class instantly winning arguments merely by expressing disapproval. Is that what oppressed people do?

I’ll go along with the notion there is something terribly wrong, recently wrong, with men. We’ve been changing what it means to be a man. In times past, you looked around for one when you had to lift something heavy or cross a busy street. Now we have these victim-minded women expressing how they see men as menaces and you know, they do have some underlying evidence to offer that’s not just smoke and mirrors, and that should concern everyone.

We used to have the Boy Scouts of America. Now we don’t.

You can thank progressives and lawyers for that.

As always, if we’re going to argue about this stuff, then let’s do it honestly. This popular visualization of men as threats is not entirely based on experiences. It’s been fed to us. There are people out there, who have been given soapboxes and megaphones, who like the idea that men are monsters. They can’t get enough of it. They work hard to broadcast it when and where they can, based on nothing but their attraction to the idea; they fetishize it.

And they destroy company stocks with it:

These people who are so enamored of the idea that men need a good Internet-scolding to put them back on the straight and narrow, or to “overthrow patriarchy,” or banish all the boys to the Northern Sea, are not all women. What they really are, by and large, is cowardly. “Men are bad” is the one thing you can say in an uncontrolled forum that isn’t likely to pick up any energized dissent, and if it does, you can be assured you’ll win and the dissent will lose. Ankle-biting the male sex is punching down, even though a lot of people like to see it as the opposite. Castigating men is quick, easy, fun, socially uplifting and doesn’t cost anything.

But comparing the Cornell situation to the Clancy trial is lunacy.

I see a lot of resentment expressed toward anyone who advances a defense of men beginning with the three words “Not All Men.” As in, not all men are gang rapists, or protectors of rapists. Supposedly, the Cornell incident is an indictment against that, as some fifty frat boys were aware of what was happening and did nothing to stop it. This is not beyond dispute. Time will tell.

But you know, not all women are on board with this man-scolding, and not all women are defending Lindsay Clancy or trying to get her acquitted.

People would do well to remember that for the last hundred years give or take, this friction between men and women has been engineered. It’s “Astroturf”; looks like a grassroots movement, really isn’t. People aggravate these tensions so they can sell things. It works.

That’s a reliable boilerplate-explanation for when you see things over and over again, that should go away, but don’t. That’s the reason why, usually. You’re seeing it over and over because it works.

I found this incredibly discouraging:

Lindsay Clancy verdict watch: Jury ends second day without verdict, will return Monday
By Peter Yankowski, Lisa Backus, Austin Mirmina, Staff WritersUpdated Aug 28, 2026 6:10 p.m.

The jury of nine women and three men in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial have been dismissed for the weekend after not reaching a verdict on Friday.

The jurors deliberated the entire day Friday after three hours of deliberations on Thursday. So far, they only asked to see the Connecticut native’s prescription medicine and the knife prosecutors say she used in her suicide attempt after killing her three children in 2023.

People who think women are generally oppressed and in need of empowerment for equalization, want the murdering mom acquitted, or as close to acquitted as it might be possible to arrange. At first blush this might seem to make sense. It really doesn’t. Our attempts to equalize the various supposedly oppressed groups often meet up with this problem: Empower the oppressed, means up with the oppressed, and up with the oppressed ultimately means none among them can ever be held responsible for anything. They didn’t do it, and if they did do it they must have had a good reason. Either way, just forget about it. We all just go on with our lives.

This is the very definition of what our great grandparents used to call “no accounts.” People who can’t be held accountable for anything. It was not a term of endearment.

What happens if women, mothers in particular, become “no accounts” by way of mercy for Lindsay Clancy? It would rip a giant gaping hole in the fabric of western civilization, assuming it hasn’t already. This is a core tenet: We men, who are physically stronger, protect our women so that the women can protect our children. A new imperative that we have to protect the children from the women would drive a wedge — even further — between the two sexes.

We haven’t had to grapple with something like this before. Men have to wonder what’s going to happen when they leave their children home with mom? And if the worst happens, in the mind of many loudmouths, it’s the man’s fault and for no particular reason, just feels.

Let’s be clear on this point: I’m not calling for Ms. Clancy to be held responsible for murdering her children or, if this holding of responsibility does not come to pass, for the status of moms and women to be lowered as a consequence. It’s something that simply is. This is how it works. You’re responsible or else you aren’t. People talk a great deal about how we need to put more thought into postpartum depression and what it can do to these moms; well, if that thinking is that there’s hormonal drama going on here that men can’t ever understand, potentially driving the mom to do a thing like this — it doesn’t mean men need to, or are somehow obliged to, withhold their opinions about it. Quite the opposite.

This is something that gives a lot of people, who have lots of opinions and lots to say about those opinions, no small amount of trouble. They can’t quite seem to grasp it. You have influence over something, you’re “empowered,” there’s another side to that, a burden to be carried. In fact all authority should be like that: A pain in the ass. This isn’t the first time I’ve been given cause to wonder about how people think about things like this. They work so hard at “fighting for” that judgment call they can make, a final verdict subject to appeal by no one else; well, things might not turn out so great. There might be a disaster. Whose fault is it? If you’re working so hard to make sure no one else has anything to say about it…guess what.

There has been an acceleration lately of this kind of confusion. Things have, in recent years, on a variety of different fronts, become unwoven. It’s like some kind of chain reaction. Someone somewhere (can’t find it) made a joke about how it all started with Pluto no longer being a planet. However you think of that particular object, it’s named after the Roman God of the Underworld, a deity associated with malice and vengeance. Maybe, just maybe…we should try promoting it to planet status, hanging back for a bit and seeing what happens?

I myself had begun to take in some uneasy vibes just the year before, that all of the important things that really affect us were about as good as they were going to get for awhile, and were showing signs of coming undone, pointing us in the direction of a sustained down-slide. It’s interesting to me that these bits of evidence I listed some twenty-one years ago, seemingly important at the time, are by and large not even remembered today. But, the deterioration happened. It’s not a Republican/democrat deterioration. Just a sort of degradation in how we think of problems and how to solve them.

We used to put a lot of importance on leadership.

What is that, exactly?

It occurs to me that my leaders have all been at work, and at work I accept money for having stepped into a status of whatever. You want to order me around and have me do dumb stupid things, set the stage for a “Morgan was wrong wrong wrong” beatdown, have at it. I won’t tolerate it anywhere else. But if you’re paying the piper, you get to call the tune. So on the job, I have leaders. They tell me what to do and I do it.

Why else do we listen to leaders? We should think about this. It’s a question of some importance, much like “Why do we punish moms who have murdered their children?”

You’re paid to do what they say. That’s good enough reason.

After that, there’s: Captain of the ship and owner of the ship. Two more reasons. “I get to say what happens, because it’s my boat.” Or, “Because if it hits a shoal and sinks, I go down with it.” Ownership, and responsibility. Boss makes a decision I know is a stupid decision, I’ve already given my reasons why it’s stupid…in theory, if the worst comes to pass, he pays the price and I don’t. Company posts a skimpier profit, or a loss. I still get my paycheck.

Unless, of course, the company folds. So the “Captain goes down with his ship” has persuasive power, but it’s limited.

Why else?

One can pick up the message, spoken or not, that a mutiny would be futile. The crew will follow the Captain through hell or high water. Might as well go with the flow, he’s popular. Well, why is he popular? These are questions you’re not supposed to ask if he really is the Captain or if he really is signing your time sheet, but it’s still a question that exists and can draw in a number of different, but entirely valid, answers. It is said that of all our presidents, Bill Clinton was the most charismatic one. Some would say that honor goes to Barack Obama. Those two had it in common that their explanations of what they wanted to do, were consistently incoherent and weak. A Clinton speech or an Obama speech does not follow the rule of “Every paragraph must have a purpose”; they just drone on and on with a bunch of lilt and resonance, to be consumed eagerly by their adoring fans for an hour or two. But if they walk into a room, it is said, you want to look. If they speak, you want to listen.

So we have: He pays you; he owns the boat; he’s responsible and goes down with the ship if it sinks; he has the loyalty of your colleagues because of his mannerisms and charisma…

And then there is: Your chances of coming out of this in one piece are much higher, if you follow his orders, because of his experience and good judgment.

That last one is supposed to be the most important of all of them. And I dunno, maybe it’s President Obama who did this to us, but I can’t remember any leaders anywhere being qualified that way. In fact, it occurs to me that as I jotted down my prognostications that we were at a summit and due for a sustained sinking twenty-one years ago, I was working for a boss who did possess that particular advantage. A boss who knew, better than anybody else, what we were trying to do and could formulate our best strategies for getting it done.

I hope none of my bosses since then see this and take it the wrong way, but that’s the last boss I had who could make this claim. Unfortunately, he had a health crisis soon afterward, discovered the hard way he was a diabetic, and lost his spiritual and bodily vitality in the ensuing months as if cursed. At the beginning of 2008 he didn’t show up for work and we received word that he’d dropped dead, literally, at his home.

He changed my career for the better, I think. I was under the impression we were close friends, the company started to go through reductions in force and he “fought hard for you” I was told. I never had reason to doubt this. But when his health faded and the circles of trust were more clearly demarcated, it became equally clear I was not in them. Yet for attending to the job we were trying to get done, he stood by me when others did not. Well, I find that flattering.

But the point is, since then, with my bosses and everybody else’s bosses, during this stretch of time following the “summit” vibes, or Pluto being demoted, or Obama being elected, take your pick…everybody taking on some position of authority is supposed to just because. They own the boat, or they’re owed the boat — by — someone. People wonder why Trump has been elected twice, and you know, maybe that’s his draw. For all the people who reject him because they hate him, or who vote for him only reluctantly because they don’t like him, the question of “Why would anyone think of putting him in charge?” is answered, by those who would, the good old-fashioned way. It’s like Willie Garvin doing exactly what Modesty Blaise says, even though Garvin is a manly man and he isn’t a simp. The legacy leader, the old-fashioned leader. The experience and good judgment. Do what he or she says, and that’s your best shot at getting through this alive.

More than twenty years ago, this was commonplace. Leaders were leaders for good reasons.

Now it’s a rarity. Leaders are leaders for flighty, twisty, ethereal and strange reasons. The boss is the boss. Can’t do anything about it. So that settles that.

It becomes relevant when the boss tells you to do something dumb. Who’s responsible for the consequences of doing dumb things? The boss isn’t. You’re not. We just end up doing the dumb thing and hoping for the best.

And I’ve found California to be an excellent vantage point for watching this, for many reasons. But I suppose that’s a story for another day.

The point is, the leaders aren’t leading. And the moms aren’t going to be mom-ing. Or, we potentially aren’t going to think of them that way. Some among us already don’t think of moms that way. The moms are supposed to be victims. Unaccountable. If and when they strangle all the kids it will be someone else’s fault.

Not good.

Next week I’m turning sixty. And people are lining up, out the door and around the block, to find out what sort of lessons I’ve been learning in all that time.

Oops, check that. No they’re not doing that. But if they did…

It’s such a good question, I don’t need someone to ask it to start churning away, coming up with an answer. What’s the biggest lesson for me out of the past, let us say, forty-two years give or take. What’s really upturned my apple cart.

“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care” has emerged from the forty-five year fog with some unexpected weight to it. But that’s not exactly a surprise. I’d heard it, and I could see some truth in it at the very beginning. I may not have responded to it as well as I should have. So I learned. But as a true surprise? It doesn’t take the top slot.

I would say, to this imaginary line-up of people wanting to know what I’ve learned, my number one world-upside-down, pancake-flip epiphany would be something like…

The most important first step, before attending to an effort that is serious, is to purge the work area from those in attendance who are not serious. Offer them a hint, usher them out, deport them, defenestrate them. Maybe that comes off as cynical. But with team and group-think crammed down our throats these last several decades, it’s become a truth that hardens and emerges with prominence, becoming even more true, because we’re not allowed to openly acknowledge how true it is.

Some people are needed. Some people are not.

There are various messages people use to communicate “I am one of the unserious people who should be escorted out of the room before you start.” Griping about millionaires and billionaires hoarding all the wealth, is a good way to show you’re an unserious person. Serious people don’t need to worry about how much someone else has, or doesn’t have. They’re more worried about what people can do. And they don’t loot. Looting is what you do when you have a want or a need you can’t take care of yourself.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to their need.”

If you’re a manager, existing in the command chain somewhere — or, thinking you should be in it somewhere — a good way to show you’re an unserious person is to say things like “perception is reality.” There is some truth in this. “Command chain,” these days, is a string of salesmen selling things to each other, and yes perception is important when you sell things. But if the work is important, salesmanship should retreat as a priority. Sound space, I have found, is a limited resource. When people are consuming huge pieces of it to restate the obvious, it’s as good a sign as any that the wrong people are in charge. That there’s too much influence being wielded by unserious people.

I’m grateful for the time I have spent around salesmen. I learned a lot. I wish I didn’t see them as antagonists, like I did back in the early days. “Nothing happens until the sale is made,” their little wooden plaques displayed to all who were interested, along with all who were not. Well, that’s true. But to be effective as a salesman, you have to hold the mark’s attention. If you don’t do that, you’re not selling, you’re just making a lot of noise, wasting time and energy, probably being an irritant. And salesmen fall into this trap when they show they’re unserious people.

One way to show you’re unserious when you’re making your pitch, is to make a lot of noise that doesn’t mean anything. Every paragraph should have a purpose. Every sentence within the paragraph should have a purpose. Ideally, any one part of it would cause a huge structural catastrophe if it were not there. And the target of the pitch should be aware of this, that being on the receiving end of each sentence, of each word, is a productive use of his time.

I’m grateful for having lived through Obama. Obama taught me the human genome is flawed, and probably limited, because we have this tendency to follow whoever is the most entertaining to watch. But these tend to be the unserious people. Throughout the millennia, humans have had a lot of things to say to other humans, but there are very few things more full of fluff and useless sound making than an Obama speech. Obama broke that “Every paragraph should have a purpose” rule, broke it again, broke it a few more times, then crushed it into fine dust beneath His heel. He was archetypal among unserious people.

But fun to watch.

That’s generally how it works. Charismatic types, who have the talent to compel large numbers of shallow-thinking listeners to focus on every word when every word is disposable, have developed that particular skill for a reason. There was, in their case, a need. They did a lot of babbling and babble was all there was to it. They nurtured and grew this talent, out of a need to make the chaff look like wheat.

It’s a funny thing — we argue about politics on social media or we see others doing it, and we think “When you’re on your death bed, are you going to value the time you spent doing this?” Good question. But people ask that, and they’ll go right back to following unserious people.

If I had regrets about spending my limited amount of time on the planet arguing about politics, such regrets dissipated six years ago with the China Virus debacle when we all became sheltered-in-place political playthings. You know that saying attributed to Pericles: Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you. Point for Pericles; that’s more or less exactly what happened. And so I don’t regret arguing about politics. This sixty-year-old is filled with regrets about following unserious people. If I’m looking at all those candles on the cake nursing some burning desire for a do-over that I can’t have, the truth is that said desire would be driven by that, rather than by the other.

Women need men.

Those are the three words, right now, most assured to draw a rebuke. An emphatic one, an instant one, and from everywhere. It is the one truth in life that people are most pressured, by way of a force both deep and broad, to reject. No no no, says the Loud Crowd. Women don’t need men, men need women. Or: Here’s a woman who doesn’t need men, and it only takes a single example to dismantle your blah blah blah yakkity yakkity yak yak yak…

Or: Some women might need men, but not nearly as much as men need women. That’s the important thing.

Well, no. Women need men, and while men might need women just as badly, that’s irrelevant. It isn’t a contest. If men need women, there’s no crisis brewing there because society overall is quite into acknowledging the need men have for women. But there is a problem, large and growing, with women needing men because we pressure ourselves into believing they don’t, when they do. It’s a house-on-fire, and we’re in the house, coming up with reasons to doubt that the house is on fire when we should be attending to the fire.

Women need men. There are some exceptions, but that’s what they are, exceptions.

Lately the Loud Crowd has come around to the idea that the men are suffering and injured from the cultural reforms of recent years. That looks like a step in the right direction, at least. But it isn’t. They’re not willing to go so far as to say “These reforms were in error.” No no no. The reforms, shoving the idea that women don’t need men down everybody’s throats, could not have been in error. They just leave the men wounded and agitated and lonely and sad; the solution is a “Covid Cares emoji” or something. Maybe a prescription of psychotropic drugs to help bridge those synapses.

Actually that’s a huge step in the wrong direction, not a tiny one in the right one. Women need men, and when they need men, what they need is the skills men have been developing as they transition from boy to man. Or — skills they *should* be developing. Well brace for a shock, because developing those skills is not all fun. Spreading the message that women don’t need men has been enormously damaging, because it’s incentivized these boys-becoming-men to skip the ritual.

We’ve kept the reprimands that “you did it wrong.” That’s always been key. But we’ve discarded everything else, including the “Now go back and do it again.” That’s been replaced with “Nevermind, I’ll do it.” So all that’s left is the reprimanding, and it takes more than that to grow a boy into a man.

Now it’s fashionable to worry a bit about the boy/man being hurt?

Don’t worry about that, I say. Worry about the women and girls being deprived of what men are supposed to be bringing.

Girls on Facebook speak with one voice now. They’re the wounded and incomplete ones. Women who are complete and whole, and capable of building lives with men, offering decent respect to men, are quiet. They’ve got too much to do. The ones making noise are making the noise about “choosing the bear.” Sounding off with a whole litany of complaints about how unsafe they feel around men, “Not all men but always a man” committing these various crimes and misdeeds. If it weren’t for men there might not be protection for women, but who would these women need protection from?

All sorts of giddy trash talking, looking on the surface like it points out a problem we need to solve, until you ask: How do we solve such problems? What are we to do about this? And if you take it seriously, the only answer that emerges is something like “Lock up all the men” although very few actually come out and say that. That’s the subtext. Women are living among men when they don’t want to live among men, but are forced to do so, and the women don’t need the men.

All false.

The truth is that if a woman had her life together and had everything working the way she wanted, and her one unfulfilled aspiration would be to self-isolate from men, she’d simply do that. We have an advanced society in which women can do that if they choose. Quite easily. We men have given women that. But to make this life complete, women still require manly skills. Just not manly presence.

You brute-force people into rejecting a truth, it becomes more true. And that’s where we are with “women need men.”

It’s more true than it was before, now that we have more men coming of age without the skills or the wherewithal or the rough-and-tumble that a real man is supposed to have. It’s created a scarcity. And you know what economics has to say about scarcity.

Women can step in and provide whatever and wherever the men are lacking, for whatever reason? Yes. There is some truth in this. And that’s where we are. The women have been stepping up and doing this. They’re very unhappy about it. Because women need men. The stronger women can get along without the men…the way your neck can get along without proper support from the pillow. But in the morning you’re really going to feel it, and that’s where the strong women are right now.

This neck ache was entirely preventable. Oh, it’s there. Just like a real ache, you may think you’re hiding it. But you can tell a woman who’s been rolling out those manly skills that should have been found in someone else. You can spot ’em a mile away. They’re not happy. Strong. Doing manly things. But, hurting, and worse than the men.

Still, we ask: What more can we do, to convince the hold-outs wherever they are, that women can do everything men can do?

Instead we should be asking: How did we get off on this kick? Now that we’ve raised multiple generations of boys to reach manhood without knowing how to change a tire or tie a square knot, and put our women in pain. What were we supposed to get out of this? What was the up-side supposed to be?

Women who can change tires and tie square knots? Sensitive men who are ready to retreat behind the line, and bloviate away about how redundant they are and how women can do everything they can do? Were those the prizes?

Okay. Got ’em, mission accomplished. It’s not that impressive.

Everyone wants to show how insightful they are. To be the first to intone that women can do everything men can do, or that the men are hurting and lonely and need a Covid-cares emoji or some drugs.

The truly insightful people who are first at noticing what’s true, are now noticing that we’ve gone as far as we can go with this. We’re at the end of a cul de sac and it’s time to execute the one-eighty and beat a hasty retreat.

Time to teach boys to become men again.

Because the women need it. So does everyone else.

Nobody talks about the real white male privilege.

After you spend a certain number of years on the planet, you come to be aware of three things:

1. A lot of people act like they’re making sensible decisions about what’s right or wrong, who’s got punishment or reward coming to ’em, where power should be invested…thinking for themselves…they think this right down to the marrow of their bones. But they’re really just engaging in tribe-think. Ingratiating themselves with this crowd or that crowd. Playing the game of “I’m your friend because I’m the enemy of that other guy who is your enemy.” They don’t even know they’re doing it.

2. “A lot of people” means a lot. This is the default. It is not an exception to the rule, it is the rule. People dish out rewards and punishments according to tribe-think, by default. Justice, fairness, sensible thinking, these are the exceptions.

3. Life gets so much easier when you filter out these people. Whittle down that friends list. Act like a member of the armed forces keeping guard, with rifle in hand, over state secrets. Trust but verify. Yes, I’m discriminating. You have to think like a grown-up to be my friend. Disagree with me if you want, single me out for punishment, but do it for the RIGHT reasons. Or else we don’t have to have anything to do with each other.

The straight white male privilege is: If people want to play this tribe game, your tribe is the first one they’re going to excoriate. It’s pretty consistent. So it’s not at all hard to pick out these people. They hate you already.

Winnowing down this friends list is as easy as falling off a log, for us straight white males. We just say “You don’t want to have anything to do with me? Fine. Your terms are acceptable.” And that’s it. No muss no fuss.

Gays…transgenders…blacks…”native Americans” and women…who have figured out the above three truisms and are struggling to get them implemented in their own lives…I dunno. I dunno how they even get started on it. It must be awful. A bunch of damn fair-weather friends and you have to figure out which ones are lying. Who’s only pretending to be your friend, so they can be someone else’s.

It would drive me bonkers. In a heartbeat.

Glad I’m a straight white male. A loathed, native-born, third-generation, Scandihoovian, meat eating carbon spewing always-wrong SWM.

It’s the nation’s semiquincentennial. That’s a fancy way of saying the 250^th birthday. It’s twenty-one years of me hearing “How much time do you spend blogging?” — which actually means — stop blogging! It’s a funny thing. We’ve got these people running around thinking the one thing we need to make the world better is fewer opinions. But not just from anybody. They’ve got targets picked out. People like me should be quiet with our opinions. Others can blast away.

I’ve been thinking about that, and it occurs to me that people my age were around for the bicentennial. That’s half a century of change, and it’s significant change. Hairpin-turn change, occurring across a relatively short span of time. It would be a crime for me to deprive the world of (more of) my opinions.

I see that things up for debate, back then, no longer are. The Death Penalty got yanked into the realm of controversy by a Supreme Court opinion, then another opinion went the other way. Today roughly half the states allow it, and if you live in one of those and it disturbs you so much, you can move to another. That’s the way if should have worked from the very beginning.

It’s difficult for me to convey to someone younger, who wasn’t around & aware at the time, what it was like listening to & watching the grown-ups squabble about this. People on both sides of it committed the sin of aligning some sort of “moral compass” to all the preening and bluster. The people who disagreed with me, wanting to get rid of capital punishment, were likely more guilty of this. They had so much invested in it. It was their entire argument: You were a better person if you wanted this ban, and you had forgotten your bearings if you opposed it. The bottom line I took away from all of it is that this is just so much faking. People opposed capital punishment to make themselves look good. If they really thought it was a moral litmus test, they’d still be making noise about it. They’re not all dead. So this is an example of something that arouses a great deal of theatrical outrage, but only because we’re living in the moment — or were living in it. Time cures things. When so many politicians’ career prospects are no longer dependent on the issue, we stop making noise about it. One side wins the other side loses, and things are settled. That’s how it works.

There are some things that were all settled fifty years ago, and since then become controversial, then got settled again — the wrong way. Same-sex marriage is still thought by any to be some kind of a “civil rights” or “discrimination” issue. That’s because of health care and life insurance benefits. Some insist it’s got to do with establishing a household, just like a man and a woman, for the purpose of raising children. I hold out hope someday we can fix that. Children are designed to need a female mother and male father; they can make it through childhood without one or the other, that’s true. But there’s a design, a good design has intent, and that’s the intent. To arrange the childhood of a stranger ahead of time missing one of these important ingredients and then swivel the focus onto other things, confident it will all work out in the end, is monstrous. It’s pure “pull pin drop grenade walk-away.” And we’ve been paying the price for such ramshackle engineering. But the insurance issue deserves our attention. Financial security for some shouldn’t rely on turning our definitions upside-down and pretending associations are real marriages, that aren’t that and can’t ever be that. Definitions are important. And they shouldn’t be dynamic. The people like me who insist on truisms that are so simple as to be irreducible, like “Things mean things,” shouldn’t be the bad guys.

Other things that were not up for debate, back then, somehow are now and nobody can explain why. The “capitalist system,” an oxymoron if ever there was one, is criticized fairly constantly. I guess rents are high and the young kids are having a tough time of it. So keeping capitalism is more open to question, when it’s no longer easy? That would mean we’re fair-weather friends to capitalism. That’s concerning because it suggests we’re fair-weather friends to freedom. We’re not supposed to be.

We’re not supposed to demand that every thing be easy-peasy, all the time, or else it’s not worth doing. We’re still Americans, right? Aren’t we better than that? Whatever happened to “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“? Hmmmm? Did that go somewhere?

My parents taught me that any references to the term “loser” were to be bundled together with all other discouraging and/or vulgar nouns and verbs, and dumped into a hole somewhere. We were a proper Scandinavian household, observing such niceties as “no politics sports or religion at this dinner table” and “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” As I wrote recently — and this is one of the things I’ve picked up in the last fifty years — we’ve overshot that mark. People are walking around being losers, thinking like losers, talking like losers, recruiting non-losers into the loser mindset and lifestyle, and they’re more than a little bit proud of it.

And then they’re going on social media to do the bragging. Forming these crowds of loser-wannabe people who are genuflecting before them as if they won something instead of losing. Meanwhile, these same people are shaming the winners. Blaming all their problems in life on Elon Musk’s new trillionaire status, and so forth. As if he cost them something by becoming one.

That’s going too far.

This is connected to the whole “debating capitalism” thing. The argument I’m hearing against capitalism is that someone somewhere can’t ever hope to achieve something…or, I can’t, and I’m too stupid to realize it. Well, the intervening fifty years have taught me what a loser looks like, and how important it is to spot them when you’re thinking about forming new associations. They’re pretty easy to spot.

And I’ve come to realize something:

Nobody makes a statue honoring a loser. Ever.

Except for one guy. Karl Marx.

I’ve come to realize this relatively recent push for Marxism, deep-but-not-broad back in 1976, but spreading like a puddle with a speed that arouses worry today, is more about notoriety than survival. You might say the goal is “Let’s see if we can get a statue built to some other losers besides that one guy.”

The thought pattern is well defined, if not articulated outright, even though it’s risible: Capitalism needs to go the way of the Dodo Bird. The amazing creativity of this new generation, or of just a few hardy individuals within it, having been missing from the human equation up until today, were not around to thwart this millennia-long barbaric practice of agreeing on prices of things and closing transactions. All this time we just needed a bright youngster, or Bernie Sanders, to point out the obvious to us, that everybody would be able to afford anything if everybody else would simply stop charging money for things.

People thought that fifty years ago. Some people. The way some people thought they should kidnap Patty Hearst, rob banks or plant pipe bombs at the U.S. Capitol. It was fringe-kooky stuff.

Now, it’s slightly left-wing.

So when cranky old people like me start griping about how things are going and babbling about Helena Handbasket, maybe you can start to see our perspective. But I’m one of the cranky old people maintaining some faith. The pendulum swings wildly, from this weird endpoint to that one as people run around saying silly things, trying to sound smart; but it seems to more-or-less consistently return to the center. So hopefully this idea of getting rid of capitalism will resolve the same way as the idea of getting rid of the death penalty. That would be ideal. If you don’t like it, move away and don’t participate in it. The rest of us will continue to execute those who have demonstrated they’re a danger to others so long as their hearts continue to beat, and buy, sell, make profits, invest, deliver goods and provide services. All the things that keep a healthy society functioning.

It occurs to me that we have a lot of loud, brassy people walking around among us, making lots of noise, giving off the impression they speak for everybody, who are especially loud when they’re agitated and apprehensive. And they deal with these apprehensions by passing judgment on what others are doing, micro-managing, propounding narratives about who’s building good things and who’s wrecking things. Who’s showing ultra-competence in what they do, and who’s wandering around going derp derp derp knocking things over like a bull in a China shop. Which Captain of a ship is steering the ship right, which one has hit the shoals and has to go down with the ship or is just about to, which one should be relieved of command the sooner the better…

…highly inaccurately.

The Unites States’ First Holy Emperor, Barack Hussein Replacement Jesus Obama, stands as perhaps the first and best example of this. The clear and uncontested dominant prevailing narrative is that He was the leadership we had long been needing, showing us all the wisdom we needed to be shown, picking us all up and carrying us to where we needed to be taken. And yet, nine years after He left office, what’s His legacy? Where? Someone tell me. It’s amazing when you take it all in and survey the…well, no other word comes to mind. Wreckage. He made health care more expensive. You can squeeze out some metrics of good things, tortured ones, if you work at it hard enough. The most popular one is “a record-breaking 73 consecutive months of economic growth” or some such thing, which I’ve long thought to be sadly amusing. We had such a record standing? We want it broken the way it was broken between 2009 and 2017, really? That’s the way we want to see ’em go?

No. Answer to a question no one was asking. Obama didn’t build anything. In fact it’s worse than that: He represented people who don’t build things, and want to give orders to the people who do. That’s how it worked in the Obama era, all of it. People who produce things have to take their orders from people who have never produced anything and never will. Atlas Shrugged villains making all the decisions. People pretend Obama built great and grand things, because He’s half black. They want other people to see them assessing Obama positively. They want to notice Obama built something, and be seen by others noticing it, so no one will think they’re racists. The problem is Obama never built anything.

Trump has to be the polar opposite. You can bitch and cuss and moan about “millions in loans from his daddy” all you want, and you can complain about the debauchery and excess of the Trump Empire. But for you to do the complaining, someone had to build the empire. Which is worth far more, by any reckoning, than whatever Fred Trump gave or loaned to Donald.

Elon Musk is about to become a trillionaire. A lot of people don’t like that. You can see those wheels turning inside their skulls, struggling to come up with a way they can say he stole it from someone. But there’s no rationale for this. He earned that money.

Loud people aren’t accurate about this. The people who make a point of being accurate about it or else not saying anything, more often than not, end up not saying anything.

I see it’s lately become very fashionable for progressives, men, women and anything in between, to pass judgment on the male sex and pronounce that we of the XY-chromosome variety are entirely unneeded, have built nothing, present nothing to the others but a lingering danger. It has become popular, at least among those who make the most noise, to say things like “In the woods I would rather run into a wild bear than run into you, and if you don’t understand why that is, you’re the reason” or something like that.

This presents two problems. The first is that, as a complaint calling out an undesirable state of things that should be fixed, it is entirely non-actionable. The question “What are we to do about this?” hovers in the air, and ultimately cannot be answered. Round up all the men and put them in a big hole somewhere? Load them into boxcars and ship them to a big prison camp? Disintegrate them?

But the second is that men have built things. Men need these things that men have built, and so do women. We’re hearing an awful lot lately about how women can do anything men can do, but the more of life we experience and the more we get to watch men and women in action, the more it’s confirmed that it’s the loud, inaccurate people saying stuff like this. I don’t pretend to know the fine details of how a woman-only society would maintain things. In all honesty, I’d find this to be educational and I half-wish the experiment could go forward somewhere to take out the guesswork. But I don’t really want that because I know it would be a disaster. Here and there, now and then, you can find a rough-and-tumble macho gal who’s ready, willing and able to climb up to a great height to rivet a girder in place, or wrestle with dangerous wildlife, or climb into a hole to do some digging, or lubricate an elevator or bridge cable. But can you find enough?

These are professions that, with things the way they are currently, are “dominated” by men to a saturation level of 90%, 95%, even higher than that. We like to use that particular verb because it makes it look like men have been crowding out those jobs, taking them away from women, abusing women this way on top of all the other ways we’ve found to do it throughout the thousands of years. But the fact is that if women wanted those jobs, they’d be doing them.

Parents see this in teenagers. I’m cool; mom and dad are square, boring, imposing on me all sorts of unwanted obligations and rules, and they also don’t know anything. But I need the shelter and food and electricity they provide to play my video games. I don’t want to think about my dependence on them and these essential utilities they provide to me, but I want to do my complaining. I’m definitely the cool one here who’s going to make the world a better place, but I don’t know what people are talking about with this “take the garbage out to the curb” stuff.

And that’s my takeaway from what I’ve been seeing:

It’s popular to pass assessments on “He’s wrecking things” or “He built this thing we use and need” or “He hasn’t done a damn thing that’s any good” — wrongfully, with an almost systematic inaccuracy, one hundred eighty degrees off course. I’m not sure why it’s so popular to do this, and I’m not sure what keeps these assessments pointing precisely the wrong way. It’s not the inaccuracy you get from a random-chance selection. Something is keeping the credit flowing to the people who don’t deserve it, with the blame for doing it wrong flowing for the people who haven’t done anything wrong, in fact have provided the goods and services consumed by the people doing the complaining.

And, it’s a way to deal with stress and agitation. People get stressed out over what’s going on in their lives, and they do more of this, their volume increasing, as they seek out the like-minded and form collectives and choruses with them, all the synchronized voices singing from a common hymnbook, about the people who built the things everyone needs to use actually not being needed, screwing things up, I’d rather run into a bear, he inherited everything from daddy, blah blah blah.

There is this inaccuracy. And there is loudness. There is anger.

There is a prevailing, uncontested narrative to go with it. And it seems to be a forever-thing.

But, I see, with distant history it doesn’t work. People revere George Washington as the Father Of His Country. Does that mean George Washington was like an Obama, just loudly scooping up the credit for building great and grand things, but unable to point to anything specific, just putting unproductive people in charge of the productive, being a noisy blowhard? No. There are facts preserved throughout history. There is hard data, about the victories he achieved, the long odds he faced — what he did, what he gave us. The same is true of all the faces on Mount Rushmore.

So we’re seeing a flaw in how we perceive things, what noises the loud people make, how we think in our collective groups, what we recognize and what we don’t. But it’s a “forest for trees” thing; we suffer the flaw when we live in the times, when we see things up close. It’s a way to deal with what bothers us. With the passage of time, it’s ultimately cured. I guess things have to settle a bit.

Not that our recording of history is perfect.

But, it’s easy to see we’re not getting a Barack Obama coin. There’s nothing to celebrate. Joe Biden’s face on a $50 bill? You can forget about that too. You’re about as likely to see Jimmy Carter or LBJ’s face on a dollar coin. Trump, on the other hand, will go down in history like Ronald Reagan: Excoriated throughout much of his time remaining on Earth, perhaps all of it, with that “strange new respect” emerging among the chattering class at his funeral or soon after it. Ultimately remembered fondly. But this is worst-case scenario. Better than even odds he’ll also get a coin, or a bill, or both. Yes, right now they’re saying he’ll be held in lasting infamy throughout the ages…just like they said that about Reagan in the 1980’s.

But that doesn’t help us in the here and now. In the current time, we have to deal with this super-loud, from-all-directions, exactly-wrong assessment of who’s building and who’s wrecking. Since it’s a way for imperfect minds to deal with accumulated stress, the more challenging everyday life is, the more of this we hear and see. What we should be worried about is: What keeps it so consistently wrong? What’s this draw upon the loud people, by the wreckers who are wrecking things and building nothing, such that the loud people see them as builders? And why are these loud people so taken with accusing and condemning the people who are really building and providing things? Why is it their way to hiss and spit, like an angry cat with its back arched in the air, at those who’ve provided needed goods and services to said loud people, in the very moment those loud people are relying on these core essentials?

Ah well. What can I say. People are flawed.

Anger has to have something to do with it. Anger, fear and guilt. The teenager knows, deep down in the recesses of his mind he doesn’t want to explore, that he should be doing a better job helping to haul the garbage to the curb. Something like that.

Smithsonian Magazine, 2/26/15 updated 8/8/24:

What does utopia look like for mice and rats? According to a researcher who did most of his work in the 1950s through 1970s, it might include limitless food, multiple levels and secluded little condos. These were all part of John Calhoun’s experiments to study the effects of population density on behavior. But what looked like rodent paradises at first quickly spiraled into out-of-control overcrowding, eventual population collapse and seemingly sinister behavior patterns.

In other words, the mice were not nice.

I’m seeing a lot of parallels between the mice and homo sapiens lately.

Working with rats between 1958 and 1962, and with mice from 1968 to 1972, Calhoun set up experimental rodent enclosures at the National Institute of Mental Health’s Laboratory of Psychology. He hoped to learn more about how humans might behave in a crowded future. His first 24 attempts ended early due to constraints on laboratory space. But his 25th attempt at a utopian habitat, which began in 1968, would become a landmark psychological study. According to Gizmodo’s Esther Inglis-Arkell, Calhoun’s “Universe 25” started when the researcher dropped four female and four male mice into the enclosure.

By the 560th day, the population peaked with over 2,200 individuals scurrying around, waiting for food and sometimes erupting into open brawls. These mice spent most of their time in the presence of hundreds of other mice. When they became adults, those mice that managed to produce offspring were so stressed out that parenting became an afterthought.

So it’s like…if the “survive and thrive” instinct is challenged by harsher conditions, it maintains its place as a top priority. If the hardships are suspended or removed altogether the priorities change.

What I notice about The Left — and I would expect The Left would agree with all this — is:
1. They and their ideological compatriots command and control the dominant, prevailing narrative in physical locations where the population density is high.

2. Perhaps because of #1, they place greater weight on what people think of each other when they conclude certain things. You ask them “What is a woman?” and the very last thing that goes through their minds is what a woman is; they’re much more drawn to choosing the proper insult for you for daring to ask the question.

3. To The Left, this is not neglect of “truth” because they don’t accept the supposition that there is a unified, objective truth. Their understanding of truth is a social thing. We accept a common “truth” to show we’re in a common tribe and can be friends.

4. Because they live in a world where we each choose our own truth, cause and effect relationships are up for debate. Experimentation does not confirm or refute theories; experiments, rather, bring credit or discredit upon themselves. The theory determines what the experiments have to do to be valid. Example: Socialism works. Anytime it doesn’t, it wasn’t implemented the right way. The wrong people were in charge.

5. The failings of human nature do not confound these theories because human nature simply isn’t a factor. Get rid of all the guns, there won’t be any violence. Equalize income and wealth, there won’t be any crime. If there’s no necessity to go to work, people will concentrate all their time and resources on mind-expanding, worthwhile, artistic things.

Where The Left would disagree with me, I expect, is in this correlation I draw between high-population-density, inner-urban, blue-state living and the “Beautiful Mice” experiment that removes significant difficulties from the effort to survive. This is an easy call. Blue state thinkers and voters don’t imagine themselves to have it all that easy. They think they’ve got it tough.

And with high crime, crumbling infrastructure and artificially inflated prices of goods and services, in a way they’re right.

I remember making the observation many years ago, that there’s this “ether” — an intangible object, but an object nonetheless, with a singular state. Only liberals can see it. Conservatives are more accepting of the St. Augustine observation that “wrong is wrong even if everyone’s doing it, right is right even if no one is doing it.” Or alternatively: There is no my-truth your-truth, there is only the truth and then a bunch of opinions.

But liberals believe in the one object with one state. As in: Darn that Donald Trump, he made it okay to be racist or whatever. So there’s a kiosk somewhere that unifies us all; the central oracle dishing out verdicts on “this is okay” and “that other thing is not okay.”

At that time I had a gadfly account, consisting of some undisclosed number of persons sharing a password, and over my protests. I would ban them a year or two later. In the meantime, they read about this and started using the “I win the argument because I don’t understand what you’re saying” maneuver, pretending “ethereal” and “object” were contradictory descriptors.

And this is the part that fascinates me. The kiosk, or ethereal object, exists somewhere. The liberals may not be consulting it all the time, but they come up with these issues as if the reference is being spoiled. Call it what you will, ether, object, kiosk, oracle, egregore, virtual reference manual; it catalogs the properties that are our prevailing culture and this is supposed to affect us in some way. As various high profile people, good and bad, have an effect on it.

This concept surfaces in the silly things they say now and then. Like: Such-and-such a person or organization or institution is setting the clock back on women’s rights or something. “The clock.” It must be affixed to something somewhere. With the wrong hands setting this clock, it becomes “okay” or “not okay” to think certain things.

You can tell liberals believe in this even though they don’t consciously realize they believe in it. This “object” is not truth itself, because it’s subject to manipulation by mortals. The truth in which conservatives believe, is beyond that; “water is wet” and it doesn’t matter how many people think it isn’t. Liberals are far more excited, even agitated, about their belief that there are many different “genders,” than conservatives are about their belief that there are only two. To the liberal, this is a social movement, whereas to the conservative it’s something that simply is. It doesn’t become an issue until a man invades the private bathroom space of a little girl.

Liberalism has changed with our higher standard of living, and with the advancement of technology. We have more liberals now, and more strident ones, because it’s an easier proposition to go cradle to grave without one’s judgment being truly tested. We can make mistakes now without ever being aware we made one. No danger to life or limb. So nothing to keep us in check.

Trump is not making the liberals angry. Neither are you and neither am I.

What sets them off is their knowledge of three things.

The first is that this “ethereal object” they seek to manipulate, is quite a different thing from truth itself. “Water is wet” is truth itself. We don’t bicker about that. It’s not up for voting, argument, rebuttal or appeal.

The second is that, to the extent the object exists, it exists as a request and not a rule. None of us have to follow it. Many don’t. “They’re married even though they’re of the same sex” is something you can choose to recognize, or not to recognize. It doesn’t matter what the law says. It doesn’t matter how the Supreme Court rules. We can all think what we want.

The third is that other people have an effect on it. This is why every moment Trump is in office and Republicans are running things, is a source of angst. If it could end tomorrow that would be good for them, but it would be better if it could end six o’clock tonight. Each minute is an agony. They want to retreat into the comforting embryonic sack of one book of rules, one object.

I myself can’t do it. I can’t roll with the changes when the “one object” flips around, as it sometimes does. It’s not like I’m being punished for each bad decision I make; I’ve made many, and haven’t been punished for all of them. I don’t work around corn harvesters or grain silos and I’m not in a position to have my arm ripped out by the roots if I make a mistake. I’m just lazy. Truth has something to do with what I do, and I change my mind slowly. I can’t say Kamala Harris is not to be mentioned one day, and the next day she’s the answer to all our problems. Every now and then this “object” demands its followers turn on a dime, hairpin-like, and I can’t do it. Too much thinking for myself, I suppose.

A thought about how we raise our children: There’s a lot of emphasis put on “social skills,” and a temptation to read that as: Make your interactions with your peers rewarding, so that you brighten their day, and motivate them to come seek out your company more often later.

We think of this as the baseline requirement for growing up well-adjusted, socially engaged, not-an-asshole. An asshole is a child who’s given up on this as he matures. For some reason, he’s driven to make these interactions non-rewarding for people. We don’t put a lot of effort into figuring out why this wouldn’t be, but we know we don’t want our children to grow up into that.

And yet so many do!

From what I’ve seen of people, a whole lot of them give up on this “interaction is mutually rewarding” thing fairly early in the game, and we don’t call them “assholes”; we call them introverts. But I’m also seeing a lot of them, perhaps all of them, give up on this aspiration to make their social interactions mutually rewarding, for the simple reason they haven’t found them to be that way.

Interacting with others isn’t fun for them. It hasn’t been. How do they figure out how to make these interactions rewarding for others? Such a handicap would be entirely debilitating. You wouldn’t even be able to get started on such a task.

I notice something else about people: “Socially engaged” and “functioning properly,” no matter how much we may wish it to be so, is not equivalent to “make social interactions rewarding for everybody.” It’s far more accurate to peg it more like “Ostracize the right people” or “the usual suspects.” Figure out who’s being made a pariah, by everyone else, and then help do that. Show you’re proper clique material by loving the right people and then hating the right other people. Display the proper stencil pattern in your selection.

We teach this early. In all the schools. Informally. And, enthusiastically.

The hatred put on President Trump genuinely frightens me. There are those who would say I identify with it because I’m an “asshole” just like Trump. We have it in common that we’ve given up on making interactions mutually rewarding with other people — who, all too often, are simply not trying. Serves us right! We chose to be assholes! Well…I look at what happened during the State of the Union address, and I’m thinking…did we? Really? We have a lot of people among us who are genuinely convinced, down to the marrow of their bones, that they’re thinking for themselves. Articulate, engaged, highly educated people. And yet they hate everything Trump has done. Everything.

You show them something Trump did that is objectively good — undeniable. Lowering the crime rate, negotiating the release of hostages, etc. And they’ll find a way to deny.

There’s only one conclusion to draw, and it’s about us. It isn’t flattering. We do not call out undesirable policies, harmful policies, “asshole” behavior, rudeness crudeness etc. People don’t criticize that stuff. They criticize brands. There can be debates about “You painted a target on your own back” or “You did it to yourself,” but the fact is, that’s how it works. If you are of the brand which is to be criticized, you can’t do anything right. Everything you do is wrong.

If you’re Trump and you cure cancer, the concern is over the right people have to die of cancer, and you’re denying them that.

There’s only one explanation: Someone is distributing talking points in hard copy, like on actual cards. Like a poker dealer dealing out cards. A good democrat is supposed to take the card and then repeat what’s on it over and over.

Because it doesn’t make sense to say “It was staged!” and also “I’m sad that he missed.” One or the other of those. Not both.

I guess that quality of mutual exclusivity didn’t make it into the instructions, or too many people weren’t paying attention. Or the cards stuck together. But we have an awful lot of democrats who are following letter and not spirit. It’s too bad he missed — and — it was staged. We out here are supposed to take all that seriously? We can’t. The pieces don’t fit together.

You shouldn’t need me to point that out for you, democrats. Your brains have atrophied ahead of time in anticipation of this perfect new world you want to build.

We have got to get into the habit of discussing ideas. You know, that thing the Greeks were doing post-Socrates. A 2,500 year old idea idea about how to evaluate ideas. Why should we do X. Why should we not do Y. What’s true. What’s false. What do we know. What do we not know. What’s it all mean.

“I am forming an impression that you are a stupid person because of this idea you have” has become a sort of default template for all arguing and we really have to bring it to a stop like a.s.a.p. There are many reasons why I say this.

For one thing, like Justice Scalia used to say, we have some very good people pushing some awful ideas. You’ve taken a wrong fork in the road if you’re attacking the person. You’re making it look like people risk friendships when they discuss politics, and you’re also lending a certain credibility to that. You’re providing evidence that it’s true, and people have to refrain from discussing politics to remain friends. This naturally means people need to deceive each other to maintain their friendships. It’s awkward, unworkable and it’s fracturing a good nation.

What follows is, or is not, a separate item on this list. Maybe it’s not. You decide. Smart people push dumb ideas. They do it all the time. We have some friends we know because I used to work with the husband. They’re the couple who seem to understand the spirit of Red Meat Saturday better than most — they’re into it for the meat and wine, and the fellowship. They absolutely get it, and I respect the husband’s level of intellect enormously. I’m sure he’s smarter than I am. But they’re liberals because of the wife, it really shows, and some of the ideas he pushes are totally idiotic. I would never presume they’re representative of his level of intellectual acumen. That would be…well…stupid.

Now this is another item on the list: It’s not persuasive. Really, think back. How many minds have you changed by telling people their political opinions make them idiots? You’ve probably seen it work as often as I have. Big fat zero. I can guarantee it will never work on me because a lifetime of foul-ups has dissuaded me from trying to convince people I’m smart. “Morgan’s brilliant, he’ll have no problem figuring this out” has consistently preceded awful disasters and I don’t want to hear it anymore. It also ends with a dangling preposition and I don’t like that, but that’s neither here nor there.

What if you run into someone who you’re genuinely convinced is a dumb person? Here is an important point about dumb people that demands some focus, although I think most people have figured it out already. To a dumb person, a normal person doesn’t look smart. Dumb people see normal people as dumb people. To you, it seems I’m describing this person with a wrong opinion who you’ve decided is dumb. Well, he sees you that way, and that remains true even if he really is the stupid person and you’re the brilliant genius. No matter how you cut it, it’s a stale mate. And it’s entirely disconnected from the pressing question of which idea is the better one.

Another item: When you call people idiots for subscribing to a certain idea, or failing to accept your own idea with sufficient enthusiasm, it may not convince them but it will certainly make you feel better about your position even though you might not have reason to feel good about it. It tends to make you into an intractable asshole.

Finally, and maybe this is the same item as the previous paragraph, again you decide. It’s just plain immature. It’s what little kids say on the playground. Third grade playground. “You’re dumb!!” When you have an opinion that’s different from someone else’s, but you can’t say why you have it, or why the other person has theirs, and you’re totally unprepared to argue about it in every meaningful way…that’s your go-to. Your one port in the storm. “You’re dumb!”

Knock it off. Now. I mean it.

For I am a bear of very little brain. There are lots of people smarter than me. Some of them have opinions different from mine. But I’m right and they’re wrong…I think…not that I’m super-duper sure about it, but that’s the way things are going to stay until you can present me with an argument about why I have it backwards, and they’re the ones who are right, and I’m wrong until I change my mind. But you have to make it a good argument. Something coherent and logical, based on known truths. Something people use when they’re older than 8.

Smart people have figured out President Trump is a king. Or is trying to be a king, or something.

They’ve figured out he’s the reincarnation of Hitler and is trying to take rights away from women. I can’t see how he’s taking any women’s rights away. You might say I did “Nazi” this coming.

They know, because I don’t share their hatred, I must be “in a cult.” If I’m in one, I can’t see it. They think — no, they know — we shouldn’t have done anything about Iran at all. So they must know Iran is harmless, like for sure. Or if they have any uncertainty about it, their superior smarts enable them to see we should all pretend not to have any doubts. Wait some more before doing anything about them. Wait until the missiles are flying.

I’m not smart enough for that to make sense to me. Seems to me if missiles are flying, it’s probably too late.

It must be nice to be so sure of everything. But then again, these smart people aren’t so sure a woman is a woman. They need a biologist to tell them what a woman is.

They’ve figured out we’re invading the “Iranqcks” for the oil. This is news to me. How’s that work, anyway?

They’re so smart they see something safe and non-threatening in a regime that shouts “Death to America” over and over again for 47 years. And they see something dangerous and “problematic” in a president who, after a succession of prior presidents who talked about this problem a lot without doing anything, actually solved the problem. Danger in safe things, safety in dangerous things, truth and consistency in people who do the opposite of what they say they’ll do, and skulduggery and shenanigans in people who do exactly what they said they’d do.

Because they’re this smart, they strut around with their chests puffed out, like pigeons. Feeling very good about it all.

But maybe they shouldn’t.

1. Given that white people were slaves sometimes, and some black people were slave owners, how can we ever get started figuring out this “reparations” settlement — anywhere?
2. How could women have possibly “fought for and won the right to vote” without at least some male assistance, if the women did not yet have the right to vote?
3. If masculinity is toxic, how come the dysfunction, illiteracy and high crime come from perpetrators who grew up without fathers or father figures?
4. Reagan’s inquiry: If none of us can be trusted with governing our own affairs, where do we get these wise, angelic public servants who are somehow fit to manage everyone else’s?
5. If women can do anything men can do, then how come there is a “patriarchy” we need to overthrow or upturn? How could that possibly have come to be? How did men end up leading or dominating anything anywhere?
6. If genitalia do not determine gender, then how does surgically altering them “affirm” it?
7. If it’s impossible (or okay) to be racist against white people, how are we ever going to achieve equality?
8. Given that people are law abiding, how is the society in which they live made unstable, when there is greater material inequality?
9. How can a government guarantee a service as a “basic human right” without involuntarily conscripting the people who have the capability to provide that service?
10. If we accept that government is less efficient in spending money, most of the time, compared to the taxpayers who’d spend the money if they were allowed to hang on to it; why then do we become perplexed when we discover a wealthy person or a corporation didn’t pay as much in taxes as we think proper? As long as it’s legal, shouldn’t we be celebrating that?
11. If there is no God, how did plants and animals develop the ability to reproduce? Walk me through it.
12. If it’s “not all men, but always a man” doing these bad things; what are we to do about that? Assuming wrongdoers are a subset of males, what sort of plan of action can we build around that? Seems some sort of deprivation of liberty without due process is the only preventative remedy. Or is that the point?
13. Since we have a process for enacting new laws and repealing the ones we find to be in error, and we even have an amendment process for the Constitution, what’s up with these “peaceful protests”? They’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing unless they physically obstruct law enforcement operations, or some other normal operations, right? So they’re altercations. Why call them peaceful? And why do we need them?
14. If DEI is good, why is it an insult to suggest someone is a “DEI Hire”?
15. How do you go about figuring out whether or not land is “stolen,” if borders don’t, or shouldn’t, matter?
16. If women are routinely doing the same work as men just as competently and efficiently for a fraction of the pay, why don’t companies everywhere make bigger profits by hiring only women?
17. If we’re only just imagining the vote fraud, and it doesn’t really exist, why not go ahead and require voter ID and in so doing, prove it?
18. Why didn’t the Biden administration release whatever is in the Epstein files that would have embarrassed Donald Trump?
19. How can Donald Trump be Netanyahu’s puppet if he’s already Vladimir Putin’s puppet?
20. Assuming you’re invested in some way in our oil industries and you have partial control over our country’s foreign policy; how do you realize ill-gotten gains or any other material benefit from our “invasion of an oil rich country”? How does such action improve your personal economic situation? What’s the plan? Does it involve increasing, or decreasing, the price of oil? Neither? Both?

For half a century or so, I’ve been listening to people who consider themselves too smart to be deceived by anything or anybody, figure out that the countries we invade or liberate or conquer or whatever…are “oil rich.”

This seems to me like “wet streets cause rain” thinking. I myself have been noticing that these countries are consistently dominated, rather than governed, by some egotistical asshole. There is, consistently, a history of recent maneuvers put into effect by said asshole preceding our interference or whatever-we-did. So maybe, just maybe, this abundance of natural resources, which includes oil, enables this asshole into thinking he can’t do anything wrong…which precedes these moves that a more humble and prudent nation wouldn’t contemplate. Time after time, such a situation escalates further and further with nothing stopping it, until something has to be done.

Here in this country, activists have literally ruined just about everything. It starts with this mythology about “peaceful protests” being the “hallmark” of “democracy.” It is the opposite of what’s true: We enjoy all the benefits of elevating the common man, so that he has a voice in our public affairs and policies, which we call “democracy.” What maintains this is the willingness of the losing side to say — eh, we blew it. We had a fair contest and we lost. The next two-to-four years belong to the other side, and we still have the rights of the minority, but the minority is what we are. Let’s lick our wounds, go off and figure out how we’re out of step with the mainstream, assuming we really are. Or, how we botched our messaging. Resolve to do better next time, but accept that until then, we’re not the majority. They are.

What we have come to accept as “peaceful protests,” are the exact opposite of that. Peaceful or not, they’re temper tantrums. They’re the child playing Monopoly who lacks the maturity to accept the periodic setbacks, throwing money, Chance Cards and plastic hotels across the room.

It’s a question we should all be asking more often, about a great many things: How come it is that seemingly everyone goes bonkers all at once?

Blame the girls? Maybe. Possibly.

But, what she’s talking about is a change in tone, not quite so much a change in demographic. Although the change in demographic is bringing about that change in tone. But with that, our fellas are acting a lot more like women than they used to…and the women are compensating for that, bringing the manly masculine characteristics where they’re needed, and where they can no longer count on their “brothers” to do it.

We’re definitely feminized more than we used to be, just a decade ago. Seems undeniable.

The shouting back and forth about those two stupids who challenged armed federal law enforcement, imposing themselves as something between an irritant and a threat, has diminished lately to a dull roar. Before the issue drops off the radar entirely, I’d like to make one more observation. Someone should. This never was an honest discussion. It often appeared to be what it really was, but it never presented itself that way.

Those intent on making enough noise that their numbers seem to be greater than they really are, insist the authorities who discharged the rounds, and/or their employing agencies, should be up for some kind of punishment. Others don’t think that. This inspires a furious exchange of ideas, not unlike an exchange of gestures between two wild badgers tied up in a bag. Beneath this exchange there is a layer, hidden from view, in which other ideas are exchanged with the same force and fury; the difference of opinion, here, is about what we take into account when bad things happen to you. There’s a “daddy faction” placing importance on the dumb stupid thing you did right before the bad thing happened, and a “mommy faction” that wants to ignore this entirely. The latter of which insists, in so many words, that bad things should never happen. It doesn’t matter how stupid you were. There should be some kind of guarantee, and the guarantee should be in place, inviolable, every minute womb to tomb.

Well…not womb to tomb. Cord-cutting doctor-spanking first-cry to tomb. Or, to euthanasia treatment. But those are wholly different issues.

This is a significant observation, if I dare say so myself. We’re eardrums-deep in these cries of “Watch the video!” or “I saw the video!” or “Did you see the video??” But it’s not about angle of car tires or what model of 9mm pistol or any of that. It’s about whether you should expect bad things to happen to you when you do dumb stupid things. Some of us say yes and some of us say no, the latter being more militant about it, insisting on absolutes, iron-clad guarantees and never-never-never.

I notice “When you pee up a rope, piss lands on you” is a sort of a standard. There are consequences for flouting the standard. I also notice, observing human behavior, that in the absence of standards performance sinks…and sinks…and sinks. It’s how we’re built. There is no bottom. More time allocated means slower completion of tasks. More physical space granted means sloppy sprawling. A lower expectation of cleanliness means a bigger mess.

The mommy-faction is not thinking logically. Or, not taking human behavior into account. They want to abolish all standards with their hue and cry of “No matter what s/he did, s/he didn’t deserve that!” They need to watch Unforgiven. It’s got nuthin’ to do with deserve. It’s about consequences. And that doesn’t mean the daddy faction wants these two dipshits dead. If you actually talk to the people in the daddy faction, you’ll pick up a strong preference that the two dipshits should still be alive. Coupled with an understanding that people in the daddy faction don’t get to decide what other people do. So that’s why the dipshits are dead.

But the mommy faction people don’t talk to the people in the daddy faction. They just upload prose and poetry about “s/he didn’t deserve that” onto Facebook.

I notice something else. Now that we’ve established the mommy faction is not thinking logically and not taking human behavior into account, and not coherently discussing the issue with their opposition, we should not be surprised to see what’s next: Stridently insisting on punishment for the armed officers and/or their employing agencies, they’re not in any way united or settled on what this punishment might be. Oh they’re great for tossing around ideas: Murder conviction, civil penalties, reform of the agency, abolish the agency. A lot of them are in favor of abolishing the agencies. It’s already been explained to them, multiple times, by myself and others, that the agencies exist to enforce laws on the books, namely that you can’t just waltz across our border and start living here in the shadows, unauthorized. If you don’t like that law, you have a variety of tools at your disposal you can use to reform the law or get rid of it. How come you not doing that?

But — did I mean to imply that the mommy and daddy factions are still married and living in the same house? I should not have done that, for marriage is an institution that works when it joins together two fully functional adults. That’s not what we have going on here. The mommy faction, having already expurgated the notion of meeting standards, living under a system of laws, or performing to someone else’s expectations, is made up of box-wine cat-lady mommies. That’s why we’re having this debate about consequences for doing dumb things. Funny how that happens: An insistence on impunity following any dumb stupid thing, morphs into a push for more dumb stupid things. The elimination of “Find Out” after the “Fuck Around” shrivels up, like a banana on a window sill, into an elimination of responsibility or obligation, and a push for more dumb silly individualistic behavior, more fucking around. Bushels of I-get-to without so much as a teaspoon of I-have-to or I’m-obliged-to.

It’s a good conversation for the nation to have, especially in a midterm election year.

But, let’s just keep in mind what we’re really discussing.

Donald Trump is not at the center of it all. Neither are our immigration control agencies. These are merely manifestations, shadows of our real conflict between the serious and creative, versus the absurd and (self-) destructive.

Great stuff. Bulls-eyes something that’s been a favorite theme of mine, for years and years. Many years. All the years since I realized people showing off their empathy for others, were doing a lot more damage to those others — and to me too, for what that’s worth — compared to those who didn’t care so much about what others thought. One Michael Clary writes at RodMartin.org:

Stop Falling for Weaponized Empathy
For all the gullible Christians angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. You’re functioning as agents of chaos. Stop it.

Weaponized empathy is everywhere right now. And Christian, you have got to stop being so gullible and falling for it.

Seriously, your naivete might feel warm, nice, friendly, and loving. But that’s not how true Christian love works.

I saw a post by the radical progressive “pastor” Benjamin Cremer that was getting shared a lot on Facebook. The post listed all the “un-Christlike things” he claims that ICE is supposedly doing, such as using “children as bait,” “shooting unarmed protesters,” “teargassing families,” and “terrorizing immigrant communities and people of color.”

[snip]

But here’s the truth: it isn’t Christlike to be gullible. It isn’t Christlike to believe and share debunked propaganda. It isn’t Christlike to be led by your emotions. It isn’t Christlike to outsource your critical thinking skills to the left-wing activists in the media.

So why are Christians so gullible? It’s because they’ve been trained to think “love” means whatever it feels like in their happy place. They assume Jesus just wants us to be nice and get along and never do unpleasant things like hold people accountable for their actions. They equate “love” with their feelings. They assume Jesus wants them to go around and feel sorry for people, no matter what they’ve done to bring harm upon themselves, because Jesus is all compassion and zero accountability. And if people are held accountable in ways that cause them pain, then that is not being “Christlike.”

I can only speak for myself, but I’m so far down this road as to start wondering about the strength of this seductive power. People fall for it when it doesn’t end up helping anybody, and surely they must be able to see this. Because it’s an opportunity to show off how empathic they are, how nice and wonderful they are. How much they care about people. What brings such potency to that sort of a draw? Why the eagerness? Christians may value community esteem, but only to a point; they’re supposed to know and understand the reckoning of the omnipotent God supersedes the opinions of everybody else.

Why not just do things you know are good for people, and whatever anybody else thinks about it, well, like whatevs. That’s supposed to be the big motivation. That should outrank everything. Why doesn’t it?

Compensating for something? What’s in their past? What is it they don’t like about themselves?

So, for all the gullible Christians who are angrily venting about ICE, your Christian love is not pure. It is not blameless. You are functioning as agents of chaos. You bear the blame for your irrational outrage, even if you present it as love and care and compassion…Allowing anti-Christian and anti-American radicals to manipulate you through weaponized empathy is a sin. It is wrong to carelessly wield the name of Christ, making false accusations against law enforcement and making excuses for criminals.

I do not think “the majority of undocumented immigrants are good people.” I think that’s false. Can’t prove it. But I have to be honest, my skepticism is growing.

1. I keep hearing it. Never with any variations to the words. Suggests mass produced propaganda. Much replication little thought.

2. “Majority,” taken literally means more than half of something. Someone would have to go through all of these immigrants and apply tests to see how many are good. I don’t think they did that. If they did, they should get word to the officials who are struggling to figure out if we have 5, 10, 15 million or more.

3. The people who say illegals are mostly good people don’t go on to say MAGA people or church people are also mostly good. They speak and think in terms of stereotypes, attesting from a cartoon world. They “know” a little too much about which groups are all good and which ones are all bad. Real life doesn’t work like that.

4. What do good people do when they’re compelled to migrate off grid, work and get paid under the table for a season, go home and then go through the same thing the following year? They would, I’m very sure, change that situation after awhile. Move their families. Fill out the forms, pay the fees, fines, whatever. They wouldn’t keep doing it. A conscious decision to just live out one’s life that way suggests something to hide.

I wish we could discuss the issue, veering away from this weird daisy-chain-fallacy of “illegal immigrants are just immigrants, immigrants are brown people, you have to presume purity in brown people or else you’re racist.” It’s not how mature people make decisions about things. And we have to get serious about violent crime. Once we’re serious about it we have to stay that way. We’ve experimented a lot, over the last century or so, with turning a blind eye to violent crime, deciding some other matters are more important for this reason or that one. It hasn’t worked out well. Courts leaning too far in the direction of protecting the accused, at the expense of the rights of the victims; timid prosecutors afraid to open anything they don’t think they can close. People get hurt as a consequence.

There are very few “victim” classes more deserving of our sympathy and our resolve to make things right, than victims of violent crime. It is really the ultimate in minding your own business right before someone jumps in to create whatever chaos, damage whatever property, or deal out whatever injury.

Thought I should go ahead and embed this one. I was listening to it in the car right after it came out, and it took into account everything that had been verified at that time, steering clear of any known falsehoods. I know none of this is funny, but “St. Tail Light” makes me chuckle a bit.

And of course I know why. These simplistic constructs are so hastily cobbled together of good people and bad people. It’s embarrassing when real life is revealed to be real life, and things turn out to be a touch more complicated.

The videos, the videos. People see them and they come away with this conclusion or that one, but seldom with any minds changed. Contrary to popular wisdom, the videos don’t educate us that much about the people shot and killed by ICE or Border Patrol agents, or whether the shootings were justified, or not. They teach us about our own human nature.

There’s something special about Minnesota, and Minneapolis. The mainstream press wants to put out the story that the Trump administration is picking on the locale, ostensibly because people didn’t vote for them in 2024 or 2020, and/or 2016 or something. But this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If you’re washing a car and you see a particularly filthy spot on the car, you scrub. If the grease spot defies your efforts, you scrub harder until it’s gone. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether that particular fender voted against you or is angry with you.

But if it is capable of anger, and that anger can somehow be tied in with this resistance to your efforts, of course you’ll intensify your efforts. It’s part of the job. So yes, there are more enforcement agents in Minnesota.

Leftists enjoy the luxury of not only telling us what’s going on there, but what we should think about it both before and after we see the videos. But with the latter, all they can really do is try. They forgot that we can form whatever conclusions we wish. It’s not up to them to dictate.

I’ve decided, from this, that I don’t want leftists/liberals running anything. Of course I didn’t want that before, but all this just confirms my sensible conclusion that they shouldn’t run anything. I recognize they don’t want me making any decisions about anything either. But I happen to be right. I’m not trying to wreck everything, and they are. But from watching them go at it on social media, how they pick up these talking points and run with them, and taking into account all the chaos and destruction I see in these other large cities they’re running, I come to realize

1. If there is violence, The Left consistently comes out ahead. It doesn’t matter if they’re the ones committing the violence — in which case, they get what they want because people are intimidated. There’s a name for that. Terrorism. Or, if they’re the ones feeling threatened by the violence, claiming victim status from the violence, or the possibility of the violence, making a show of being scared. Either way, they get what they want. Someone somewhere is taking notes about this. Wherever their desire to win is most keen, that’s where things start to become unstable. And for that, of course, they want us to blame others, but who stands to benefit? Liberals who want to win, foment violence. It’s clear they see that as a winning strategy. In this case they’re trying to put together the narrative that the law enforcement authorities are dangerous, trigger-happy, chomping at the bit for any excuse to start gunning down civilians. Why then are they organizing more protests? If you take their concerns seriously, it doesn’t make any sense. But if you take note that liberals consistently win from violence, everything falls into place.

2. The right to swing your fists around ends where someone else’s nose is. If you listen to a liberal waxing lyrically of his rights or of a fellow liberal’s rights, it’s all fists and no noses. They don’t even acknowledge the other noses are there. For years I’ve been warning about people who make decisions based on feelings rather than thought. We think of emotions and feelings as a sort of first step to being kind and considerate to others. But the truth is, people who value feelings over thought, value THEIR feelings. Theirs. Not yours. And they don’t care about your nose. They just want their rights, as they interpret them. There’s no spirit of negotiation, no trading of half-a-loaf, no concession of anything. Over the years I’ve come to see this in everything they’re willing to discuss, every little issue in which they want to extol the virtues of their “civil rights” or what have you. I see it in the abortion issue, which the country as a whole recognizes as a conflict of interests between mother and child, but to the emotionally entrenched liberal, it’s distastefully distilled down into the simplicity of “her right to choose.” I see it in all the controversy washing over what they call “the January 6 insurrection”; the rest of us should enjoy an implied right to justified confidence that an election was conducted securely, fairly and with integrity, but the liberals don’t think so. And I see it in these physical confrontations between protesters and law enforcement agents, the latter of whom have the right to defend themselves but again, the liberals think rights are things that only exist on one side. I see this over and over again. Feeling over thought, and people who decide these weighty matters with feelings don’t care about anyone else’s.

3. They think in terms of simplistic narratives. When they’re in conflict with others, which is often, their vision of the kind of “win” they want to score looks like a daisy-chain of prizes, one after the other. Example: ICE is to be found guilty of homicide and/or a variety of procedural transgressions. As I’ve pointed out before, that’s different from yanking ICE out of Minnesota. And that in turn would be different from opening our borders and granting amnesty to all the illegal aliens who have entered and started living here without authorization. To the passionate emotion-driven liberal, though, it’s all one win. Or rather a chain reaction, like firecrackers with their fuses braided together. One is to follow the other. This is a distortion of the issues, and an effective one; the nominally curious but not too meticulous observer will start to conflate these two issues. In this way it’s “decided,” albeit passively, that we may be a nation of laws, but our laws about the border shouldn’t count for anything because “we” will not stand to see those actually enforced. For the nation at large, that’s just an error in judgment, one that’s reinforced across time by precedent. But for the strategically minded liberal, and the unscrupulous businesses that depend on this illegal labor, it’s a battle plan. Unfortunately, when carried to its natural conclusion, it leaves the rest of us wallowing around in a kaleidoscopic mishmash of “laws” that don’t really mean anything, short leashes staked to the ground used to tether in place only those who are willing to abide by them, while the rest run around wild and free. And I think everyone realizes deep down that our society can’t function that way.

I listen to these liberals expressing their feelings, pretending to have discussions with concerned people like me, but really just showing off for each other. I can see their feelings of what’s right and what’s wrong should take precedence over the plain meaning of written law; but when you compare the law to someone else’s understanding of right and wrong, it’s different. The other person’s perception of right and wrong don’t even enter into it. And then how someone else might interpret the written law, that doesn’t seem to enter into it either.

I don’t want liberals running anything. They’re not ready to accept the responsibility anyway. If they were capable of accepting responsibility for something not coming out right, they wouldn’t be liberals in the first place.

That should really be the Republican position this year, and most every presidential or midterm election year. But especially this midterm election year: “We don’t want democrats running anything.” And these are the reasons.

Of course, the rejoinder will come back thick and fast: You’re alienating the noble centrists, the ones who consider themselves above it all.

And then the Republican strategists will start assuaging and mollifying: Oh no, we didn’t mean it. We’re okay with whoever running whatever. Just put us in Congress though, because, uh, er, ah, you know, reasons.

When what they should say is: Ya know what? If you sensible centrists can’t see the logic in it, we don’t want you running anything either.

It has been explained to me that when people consistently fail to understand something, they may not be trying to understand it; in fact, they may be putting in a good amount of effort to avoid understanding it. Intelligence or lack thereof may not be the limiting factor. There must be a third problem concealed from view, somewhere, for my failure to understand liberals has been like an itch under a cast that my coat hanger can’t reach. People tell me not to pay attention, but as a California resident, I look around and I see the strangeness of liberals impacts every little thing around me, everything I do. Could intelligence be the limiting factor? I am a bear of very little brain, I know.

But looking at it from high to low and with all available humility, evaluating it scientifically, I know there is some intelligence somewhere I can bring to the fight. I know this because fresh, new and unfamiliar problems, emerging on those very few occasions, confound and perplex me. After I’ve solved them, I’m not proud of the use I’ve put to my time — but, now, whatever the problem is, it’s no longer unfamiliar. It goes into the inventory of familiar problems. Which I can solve easily and nimbly. That’s intelligence. It may not be something I can bring to a contest with some other intelligent person selected at random. But that’s not the question. I’ve got at least some! But after decades and decades of having my face ground into the problem of liberals, sometimes in concert with my wishes, sometimes against ’em, like a puppy having his face mashed into his own feces; I’m just as confused today as I was as a child, hearing for the very first time of “Watergate.”

I’m under the impression that the thing I really want to know about, is concealed with several layers of obscurity and duplicity, with fragmented bits of evidence that are evidence only because they’re somewhat connected, but only weakly, left out in the daylight for my studying and evaluation. Like figuring out the nuances of a giant’s asshole by studying his toenails. My impression is that I’m struggling to figure something out about the liberals that the liberals, themselves, don’t completely comprehend.

Lately they have busied themselves with their efforts to re-weave the social fabric that binds us all. These efforts are out in full view of everyone. They fancy themselves to be in charge of the dashboard full of levers, buttons, switches and dials, in autocratic control of the rewards and punishments that fall on the rest of us as we participate in society. They’re not completely wrong about this. My observation, though, is that this has become the Trump-hater’s go-to tool: “How could you vote for a man who…” followed by some kind of fluff. We’ve really done it now. Our apologies are going to fall on deaf ears as history vilifies us! Our apologies? I don’t know of any Trump supporter offering any. Bear in mind that today, nearing the end of the calendar year, we’ve got some half of a year or more since we’ve seen any discussion of policy from the liberals or other Trump-phobes. We used to argue about tariffs; they were going to do this and do that and upset the balance of nature and result in higher prices across the board and another Great Depression. It seems, when that didn’t happen, that’s when someone in some central command-control kiosk decreed the new talking point is going to be this history-will-condemn-you stuff.

There is a problem here and it’s rather obvious. Social conditioning will work with pronounced effect, and most efficiently, on some of us but not on all of us. In fact, just about everyone who’s open to its effects, has been converted already. There’s little point to getting some “wave” going of “I hate Trump because everyone else seems to hate him,” because those people already abandoned any support of Trump quite some time ago, assuming they ever had any.

And so we’ve all embarked on this cycle that’s become embarrassing to watch. Liberals and other Trump haters will thunder away about how it’s too late for us to apologize for supporting you-know-who, history will mark us dirty, we’re going to be struggling to hide any evidence that we ever voted for him or said anything flattering or supportive about him, etc…and then someone will emerge to intone: “No use talking to these people.” But they’ll make sure we can see them saying this. Bees don’t waste their time telling flies that honey’s better than shit! — buzzed the bee, loudly, making sure all the flies can hear him explaining this to the other bees. All the flies. Again, for the ones in the back…

And then I guess someone somewhere is taking stock of how many of us have been converted this way. And the answer that emerges from that, must be falling short of something because, like a child who’s just made a grand final exist from the room in tears, slamming the door shut but then thinking of one more thing to add, they thunder back in with “And another thing!” And the cycle renews. History will blah blah blah…now bear in mind what I said, it’s been months since discussion of any policy issue.

I don’t get it. I understand midterms are coming up and we’re about to hear all about “a woman’s right to choose.” It will be up to those hearing it, be they sympathetic to the cause or not, to bolt on to the end of that hackneyed catchphrase — “to murder unborn babies” since those repeating it, so consistently lop it off for obvious reasons. And I guess they can’t argue issues because Trump’s been fixing them.

Pundits, leaning in all sorts of different directions, are prognosticating a “blue wave” next year. Could very well be. I don’t know. I see for the past several years, there hasn’t been one. Does Obama even count? That looked more like “Look at me, no way I can be racist I’m voting for a black guy” than any widespread or passionate approval of left-wing policies.

It could be my rose colored glasses fooling me; I’ve been wrong before. But I’m looking around and I’m seeing an awareness of what’s been bothering me for years now, that I didn’t see before — just a few years back, it was me singing my lonely little song, off in the tall grass, in quiet frustration that nobody else was noticing this. Liberals run our big cities. All of them. And misery abounds. We don’t need to wonder about the effects their policies have. We know. For sure.

The liberals, themselves, look on these pronounced, unique effects, and they don’t try to cloud the issue with “Actually that city did have a Republican mayor, just ninety years ago.” No. They accept the responsibility, and spin the results. Their favorite tactic is to claim credit for the “high per capita income” in this or that big city. Yes…big cities have high average incomes. When it costs five grand to rent a tiny studio apartment and you’re taxed up the butt on everything, you have to make money. Or, be a homeless person. That’s a liberal big-city for you. You have to do a little bit of thinking about whether you want that for the country as a whole, and it seems to me the country, at large, has done the thinking. But again. That’s just my perspective. Rose colored glasses.

At the end of it, if I were a Trump-loathing liberal who was concerned about the midterms next year, I wouldn’t be swaggering into this poker match confident of my high hand. “Trump’s an oaf” and “Trump is boorish” could have been effective maneuvers, but those who might have been swayed by such personality-based arguments, were already swayed a long time ago. I would be looking at policy differences. That’s what elections are supposed to be about, is it not? For them to abandon that and persist in this business of “We are the weavers of the social fabric and we’ll make sure you can’t sit at our lunch table” comes off looking like a tacit admission that Trump has already won on policy, and all-around.

It also looks like a tacit admission that this is the “one tool in the bag” for liberals, and has been for so long that they don’t know any other way to win an election: Forget policy. We’re the Mean Girls. We’ll threaten you with social ostracism…because we’re from middle school, and we don’t know any other way to do it.

So let’s see: Calling it a “Trump Shutdown” didn’t work. The democrats had to cave without having won a single thing they wanted. But, like a racquetball hitting a wall, the narrative carried a surplus of kinetic energy that had to go somewhere, so…BOUNCE. Suddenly we’re all supposed to demand release of the Epstein files. Trump invokes the time-honored technique of “Destroy a stupid idea by taking it seriously”…bully-pulpits the Congress into authorizing the release, signs the bill.

It turns out just like the Russia Russia Russia hoax: Everyone was collaborating with Epstein *except* Donald Trump.

Racquetball hits the wall with a loud KITOONK sound, and suddenly we’re all supposed to be talking about yelling “Quiet, piggy!” at a female reporter.

No one seems to be interested in the identity of this “female reporter,” which is floated among three candidates, one of whom is named Margaret. White House says Trump was actually saying “Quiet, Peggy” and although this seems unlikely to those who have listened to the recording, there’s nothing to prove otherwise.

So, KITOONK, two senators and four congressmen decide we’re all supposed to be talking about the issuance of illegal orders to the military.

Trouble is, they can’t name any illegal orders that have been issued. Three of them have been directly confronted with the question during interviews and all three had to waffle and weenie out of it. That means the six are guilty of weakening the chain of command purely for political purposes, which is sedition. Meanwhile, two members of the national guard are shot, one fatally. Loudmouths wanted everyone to think of the national guard as following illegal orders and potentially shooting unarmed civilians, and it turns out when you say stuff like that, someone takes it seriously.

It’s scandal-racquetball. Trump isn’t supposed to win at this, so when he does, it becomes imperative to bounce that ball and spawn off another scandal.

The kinetic energy accumulates, with deadly results.

Meanwhile, I notice something about the way people argue when the subject turns to this stuff.

Trump’s policies which are supposed to be illegal, unconstitutional, hurtful and morally deficient…although no one can say how or why…supposedly manifest his moral failings and character shortcomings as a person.

If you oppose the Trump agenda, you’re socially obliged to speak out about these shortcomings. Even if you don’t personally know Donald Trump, you’re supposed to churn out several paragraphs about how morally bankrupt he is.

Of course people are much more loquacious about things when they don’t have the knowledge to support what they’re saying, so what ends up spewing forth is this geyser of blah blah blah about what a terrible person Donald Trump is.

And if you have an opinion about that — you are further socially obliged to think something similar about his supporters. All of them. Every single one. Although you don’t know us any better than you know Donald Trump, whom you don’t…

There can be no “I oppose the reforms they support, but I know their hearts are in the right place.” None of that. None. We must hate the women hate the gays hate the blacks hate the trannies and be anti-science and anti earth.

And if you’ve figured out what terrible people we are…

…you are further socially obliged to oppose the reforms we support. And it goes back to the beginning. It’s a feedback loop.

So we end up with post after post, page after page, paragraph after paragraph, kilobyte after kilobyte, of this…stuff.

• Trump’s policies are wrong
• Trump is a bad person
• We who support his reforms are bad people
• Lather, rinse, repeat

We get to read all about that. But meanwhile, we have a lot of illegal immigrants inland. And there are industries built around them. They inflate the welfare rolls and the registries of various public assistance programs. They cost us a lot of money, we’re 38 trillion dollars into the public debt which is climbing. These are real problems…and no, nobody anywhere is saying “Get rid of Donald Trump and it solves all these problems.” That would be so absurd, even the most frenzied Trump hater is coming nowhere close to saying that.

Just: Get rid of Donald Trump.

Sorry to say, this all ends up looking like what it is: Trump came along for a reason. The country is divided on him because it’s divided on whether we want the problems fixed or not. A lot of people don’t want the problems fixed and that’s why they hate him and whenever they come up with a new scandal and he ends up surviving and winning that scandal, they have to create a new one.

Meanwhile, no one is addressing these problems.

Except Trump. And we who support him.

Everybody is else just babbling nonsense. Pulling new scandals out of thin air, trying to win at them…and failing.

Making things worse. Getting people hurt.

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.