My first reaction to this was, of course, that I like the implications of the headline; upon reading it, I was glad to see the headline was earnest and 51 is, after all, greater than 31. Although still 49 points shy of where it should be.

Fifty-one percent of Americans say that they would rather have a border wall on America’s southern border, compared to 31 percent who say that they want a Green New Deal, according to a poll released by Remington Research Group.

Republicans said that they would prefer a border wall by a 68-point margin, while Independents said that they would prefer a border wall by a two-to-one margin.

Overall, a majority of Americans, or 51 percent, said they oppose a Green New Deal, 51 percent of Democrats support the radical environmental program, while Republicans and Independents overwhelmingly oppose Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) idea outright.

But then I had another thought: This is a rather silly comparison, isn’t it?

It’s kind of apples-and-oranges. The objective of a wall is to elevate the difficulty involved in breaking into our country illegally, whereas the GND’s objectives seem to be a messy hodge-podge of reducing our impact on the environment, and make sure everyone has the same amount of stuff. I read through that goofy draft that wasn’t supposed to have been part of it or whatever, and waded through the other literature about it, and I’m altogether unsure about the linkage between proper stewardship of Mother Earth and her bounteous resources, and income/wealth equality. What is it? Is there, perhaps, some propaganda floating around that if we make sure everyone’s got the same amount of stuff, the environment will improve? I’ve no doubt there is.

But that would be the opposite of what’s true. Socialism is awful for the environment.

The Soviet government’s imperatives for economic growth, combined with communal ownership of virtually all property and resources, caused tremendous environmental damage. According to economist Marshall Goldman, who studied and traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, “The attitude that nature is there to be exploited by man is the very essence of the Soviet production ethic.”

A typical example of the environmental damage caused by the Soviet economic system is the exploitation of the Black Sea. To comply with five-year plans for housing and building construction, gravel, sand, and trees around the beaches were used for decades as construction materials. Because there is no private property, “no value is attached to the gravel along the seashore. Since, in effect, it is free, the contractors haul it away. This practice caused massive beach erosion which reduced the Black Sea coast by 50 percent between 1920 and 1960. Eventually, hotels, hospitals, and of all things, a military sanitarium collapsed into the sea as the shoreline gave way. Frequent landslides–as many as 300 per year–have been reported.

Water pollution is catastrophic. Effluent from a chemical plant killed almost all the fish in the Oka River in 1965, and similar fish kills have occurred in the Volga, Ob, Yenesei, Ural, and Northern Dvina rivers. Most Russian factories discharge their waste without cleaning it at all.
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According to the Worldwatch Institute, more than 90 percent of the trees in the pine forests in China’s Sichuan province have died because of air pollution. In Chungking, the biggest city in southwest China, a 4, 500-acre forest has been reduced by half. Acid rain has reportedly caused massive crop losses.

There also have been reports of waterworks and landfill projects severely hampering fish migration. Fish breeding was so seriously neglected that fish has largely vanished from the national diet. Depletion of government-owned forests has turned them into deserts, and millions of acres of grazing and farm land in the northern Chinese plains were made alkaline and unproductive during the “Great Leap Forward.”
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There is much evidence to dispute the theory that only private businesses pollute. In the United States, we need look no further than our own government agencies. These public sector institutions, such as the Department of Defense (DOD), are among the worst offenders. DOD now generates more than 400,000 tons of hazardous waste a year — more than is produced by the five largest chemical companies combined. To make matters worse, the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the enforcement power over the public sector that it possesses over the private sector.

So taking better care of the environment does not necessarily fit some grand scheme of taxation and incentives, to reward the under-privileged and punish the successful and make sure income/wealth disparities are reduced. I really don’t know where we ever got that. You know what does, though? Donald Trump’s big, beautiful wall. You can’t have open borders with a welfare state. There’s a rule about that, and if there weren’t such a rule, someone would have to come up with one.

The incompatibility is mathematical in nature. Just as, you can’t rank members of a set without defining what the set is; the same goes for assessing the level of inequality, of anything. In fact, the greater the assessed inequality, the more crucial is the question of set membership. In the most extreme case, perfect inequality — n people in a village, where one guy has lots of dollars and the other n-1 people have zero — the removal of a single person instantly transforms the situation to one of perfect equality.

So borders do matter. Especially if you’re trying to force this sameness these open-borders types tend to want forced. The periphery comes first. It’s got to be that way.

I submit that such thoughts about compatibility, and cause-and-effect, are more important than the poll results. However many people think they want something, the ones who do want it seem to be very, very sure they want it, and are highly enthused about it. But, as usual, the ones most enthused haven’t thought things through all the way.

Kaitlin Bennett went undercover.

From the comments:

If Trump supporters were all in camps, who would feed the freeloaders?

Indeed.

9:08 student body president saying “do it, but lie about it so we don’t get in trouble!”

Yeah, and the meaning of the word bigot is: “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.” Just pointing that out there.

I live in California and I think she nailed the look

I live in California too, but I used to live in Seattle…she bulls-eyed both, except her clothes are all brand new and her hygienic habits are satisfactory. She looks alive and pleasing to the eye, whereas a true leftist is like a hunk of some zombie spirit world materialized onto the plane of the living by mistake.

Ironically I was just talking about this to someone last night. I said that although conservatives might dislike liberal ideologies, most would never want to see a liberal harmed or harassed, whereas I know for a fact many liberals/leftists would be thrilled to throw conservatives into camps or see harm come to them. It comes down to more than just policy ideals, it’s a very warped and toxic mindset!

Not hard to prove that true. I saw this question posted on Quora a few days ago: “Is it unfair for Fox News host Tucker Carlson to be unable to go to restaurants because he gets yelled at by people who oppose what he does/says?” And the very first answer is “I don’t just think it’s fair. I think it’s overdue. And this also goes for members of the Trump administration being denied seating at restaurants, etc.” The attitude is everywhere, and you can see it if you just take the time to look.

Going the other way, I can’t prove it but I think I speak for a lot who lean my way when I say: No “camps” for lefties. The camp I have in mind is reality itself. It’s called getting your hands dirty, doing some honest work, engaging in a difficult effort in which failure is a real possibility, and the final word on whether or not you succeeded goes to someone else who cares about end-results, and isn’t a tenured professor.

Work hard to make a positive difference, and earn a bit of profit honestly and well. Then watch some goo-gooder come along and take that away, to be redistributed among others who didn’t try as hard…lather rinse & repeat a few times. A lefty who doesn’t catch on after awhile, is too far gone anyway, but I think most of ’em would catch on in pretty short order. So no camps. Not because I’m some kind of nice guy, but because they’re not needed.

Bernie, Bernie, Bernie…

Q: What is the Bernie Sanders theory of the case, for why Venezuela is the way it is? What went wrong there, in what is an avowedly socialist project?

A: Ah well, that’s a long story that I don’t think we have time to get into. But this is what I will say: …(blah, blah, blah)

Journalist just lets him off the hook. Because our media sucks.

From the comments:

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried. Hey Bread line Bernie, I explained it in 8 words.

How could it not fail? The fuel line of our economy is the connection between your actions today & your prospects tomorrow. Socialism severs that fuel line.

It isn’t complicated.

Yes, to all of it.

There’s a lot of talk these days about people being “anti-science.” The problem is, a lot of people making those claims either are a bit unclear on the idea of what science is or know full well what it is but are hoping you don’t. Just because someone calls something science doesn’t mean that it actually is.

First off, science is not a collection of “facts”. It’s not a set of conclusions. And it most certainly is not ultimate Truth, forever and ever, amen.

Science is a method. And the core of that method can be summed up in one simple question:

“How would we know if we were wrong?”

The late Richard Feynman described it this way:

First, we guess what we think our new law will be. Then we calculate what must happen if that law is right. Then we compare the result of that calculation with experiment.

And here’s the most important part. If the calculation from our guess does not match experiment, it’s wrong. Period. Yes, there can be experimental error. Yes, if the data is variable sometimes just from chance you’ll get a result that is atypical. But once you account for those, once you’ve gotten your measurements nailed down precisely enough to differentiate from your calculated result, once you’ve got enough measured data for the statistics to say whether it matches calculated results or not, then if they do not match, they’re wrong.

Ran across these emanations from the dark cesspit of despair late at night. I’d like to put together a rebuttal of sorts, because it reminds me of this clip from She’s Having a Baby, and I know our society dies a little bit when more and more people think this way. But a rebuttal wouldn’t do anything other than insult the intelligence of the author — he’s clearly already read such things and figured out for himself how little they mean. I think the encounter would be fruitless, or it would come down to a contest of writing ability, and then he’d win and I’d lose. Give credit where it’s due, he did a great job of summarizing the situation.

I know, because I’ve been there myself. Three times, this side of that stupid Y2K computer bug. This century’s brought challenges the last century didn’t bring, even though in the olden days I can see now I really didn’t know much of anything. “Something else won’t come along,” as brilliant of a good-writing gem it may be, as much potential as it may have to really get the point across…is a tested falsehood. I can’t die three times, and the test of whether something is over or not, is whether there’s more coming afterward. Well, knock on wood, I’m still working.

Kevin Bacon’s character, at 1:40: “I secretly believed that he was terrified I might make something of myself outside the field. If I did, he’d be reminded in living color of his own failure.”

You see, there’s some good writing in that too — and some truth. Once we’re in the hole, we pull others in with ourselves. Maybe without even realizing it. “If I climb out of this hole, I’ll remind that guy down there that he’s not really trying.” We-ell…you know, sometimes that could be a good thing.

There certainly is an age thing going on, I discovered. I don’t think about it much because there isn’t a lot I can do about it. So the other lessons have made more of an impression on me. Every little complication that makes it tougher for a reader of my resume to figure out what it is I really do, is a liability. In my youth, I went where I was needed, and I noticed the people who were more highly valued didn’t do that. I wondered at the time if they knew something I didn’t know, and in the aftermath I got my answer. One manager got me on the phone, and inquired from behind a thin veil of exasperation from having tried to figure it out for himself, what was I. It was a weird conversation because he was all but admitting he didn’t know what to do until he had me properly pigeonholed. It was also exasperating, because from a technical point of view I knew it was true I was worth more, having had real practical experience in more areas. But it was also true I wasn’t willing to be pigeonholed, because at that point I would have done either one, programming or project management, to earn a steady paycheck. This conversation didn’t go anywhere and I never heard from the guy again. I guess after he hung up I was supposed to go “Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should’ve told him I’m a coder, coder, coder!” But, I look at it more like I dodged a bullet.

Nevertheless, there’s some Logan’s Run youth-worship going on there, and some unhealthy pigeonholing. People placing people, and the placers are creating problems because they themselves aren’t going to be in the business in another five years, aren’t truly committed to making the organization better, and don’t have any interest in making it healthy over the long term. They just want to make a decision today, and be able to defend it for a few weeks or months, tops, then go on to something else. We should all worry about this whether we’re impacted or not, because it simply doesn’t work. My “Are you a programmer or a project manager?” type interviewer got back exactly the answer he didn’t want…either one…both…he was sniffing me out to see if I really needed a job, which I did, and that was a turn-off. The most attractive candidate is already working. Why was I out looking for a job after age 35? There must be something wrong. Well the math doesn’t work on that, does it? Medical miracles have made it commonplace for people to live past a hundred years, and with that we’re going to have to get used to the idea of people maybe not retiring at 47. Someone didn’t get the memo. And so a situation is developing.

The sense of despair, travels. The sense of victory, not so much. We can’t outlaw age discrimination, or people-pigeonholing. We can only adjust our attitudes. Something will come along, if your skills match the job someone needs to have done. The trick is to keep them relevant.

Happy President’s Day. Hamilton wrote in Federalist #70:

Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. Every man the least conversant in Roman story, knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious individuals who aspired to the tyranny, and the seditions of whole classes of the community whose conduct threatened the existence of all government, as against the invasions of external enemies who menaced the conquest and destruction of Rome.

There can be no need, however, to multiply arguments or examples on this head. A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.

Of course, Rome eventually fell. It goes without saying there is an intended balance here, and there are those who insist President Trump is throwing it out of whack with this “Emergency Declaration” business to set aside funds for the construction of his big, beautiful wall.

Well, about that.

The WH did not make one executive action today. In reality they made three, only one of which involved an emergency declaration.

First the WH announced they would be funding $601 million in wall construction from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund, relying on 31 U.S.C. § 9705. This does not require an emergency declaration.

Second, the WH announced they would be funding $2.5 billion in wall construction under 10 U.S.C. § 284 (this is MilCon $ for combating drug trafficking). This does not require an emergency declaration.

Finally, the WH announced they would be funding $3.6 billion under 10 U.S.C. § 2808. This money does require an emergency declaration.

According to the WH this money will be spent sequentially so the § 9705 money will be spent first then the § 284 money then the § 2808 money.

So depending on how fast they can begin construction, they will have to spend over $5 billion (including the $1.3 billion in fencing appropriations) before any of the emergency money is ever tapped…

But, isn’t this whole thing rather phony? If it’s an emergency, why declare it and then go golfing? Seems like a good question, at first, but then you go to inspect it…to do that, you have to construct a coherent narrative in which there’s something wrong with Trump making a move after Congress told him no. According to this narrative, Congress must have acted in good faith, not attempting in any way to usurp the control of the cockpit, determining which way the ship is going to go; but simply reporting to the Captain of the vessel, as the responsible stewards of the fuel supply, that there’s no more fuel.

The Captain has the sole responsibility to steer the vessel clear of any dangers. The guardians of the resources say the resources are not available to do this.

Looks like an emergency to me. What else to call it?

But many have lined up to point out the dangers of precedent. If Trump does this, so goes the litany, a future democrat President can declare a national emergency that…I eat meat. Or that I own guns. A constitutional crisis will follow, and supposedly we’ll have Trump to thank for it.

I find this unconvincing. It pretends we have yet to head into the cul de sac, when in fact we’ve been in it for quite some time, and in fact have converted it into a busy thoroughfare. Seems such a long-winded way to say “We should never elect democrats President again”; or, “I don’t know very much about these national emergencies.”

Good constitutional arguments can be made for and against President Trump’s evocation of emergency powers to address the crisis at our southern border. But the notion that such a declaration would encourage a future Democratic president to do something similar borders on the comic. Democrats don’t need encouragement.

Under President Barack Obama, the Constitution was violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party, and the faithful cheered every violation. In early 2014, New Yorker editor and Obama groupie David Remnick wrote about his experience accompanying Obama on a west-coast fundraising tour.
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By 2014, Obama had successfully nullified any number of laws with negligible media objection. In February 2011, for instance, Obama and “wing man” Attorney General Eric Holder came willy-nilly to the conclusion that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was not “constitutional.” President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law in 1996 with overwhelming support from Democrats in Congress and nearly unanimous support from Republicans.

No matter. Going forward, Obama decided that the Justice Department would no longer enforce DOMA. That simple.
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On the subject of illegal immigration, Obama did not bother deeming existing laws unconstitutional. He chose not to enforce them because they did not poll well among Hispanic voters. It would get no deeper than that.

Getting back to the presidency itself, there’s an oath you’re supposed to take as you’re inaugurated into that high office. It reads:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Seems to me a more easily defensible idea, that Trump has fulfilled the letter and the spirit of this oath and Obama has failed it, than the other way around.

Because of some family obligations, I’m communicating with some people for the first time in many years. It’s not by choice, and even now this is being done through intermediaries. But I can pick up the vibe of some old resentments against my less enjoyable qualities, and being a flawed Son of Adam who ate of the fruit, I must concede there is some legitimacy to these resentments.

Even the people who tolerate me graciously repeat some of the litany: I don’t admit it when I’m wrong. There is some truth in this, although it doesn’t survive strict scrutiny. All it takes is one time for me to admit to a mistake, and that proves I’m at least capable. After reflecting on this, on & off for many years, I’ve come to the realization that the complaint is insufficiently precise. It has to do with how, and when, I admit to being wrong about something.

The complainers evidently have a script already written in their heads: I’m to be shown something, and then comment audibly something like, Heavens to Murgatroyd I must mend my ways. What actually follows is an explanation of why this new nugget of information doesn’t matter, or best-case scenario, a methodical re-examination of the true state of things followed by a rational, autonomous, non-instruction-driven declaration of my new revised opinion which might not fit the supplied stencil. So the real beef is not that I’m unwilling to alter a flawed opinion, but that I’m maintaining my own control over how I come up with these alterations. This is something all real grown-ups are supposed to be doing all the time, so with this understanding I suppose I’m magnifying my original sin. My interest level in possibly reforming, also, is slipping from its apex. From there, things deteriorate all-around.

So yes. I don’t get along well with mental midgets. It’s best we not have contact with each other.

But some labor under the onus of maintaining contact with me across vast expanses of time whether they want to or not. And for them there is an additional complication: As time goes on, these happy occasions on which I admit I was wrong about something and revise my opinion, become less and less frequent. Well…yes. That’s actually a feature and not a bug. If you apply your own critical thinking skills, make up your own mind about the true meaning of things as grown-ups are supposed to be doing, and you are capable of learning from mistakes but you apply those lessons in a way that makes the best sense to you — throughout a larger expanse of time, with nothing dramatically changing, you should reach correct conclusions about things more often and you should find it necessary to admit defeat less often. That’s actually the only meaningful definition of learning. So I conclude we’re dealing here with a mindset that demands from others a “healthy” admission of mistakes made, but is unready to deal with the natural consequences.

We just finished the latest available episode of The Ranch, and it’s been entertaining and everything because the jokes are genuinely funny and the writing is above par, but I have to say I’m somewhat relieved. Watching them back to back, you can see the slow but sure drift toward soap-opera dreck, and I’m tiring of the leitmotif of aggrieved, aggravated females getting fed up and leaving because of [blank]. It comes across like a creativity deficit in the writing pool, perhaps an outreach effort toward harridans who watch too much teevee and, in a related development, can’t manage to make their own marriages work. Or, if I’m conspiracy-minded, a blue-stater’s desire to infect the red state with the blue-state plague of broken families. And honestly, I find it rather offensive toward red-state women, who in my personal experience are not that delicate. I sympathize somewhat with Abby’s predicament with Colt’s deceptions, but I’ve never been entirely clear on what these various women find wrong with Beau. Something to do with waiting for something to change, and the thing not changing. Sorry, that’s just stupid. If you’ve got a ranch and women on the ranch act this way, eventually the whole damn country goes hungry. When is it time to leave? Abuse, physical or mental — and, no fair stretching the perimeter of “mental abuse” to cover “He doesn’t make me feel good ALL of the time.” Adultery. Lying, I suppose, if they’re really big lies and not just “No that dress doesn’t make you look fat.”

Short of that — sit down and STFU you dumb bitch. That’s what we tell your husband when he gets bored with family life, and desires a spectrum of options he no longer has.

I believe we’re just emerging from a sad chapter in our cultural history, in which we haven’t been able to get along with each other because it’s become fashionable to expect/demand so-and-so does such-and-such. Now this character that they’ve used Sam Elliott‘s acting talents to construct, to me, couldn’t possibly be easier to understand. He’s not a complicated individual at all, what you see is what you get. Perhaps I identify with him too much, because for me, he’s the central character and the soap opera angle of “The Ranch” is about this crusty old fart trying to bring beef to market in the middle of a bunch of estrogen-charged ditziness…which I suppose is not the intended thrust of the show. It seems everyone else is picking up on something that’s eluding me. The monologue from this or that woman lamenting how long she’s waited for something to change, and it never does, has always bored me. And I suppose my reaction isn’t the intended one either: “Well then GTFO, you silly twit.”

But these are scriptwriters who have managed to create an immensely popular show in a short amount of time. Their fingers must be on the pulse of somebody, if not on mine. This sad chapter is not yet closed. There has to be closure to this, because society cannot endure this way. We cannot keep a healthy culture going, when everyone with an opinion to offer about anything, is expecting everyone else with an opinion to offer about anything, to change for insufficient reason. Those who fancy themselves learned in all the interpersonal skills required in order to function, are going to have to get jiggy with the plain fact that people are people, and they don’t change their minds about things just because they’ve received an instruction that they should do so. There has to be a reason. And even if one emerges, you’re going to have to deal with the fact that that reason will be reconciled against their own life-experience, and not someone else’s.

There’s no such thing as being right all the time. But there is such a thing as thinking for yourself, as an adult…and the problem is, this works. If you’re truly capable of learning from mistakes, after awhile you make fewer of them, so if your aim is to regularly admit to mistakes so you can make other people happy, this is not for you. Making mistakes is just like anything else: If you want to do it often, meet some kind of quota, you have to put some effort into making mistakes.

Washington Times:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says he doesn’t “deserve” his fortune and thinks taxes on the rich should be much more “progressive” than they are in the United States.

“I have paid more than $10 billion in taxes, but I should have paid more,” Mr. Gates, who is worth roughly $96.5 billion, told the UK.’s Daily Mail in an interview published Tuesday. “I more than followed the law but I think things should be more progressive.

“I don’t deserve my fortune,” he said. “Nobody does. It has come through timing, luck, and through people I worked with. I certainly worked hard and I think software has been a beneficial thing, but I benefited from a structure too.”

Yeah…but no. Not following. You benefited from a structure, for which you paid more than your share of taxes. Individuals and companies benefit from lots of things, for which they/we pay…once we’re done paying for those things, we’re done paying for them. That’s the whole point of paying for them, to satisfy the attached claim.

The big lie here is that “benefit from” is somehow synonymous with “Will never satisfy the attached claim, ever, ever, never, not ever.” Silly stuff. You don’t think of the candy bar you bought from a vending machine that way, why think about anything else that way? Soldiers give up their blood and their limbs for us, we can think about them that way. How about that? But government contracted with private businesses to build our roads and so forth?

There persists another deception about the nature of money, what it represents. It’s not privilege. The government didn’t allow Bill Gates to have money. Bill Gates earned it by building things, then running things, then investing in things. Yes it can grow exponentially without work. That’s a feature and not a bug. You risk large amounts of money, if it works you make large amounts of more money. That’s what makes our economy go.

Money is control. Saying “I don’t deserve to have this much control” is saying “I don’t know what I’m doing,” which means Gates either doesn’t know what he’s doing, or he’s being deceptive. He knows what he’s doing.

The real problem is that we have persons walking around among us, listening to stuff like this and reading about it, who are receptive. Mr. Gates is playing to them, earning their approval. Why does stuff like this net their approval, that’s the real problem.

“I don’t think giving the money to my children would be good for them or good for society,” he said. “So after whatever consumption I have, and after some left aside for the kids and for taxes, the rest of the money goes to the foundation.”

“Melinda and I work hard all the time to make sure that money goes to help those most in need,” he added.

I can’t disapprove of that, it’s his choice and he has every right in the world to make it that way. If I’ve got some three-comma assets under my control when my time comes, I’ll probably do something similar.

But this one-guy-has-too-much stuff has been creeping in, a little bit at a time, and while we were all snoozing away it seems to have become mainstream. It’s not a question that becomes relevant only when & if you reach billionaire status; it cuts to the quick of the point of existence, for all of us. Too many Americans don’t have savings, aren’t ready for retirement, and that’s directly linked to this mindset that the most positive effect you can have on posterity is to do-nothing, emit-nothing, be green & clean. Lack of financial goals. Vacation? That’s why we have tax “refunds.” If you haven’t got enough coming back or you end up with the IRS sending you a bill, well, then you play the lottery.

Unprepared people have hurt me. They’ve redirected my resources and thwarted my goals, jeopardizing or diminishing my dreams. They have, at the very least — excepting the occasions I rejected their conjured-up high-drama crises entirely — delayed what I was trying to do, which often had something to do with helping other people. In short: They have been agents of chaos.

People who have “too much” money haven’t done any of this to me.

This is not consistent with favored plot-lines and literature or movie drama. But it has been my experience and, from what I have learned about the experiences of others, it’s not unique.

Enough of this. It’s pablum for people who lack the attention span to review, or consider themselves above reviewing, results. It doesn’t bring good results. It wrecks things and causes misery.

It’s a good thing you’re running a charity that’s supposed to help people, Bill. Perhaps it can make up for some of the damage you’re doing here.

So we finally watched Solo, and I wasn’t that excited about it so I just glanced at it every now & then, sort of seeing it with half an eyeball. But I do have to say what I saw surprised me and it looked pretty good overall. All this fuss about the social justice robot seemed overblown, to me.

Disney’s new direction, I’ve come to realize, has stirred a sort of weariness in me. It’s not annoyance and it’s not actual fatigue. I’m weary of going through the motions pretending something is deep and complex, when at the end of it the narrative turns out to be threadbare and shallow. Back in my childhood, the franchise excited us as a meeting-place between technology and spiritualism, as good confronted evil. That’s gone, and what a shame that is. What we had before wasn’t just a mix of tech and holy ghosts, all dumped into a big bag & shaken together. There was planning, there was elegance.

There was real mystery. Yeah we were disappointed when we realized Lucas was making it all up day-by-day as he went along…there’s no explanation for Darth Vader standing right in front of his own daughter and being unable to sense her. Sorry, but every explanation you’ve heard about that is bunk. The unavoidable fact is that Leia was not his daughter in 1977, and by 1983, she was. But at least each character had a solid anchoring within a much larger story, including Leia…who, since then, has become a plainer, simpler, less interesting character.

It’s not just Leia. Some of the old elegance, that depth of good story-telling, has been bleached out by this effervescent drive toward “Girls Are Awesome!!” Okay, yeah, boys got a lot of inspiration out of Star Wars and there’s a desire to share this among girls who couldn’t get into it. This issue with girls who couldn’t get into it, puzzles me too. I recall the girls being just as inspired as we were, and having just as much fun. These days it seems we have a lot of people who see yet another inequality in need of correction. But the people most agitated about that, don’t warm up too cozily to the concept of religion. As a consequence, Star Wars has lost depth. I tire of obligatorily pretending the depth is still there when it isn’t.

It’s come to be just another thing social justice warriors are wrecking. And we’re not supposed to notice.

This issue of the droids being potentially sentient and therefore deserving of rights, though, does rightfully claim an anchoring in the old trilogy, specifically at the moment when Luke tries to enter the Mos Eisley Cantina with his droids and is curtly informed by the bartender “We don’t serve their kind.” Therein lies a loose thread, that can be pulled to offer us the story of how oppressive things are in this galaxy at that time. I remember wondering about this, maybe for just a split second, clear back in ’77 as I was trying to take in the story. I guess this is just a weak point in the story-telling, because with good story-telling things should have a point, a reason to be. What was the reason for this exchange?

Luke comments to 3PO that they should acquiesce, which they do, since they “don’t want any trouble.” Is this to clue us in on the situation that, with the Empire looking for the droids and the entourage now wading into a much more densely populated area, they’re in danger? Seems redundant. Is this setting up a theme that “there are alternatives to fighting,” which is picked up a little while later as the Millennium Falcon is sucked into the Death Star? Or a situation in which the droids are out in the alleyways looking for proper hiding spaces, instead of meeting Han Solo and the Wookie?

Maybe, when it came time for Obi-Wan to save Luke by slashing that guy’s arm off and killing the insect-creature, a couple of zany mechanical sidekicks would have hurt the suspense factor? I never did get a good answer to this. George Lucas has always been a stickler for the good-storytelling rule that, if there isn’t a definable reason for a thing being there, the thing should be ejected along with even the most marginal risk of possibly boring the audience. Seems to me the Mos Eisley Cantina could’ve gone right on ahead “serving their kind,” the droids could’ve waddled around, and everything with the story would have been fine. So what gives?

I’m very sure there’s nothing deep or challenging in the state, or degree, of droid sentience that I’m missing. As characters in the story, the droids service the whims of children who haven’t yet put any serious thought into the difference between gadgets and living things. The droids do things robots simply don’t do, like express pleasure while taking a hot oil bath, swear at each other and tell each other to “switch off,” etc. To adults who fancy themselves sufficiently sophisticated to ponder weighty moral issues, they’re toasters, with just some fictional/metaphorical embellishments added, like speech to a cartoon animal, to entertain the less mature.

Toasters don’t need liberating. Oh yes, I know slaveholders referred to their slaves exactly this way in the antebellum era…they’re things and not people. This doesn’t cause me much discomfort with regard to my toaster. As far as I’m concerned it can stay where it is.

Independent Sentinel:

Radical leftist Cory Booker has been a vegetarian roughly since 1992, and it began as an experiment. He is committed to it now and wants us to all be vegetarians to save Planet Earth.

The planet can’t sustain all the meat eaters, he told vegnews.com.

“You see the planet earth moving towards what is the Standard American Diet. We’ve seen this massive increase in consumption of meat produced by the industrial animal agriculture industry. The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” he said.

There just isn’t enough land, he said. There is too much rainforest destruction and too many greenhouse producing gases, he added.

Hmmm…I like eating meat, but let’s leave that alone for now. After all, the continuing survival of the planet is at steak, er, stake.

The problem here is that I do lots of other things, besides eating meat, that we can’t afford to have everyone doing. The lot size of my house, for example, multiplied by 3.77 billion (world’s population divided by my household’s population) would come to how much land mass? I have a job, and drive a car to get there. I use up services, I consume goods. Not just meat, I also go through a lot of coffee, to say nothing of beer and wine.

You know what I think would make a big, negative environmental impact? If everybody stopped eating meat. How come no one’s exploring that? Could you just imagine? These discussions surface about eating-meat, and people automatically think about cows. Every now and then I’ll come to learn about the actual throughput of chickens, though, and it’s hard to fathom. Hundreds and hundreds, per day, in one tiny little restaurant…what if we were all to quit, uh, cold-turkey. All those chickens that would’ve been butchered every day instead just strutting around making more chickens.

I would imagine one of the first things to happen would be an acute corn crisis. Corn requires a massive investment in land use, and all of the time. You use an acre to grow corn, you can’t use that acre for anything else. I could take this further, but I think I’ve already passed the point that’s been given any serious thought by the Senator or those in agreement. Liberals like to talk about simple things, like individual liberty, being “complex” and “tricky” so they can disguise what they want to do. But then they come to whether the planet can survive the way we do things, and all of a sudden things aren’t tricky anymore, they’re nice and simple, like a fast car barreling toward a brick wall, or a cliff. But that’s exactly when things really are tricky, and not that simple.

Liberals have a reputation for ruining everything, because they do.

You do realize, don’t you, that they could avoid this reputation — even with their awful ideas — if they agreed to the implementation of those ideas with some kind of back-out plan if things don’t go the way they should. That’s the way you roll out a patch or a new application in a large-scale enterprise network. But they won’t. They want it to be like dumping an additive into the village water well; once it’s done, it’s done. You can put it in but you can’t suck it back out again. They want it like that every time.

They could avoid this reputation if they provided for some kind of opt-out, so that whoever doesn’t want their local well spiked can be given the option to say no thanks. But they won’t. Their ideas are so “good” they have to be forced.

They could avoid this reputation if they agreed to a sunset option, with option to renew after some term. They almost never do this. They want that ratchet locked in place.

They could avoid this reputation if they didn’t work so hard to exert control over who’s allowed to vote, at what age, with what criminal record — if they could just accept the voting body for however they find it, and make their best pitch to it, like any reasonable sales or marketing professional. But they won’t. They have to do their “ballot harvesting,” their Motor-Voter, and they have to fight any voter ID requirements so we’re not allowed to know who’s voting.

They could avoid this reputation by firming up their list of ecological/cultural lists of offenses, so that it could remain static for a little while. But no. Every year there’s a new offense that’s supposed to make all liberals in good standing angry and “triggered.” For any year that doesn’t see the arrival of a new offense, there is a new expensive social program, some new nanny-state assurance, and we don’t have an adequate level of government until and unless it’s provided. It’s a constant influx. So we never know how many dollars per nose it takes to run a proper government.

They could avoid this reputation by setting up a “sandbox” and checking their new rules within that isolated enclave, leaving everything outside the perimeter unaffected. But they won’t.

They could avoid this reputation by going first. They could say “I want you to pay this higher tax, as I have been paying for the last two years” or “I want you to order drinks without straws, as I have been doing for the last two years.” But they won’t.

They have the reputation of ruining everything, because they want to implement something they haven’t tried themselves…everywhere, from sea to shining sea…forever…with no opt-out plan…no back-out plan…no sunset. And not even so much as a hint that it’s the right way to go.

Notice we’re not even deliberating here whether it’s good to ban drinking straws, to impose unrealistic demands on utilities to use “green” energy, to put Lara Croft in long pants, to expel college students for wearing pro-Trump hats, to tell us how many cartridges our weapons should be able to hold or what days we can water our lawns, to increase the minimum wage or marginal tax rates. It’s got to do with how the rules are imposed, not what they are. Liberals don’t like this reputation they have. I wouldn’t like it either. But I don’t feel one bit sorry for them.

Unless I’ve missed something, the course change Americans voted in for the next two years is

1. Presidents have to release their tax returns
2. Impeach the motherfucker
3. Highest marginal tax rate = 70%

This AOC person deserves some praise for, if nothing else, contributing the most definable, actionable and real policy change that can be discussed. For coloring outside the lines of this unworkable hatpin-tiny platform of “I/we hate Trump” that had been drawing criticism and ridicule all year.

As far as the discussion that ensues, we have had it before. The problem with that arrangement is that the nation’s mighty resources are directed by people who played no part in bringing them into existence. Socialist H.G. Wells wrote a story about this, “The Time Machine,” about the Eloi and the Morlocks, the former of whom lived “above” and enjoyed the perks and privileges of society, the latter of whom lived below, toiling away to make it happen. This is the paradox of socialism: We’re supposed to require their enlightened way of looking at things to see that this is dysfunctional, and yet once they’re in power this is exactly the world they tend to create.

It doesn’t work because the people enjoying the benefits must necessarily make the far-reaching decisions of state, but are missing a toughness that can’t be taught. Pelosi will cut off your head and you won’t even know you’re bleeding, huh. But she’s Eloi. Thrown to the wolves, her kind would NOT return, leading the pack; her class requires this membrane between the upper and the lower, to protect the charismatic types from the exigencies, pressures and shocks of the hard work they can’t do.

There was another story from much further in the past, a fable about a goose and golden eggs, by a guy named Aesop. The parable teaches us there is a difference between a desire to spend loot, and the proper respect that must be paid to whatever brought it into existence.

This new Congress looks to me like a problem that’s going to solve itself. I don’t mind the vulgar language, the so-called “strong willed women” and their readily evident lack of practical skills. What concerns me is their lack of curiosity about what it takes to make things go. But I’m picking up the vibe the rest of the American voting public is seeing the same thing I’m seeing. This is going to help Trump in 2020. A lot.

I just hope these silky-girl-hand types, these Hillary-wannabe pantsuit waifs, caricatures of the type of person we shouldn’t want running anything, double-X reincarnations of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, don’t become fastened in the nation’s consciousness to the condition of being female. There are quite a few chicks in this country who understand hard work, cause and effect, supply and demand, who know how to strip and clean a rifle and field dress a moose. There are females who understand that when you subsidize something you get more of it, and when you tax something you get less of it. Really! Girls who have proper trigger discipline and can drive a stick shift. They exist. It’s a shame they were not ably represented in last year’s electoral results, which by and large have favored the “Panera Mom” who gets offended by every little thing, can’t parallel park, and never cultivated an intimate or mutually respectful relationship with anyone who wasn’t a mall-shopping buddy or a stuffed animal.

I’m wondering, once again, why whenever we have a “Year of the Woman” it always seems to end up representing women I don’t know. The women from whom I’m permanently estranged, by choice, the ones I seek to avoid. The sisterhood of Annie Oakley types, who at the very least have once or twice had to deal with a recoil and smelled the sweet scent of burning gunpowder, never seem to find their voice in these things. If we can find a solution to that, we will find a solution to much. Empowering malcontents, with males or females, never ends well.

From the previous:

Self-entitled strutting thin-skinned martinets who go around being “triggered” by every little thing are not responding to some kind of problem, they ARE the problem.

Ben Shapiro writes, evidently thinking about the new year along the same lines…

If we fail to abide by these new strictures, we will be attacked by the Wokescolds. These “woke” inquisitors have apparently mastered the ever-shifting dynamics of leftist power politics and are willing to scour everyone’s online history and interpersonal relationships for signs of heresy. Once such heresy is uncovered, the Wokescolds truly go to work: They demand apologies from the supposed sinners and boycotts of those who refuse to disassociate from them. They discourage decent people from speaking up — better to stay silent so as to avoid the wrath of the Wokescolds.

The Wokescolds deliberately pick marginal cases — cases on which good people may be split. This allows the Wokescolds to consistently narrow the boundaries of safety for those who disagree with them.

From the comments:

From a mythological perspective, Leftists who self-proclaim their “wokeness” are simply another manifestation of Puritans who suppressed their own shadows then projected their unwanted feelings onto easy targets. For the anti-Liberty New England Puritans, nature itself became evil. All that was instinctual and innate became despised and feared. They created the witch hunt …. literally. Today’s “woke” Puritans despise and fear their own feelings of racial superiority and their own desires to succeed financially and their own lust to associate with whomever they want. They hate themselves for being themselves, so these highly-civilized and totally dependent Leftists cast their harsh and envious judgmentalism onto the self-reliant and the liberty-loving people who understand freedom. Ultimately, just like the Puritans, they are insane.

I’m seeing another precedent, much more recent, which might be easily conflated with the latest: political correctness.

What began as a force for good (considering the number of people who really are racist, sexist and homophobic) has since become a laughing stock beacause [sic] of the ridiculous extremes to which certain neurotic ultra-liberals took it – cf. a person being ‘vertically challenged’ rather than short. This has actually undone a lot of progress made in changing bigoted attitudes, whilst making people feel guilty for enjoying anything but the blandest, most [anemic] [humor] for fear of being ‘offensive’. I mean, seriously, what’s funnier out of ‘Friends’ and ‘South Park’?

But there is a difference. What Shapiro is writing about is, first last & all in-between, a battle tactic. And its origin is in social media. He mentions the example of Louis C.K., who I guess is not buying into the gender-neutral pronouns. This cannot be allowed to stand. If Fanucci doesn’t collect all of the dough from Corleone, Tessio and Clemenza, he looks weak in the eyes of his neighborhood and so he has to exert some muscle — that’s how it works. It is a defensive maneuver. Even when it’s used offensively it’s still defensive. The Wokescolds prowl through the social media stream of the intended target looking for one of their “marginal cases,” but before that happened the target must have done something to make himself a target.

Whereas, P.C. was just a way to uplift oneself socially. Every little term, name, nickname, noun or adjective written or spoken, was a new opportunity.

Batman: And you are…?
Batgirl: Batgirl.
Batman: That’s not very PC. What about Batwoman, or Batperson?

Like that.

The Wokescolds, contrasted with preening polishing busybodies who sought to socially uplift themselves, toil away for the benefit of the movement. They’re looking for high-value military targets. After they lock onto one such target, they look for the crime.

Shapiro continues…

…while the Wokescolds may win temporary victories, those victories will surely be Pyrrhic: As it turns out, we tend to like our biology, language, politics, religion, romantic relationships, art and comedy. The Wokescolds will certainly lose. But not before they destroy a lot of people and fray the social fabric nearly beyond repair.

I dunno about that. Like any other social reformer, they only get to decide on content. It’s up to everyone else to decide whether or not to accept, and in so doing whether to add to the momentum or deplete it. We own this evolving society and all the evolving social mores within it. If disaster ultimately ensues, that’s on us.

Just. Say. No.

I am proclaiming, retroactively, 2018 to be the year of gender fluidity, of non-equivalence, of “let’s pretend this thing is that other manifestly different thing.”

We drop that here. >=2019, men are men and women are women. We don’t play the “I identify as” game.

Illegal aliens are illegal. They aren’t legal.

A bad idea, expressed in a great many languages, does not become a good idea because it’s expressed in more languages.

People who work for a living and work to help others, work for their living and work to help others. People who are pieces of shit who don’t do anything, voting for redistributionist policies to show what wonderful people they are, are just pieces of shit voting away our sacred property rights.

Working for a living ≠ voting for a living.

Self-entitled strutting thin-skinned martinets who go around being “triggered” by every little thing are not responding to some kind of problem, they ARE the problem.

Assholes who launch civil actions against bakers who refuse to make gay wedding cakes, are not expanding freedom for everybody, they’re encroaching upon it.

When politicians and their acolytes fly thousands of miles on fossil-fueled jets to attend symposiums lecturing me about how I’m destroying the planet by driving to work, I’m not going to pretend they’re saving the planet. I’m going to acknowledge the plain and obvious fact that they’re fucking hypocrites and you’re going to start acknowledging that too.

I am proclaiming 2019 to be the year of A=A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today:

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

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

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

Helen Andrews tells of her personal experience…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Office Space relates:

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

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

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

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

Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.

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

Peter Gibbons: Good point.

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

Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?

Lawrence: Well, yeah.

Peter Gibbons: Nothing.

Lawrence: Nothing, huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sadly, I think that’s it.

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

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

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

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

Hirono:

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

Reagan:

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

I have nothing to add.

But Laura Ingraham does.

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

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

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

Surber:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five double-X chromosomes are no better.

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

Softracize (v.)

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

In the manuscript, Chapter Two, I describe…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So don’t shoot the messenger.

Allie Stuckey writes at Townhall:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leftism’s god is a jealous god.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monica Showalter writes in American Thinker:

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

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

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

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

Well yes, of course. it’s obvious. Click the pic to embiggen.

Hoft:

In the background of the picture a group of men are posing for one camera man and another is running towards another camera man. In other areas, people are just standing around. The woman with the children was just a photo-op…

Surber:

The whole media is a PR shop for this caravan. The media hailed the Reuters photographer as a hero.

He told NBC News, “When the tear gas started, some people were screaming and everybody started running away. I saw the woman and two children running away. One girl was barefoot from the beginning. The other was wearing beach sandals and lost them in the chaos.”

She lost her sandal!

Oh no.

Orange Man Bad…
:
…We have the worst media in the world.

We have made our media what it is, of course. The lies are going to get worse and worse, as long as they keep working. Our friends the liberals are the loudest among us — they solve everything by way of emotional outbursts, and they have the time, no one is counting on them to produce anything. And liberals have made it a point of pride to believe the right things, no matter how risible, and disbelieve all the WrongBadThink, no matter how little cause for doubt there may be. A brief glance in the rear view mirror at the Chredible Christine imbroglio, is sufficient to confirm that.

The rock won’t cease its descent until it reaches the ocean floor, and the floor has yet to be found.

The Atlantic:

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena — the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks — might not be real…

One by one, researchers have tried to repeat the classic experiments behind these well-known effects — and failed. And whenever psychologists undertake large projects…they typically succeed, on average, half of the time.

Ironically enough, it seems that one of the most reliable findings in psychology is that only half of psychological studies can be successfully repeated.
:
But skeptics have argued that the misleadingly named “crisis” has more mundane explanations. First, the replication attempts themselves might be too small. Second, the researchers involved might be incompetent, or lack the know-how to properly pull off the original experiments. Third, people vary, and two groups of scientists might end up with very different results if they do the same experiment on two different groups of volunteers.

It comes as news to me that anyone was even making the attempt. I have long understood psychology to be a “soft science.” It qualifies as a scientific discipline only just barely, out of the sense that there’s a reality out there that is worth studying. But that the standard requirements applied to all others, which are really just prerequisites for conducting a valid experiment, were out of scope due to the nature of what was being studied.

Rather like economics. You can compile histories of this thing happening and then that other thing subsequently happening, then you can look for patterns. But you can’t truly reproduce these “experiments” according to a strict interpretation of that word in a scientific context, because you can’t isolate. Economics is the study of how everything is necessarily connected to everything else, and there’s always something spoiling the process. It’s the same with psychology. Those skeptics in that third group have it right. The old maxim about snowflakes, no two being identical, that’s true of people as well.

It is dangerous to intermix soft sciences like this, with hard sciences like physics, astronomy, geology, et al. Lacking the tools to replicate or to falsify, the discipline inevitably deteriorates into a hodge podge of theories that endure because they’re interesting…to someone. And then a credentialed priesthood arises around the unverified theories, because for something to be interesting, someone has to be around to find it so. The old thing about the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it, you know? Someone has to say “That’s an interesting theory” in order for someone else to say “The experts say this causes that…”

So we require credentialing, so those high priests can say “That’s a good theory because I say it is one, and who are you to take issue?”

If all of our science deteriorates into that layer, we will have no science and we will know nothing.

From PJ Media.

“It’s not surprising that Donald Trump is increasing his attacks,” Rep. Red Lieu (D-CA) recently said on CNN. “The walls are closing in on him.”

That’s a familiar refrain on CNN and MSNBC, where hosts continue to string their audiences along with the hopeful narrative that Mueller is on the verge of delivering a death blow to the president. Those walls have apparently been on the verge of crushing Trump for the past 14-plus months now.

I’m just wondering: If this Mueller character is about to unleash the devastating final report and this is really gonna cook Trump’s goose once and for all…who gives a fig about those tax returns? Conversely, if the release of those tax returns is such a game-changing event, what does this say about the sum total of everything Mueller has managed to collect?

One really tips the scales or the other one does. Can’t be both. If it turns out to be neither one, though, that would be in keeping with the trend we’ve seen hold up thus far.

How do liberals miss this? That’s the real question. They still maintain a chokehold on our consensus expectations, on our prevailing sense of normalcy. They’ve won the House of Representatives after going two years having nothing to sell other than “we hate Trump.” Now they’re going to guide the course of Congress’ lower chamber, and arguably deserve to…therefore, The People have a right to know. What makes them so dysfunctional? How do they miss such obvious things?

It’s the same as it ever was. They “think” emotionally. A good story hooks ’em every time, if they happen to like it. There is little to nothing by way of critical thinking going on here. Regular-thinking is thinking about what fits, critical-thinking is thinking about what doesn’t. The if-then stuff.

“If your hair’s wet because you fell in the creek on the way home from school, and you didn’t go skinny-dipping, then how come your clothes are dry?”

If they had what it took to ask such questions about the narratives they happened to like, they wouldn’t be liberals.

Of the blog that is; “The Blog That Nobody Reads.”

Due to work and personal obligations, we’ve throttled way back over the last two years but the flame is still lit. We’re at 8,320 posts, 26,826 comments and many users/readers.

Normally this time of year our rotation is 11/10: Marine Corps birthday; 11/11 Veteran’s Day; 11/12 our birthday. This time we disrupted the pattern because we wanted this business up in Paradise to stay on top where the uh, you know, “nobodies” would have more of a chance to see it. We’re still waiting to see how that all goes for our friend(s) and this is sort of a sad birthday for us all.

It’s obvious here that there’s a problem. Many days are very smoky. Air quality is extremely poor. The soot is getting everywhere and everything’s filthy. We’re still safe, but the emerging news remains less than encouraging for others nearby.

Washington Post:

In the ’60s, Mr. Lee took a distinctly new approach to characters and setting, as well as to the very interaction with readers who had grown used to comics that were aimed solely at a younger audience and that featured flawless, square-jawed heroes who had uncomplicated morals.

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the comic-book-themed novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” said in an interview that Mr. Lee’s best-known characters were “vain, pompous, conceited. . . . Everything that works in comic books today is indebted to him for that.”

Wikipedia:

Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber, December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018) was an American comic-book writer, editor, and publisher. He was editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, and later its publisher and chairman, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.

In collaboration with several artists – particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko – he co-created fictional characters including Spider-Man, the Hulk, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Black Panther, the X-Men, and – also with co-writer Larry Lieber – the characters Ant-Man, Iron Man, and Thor. In doing so, he pioneered a more complex approach to writing superheroes in the 1960s, and in the 1970s challenged the standards of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to it updating its policies.

Following his retirement from Marvel, he remained a public figurehead for the company, and frequently made cameo appearances in Marvel Cinematic Universe films. Meanwhile, he continued independent creative ventures into his 90s.

Lee was inducted into the comic book industry’s Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. He received a National Medal of Arts in 2008.

Well that’s too bad. I generally disapprove of these reforms, but it is true that his contributions to the entertainment medium were invaluable and I’m certain he’ll leave a big hole that will be hard to fill.

I have, by the grace of God, many dear close blogger friends. Gerard Van der Leun is my most prized, for so many reasons.

Within the last day, he passed on word that he had to evacuate from his childhood locale of Paradise, CA due to the Butte fire, and subsequently learned his house was destroyed.

This is a fatal fire. The latest death toll I have is nine, and unfortunately I have a feeling providing linkage to the stat would be useless because that number may change. But our friend is safe, and so is his Mom, and his cat. Thank God. But so much lost. Can you even imagine.

Nobody reads this blog, as I’ve noted many times…so I’m sure no one’s reading this. But anyway. I’m heading on over to the tip jar. Anybody who wants to come along, meet me here. I’ve been interacting with this wonderful man and watching him for over a decade, during which time he’s just so freely given of himself to younger lesser blogs, like me, with his linkage and his advice and literary talents. To say nothing of his entertainment value.

It’s go-time. This is a compatriot, in his hour of need. If you have the means, at the moment, please join me in treating him that way. If not, I’m sure your best wishes will be welcome as well.

Gerard, your grief is ours. Our home, should you see fit to work us into your rotation for whatever reason, is yours.

Update 11/10/18: Returning to survey the damage. Pretty heartbreaking.