It’s so strange. I have heard from people who voted for Reagan, and were sorry for having done so. Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump. Losers, too, have repentant voters who would like to have done it differently. Mondale, Dukakis, Perot, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Romney and yes, even her, the Smartest Woman on the Planet Hillary Clinton. They all had voters who wished they could take back their vote and do it differently.

Even JFK, back in the day. Here and there, now and then, you could read about them. Should-a voted for Nixon, gosh darn it.

But, the 81 million have no regrets.

The guy who hid in his basement…can’t put together two words…is not popular…time comes for him to brag, he’s got nothing…far-and-away record number of votes received, ever, since the nation’s founding, and no one regrets anything?

Oh okay. So they wanted World War III and gas at $7 a gallon?

People who follow politics only casually and haven’t seen a reason to commit to either side, get to be loud in our country. It’s the price we pay for our affluence; our populace, or certain portions of it, get to enjoy bizarre, unfitting luxuries and that is one of them. Some of these neutrals figure they’re neutral because they know something the idealogs don’t know, although they typically can’t say what that is. But while they’re running around being loud, one of the ideas they tend to purvey is that the committed conservatives and committed liberals argue more-or-less the same way, just in different directions. And this is attractive to people who haven’t been paying attention at all.

It’s a case of the blind leading the blind.

It’s quite wrong. Or at least, if one dedicates oneself to paying attention to figure out what’s really happening, rather than just to pick up casual, surface-level observations to drop into the next coffee table conversation with friends, co-workers or relatives, this is the first domino to fall.

Liberals, I notice, generally don’t believe in cause and effect. They certainly act like they do, but they don’t. Conservatives say “Increasing the minimum wage costs jobs” and liberals say “No, it actually creates jobs” — seems like here we have an earnest point of discussion. But…we don’t. Conservatives can offer a cogent rationale: Raising the price of any product or service, will generally reduce demand. This is not only strong reasoning, it is the basis of economic theory. Supply, demand and price are interrelated, and this is how markets work. The liberal rebuttal seems to consist of little more than “Paul Krugman says, and who are you to question him,” infused with some “If you get to do that, our side gets to do this” verbal nerd-slap-fighting.

I’m noticing this lately because conservatives have noticed Putin had left things alone while Trump was in charge, a notion that the dedicated liberal overlooks, or rejects, just because it doesn’t gel well with his feelings. As I wrote earlier, we as a country would do well to seriously discuss this idea that bad guys are intimidated into inaction when our leadership is, shall we say, hawkish. Such a discussion might be short, but we wouldn’t know for sure because our liberals don’t want us discussing it. But history seems to support the idea. And again, there is a cogent rationale: Bad guys who run around doing bad things, make decisions about whether or not to do them before they act, and they decide these things in their own self-interest.

Liberals say “inequality” — whether they’re talking about wealth, or income, they typically don’t say — leads to social instability and upheaval. How this works, I don’t know, and you can’t tell me because you don’t know either. They won’t say that part either. It seems to have something to do with the emotions of the people who are causing the social instability and upheaval. Left to guess, I would have to surmise this is a threat that if we don’t redistribute income so that unproductive people get some of it, the unproductive people will march through the streets BLM-protest-style, smashing things. On the other hand, that’s not fair because I’m going beyond what the liberals are actually saying. On the other other hand, that’s the best I can do because they’re not being clear about it.

They establish some link between capitalism and “climate change” that is trashing the planet, but it looks like communism is harder on the planet than capitalism ever has been.

They link some good things to their purported causes, too, like electing Barack Obama President led to the termination of Osama bin Laden. Gotta give ’em that one. Except for one thing: How? What specifically did Obama do to make this happen?

Conservatives say if we let entrepreneurs and other business types keep more of their profits, we’ll see economic benefits for all. Liberals smear that as “Trickle-Down,” but history supports it, and so does common sense: You want more of something to happen, you make it easier and more rewarding for the people who are doing it, you get more of it. Liberals say if we have more infrastructure and education, we’ll reap the same benefits. But when we don’t, they move the goalposts and begin indulging in bizarre arguments that we never should have wanted what we thought we wanted in the first place. Education, so goes the goalpost-move argument, should not be all about making more money, it should be more about making the student into a well rounded individual. On this issue, we could see some agreement between conservatives and liberals, if the liberals would just hold still: Educate the kids, so they grow up with practical skills, learn to provide for themselves, and there’s a benefit for all while we make some serious inroads on that inequality problem. Seems doable. But the liberals tailor their arguments for people who can’t pay attention or remember anything.

It seems a lot of the time like liberals appreciate inequality just fine. Replacing the ABC’s and three R‘s with gender studies, would be a great way to perpetuate inequality.

It is a solid, cogent argument to speculate that Putin invaded Crimea when Obama was President, because Obama was President, and he invaded Ukraine when Biden was President because Biden was President. When Trump was President Putin invaded nothing, because Trump was President.

“COVID happened under Trump’s watch,” on the other hand, while true, is not solid or cogent. Again, it’s just “I get to do this if you get to do that” verbal nerd-slap-fighting. The question remains outstanding: Why? What is it about Trump being President that caused the pathogen to escape the Chinese lab? Or motivated the Chinese to release it on purpose? The most obvious answer would be “They wanted Trump to lose the election so the whole thing was a setup.” We don’t have supporting evidence for all that just yet, but if it emerges, it would hardly be a reflection on Trump himself. Rather, it would indicate that someone had something to hide, and were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it hidden, which would suggest that replacing our President was the wrong thing for us to do.

What we have here is truly a remarkable thing: We have an ideology dedicated to the proposition that events are spontaneous, that nothing happens because of anything else. An ideology that is unaware of the simple concept of cause-and-effect. And that’s something that, on an individual level, its adherents must realize is a real thing. I mean, to go about their day-to-day lives, they must get this, right? What do liberals do every day? Maybe…go to Starbucks to get a seven-dollar daily drink before bitching about how hard it is to make ends meet? So they must know, to get the drink, you have to reload the card…? My point is, the politics apparently are making them stupid. They understand, when they just do their daily-routine things, the events cause other events to happen, and then when they immerse themselves in politics and start spamming conservative blogs with nonsense, suddenly they don’t understand this anymore.

They think “the January 6th insurrection” was such an awful, terrible thing. Conservatives come back and say “Well yeah, BLM had been rampaging through our cities all the previous summer, law enforcement did little to nothing about it, and that sent the message that political violence was okay.” Pretty simple summation, and you get here before you’re obliged to condemn this act or uphold that act. It’s an old, respected custom, that if we don’t prosecute crimes, they become okay and we shouldn’t be surprised when the crimes happen with greater frequency and with more damage done. But somehow, when you get to that point in the discussion, liberals activate their amnesia-shield of “I don’t comprehend cause and effect because it’s too complicated,” and start topic-drifting, goalpost-moving, or filling the sound space with nonsense and noise in some other way.

The longer I watch them, the harder it is for me to chalk it up to true amnesia, lack of focus, or any other kind of incompetence.

To harp on the point that COVID happened under Trump, and then waste time on bogus “fact checks” that say high gas prices aren’t Biden’s fault, is worse than hypocritical. It’s flagrantly dishonest. It says something about our discourse, and the environment in which it takes place, that liberals not only engage in the duplicity on a routine basis, but feel comfortable doing it.

Cheeky hot-pants girl from Eat My Dust says…

You know the thing I’ve always hated about cars, is they’re so gorgeous on the outside but so ugly and dirty under the hood, ya know?

It’s supposed to be a stupid one-liner that helps build on the character’s superficiality…and it is.

But in light of current events, it’s quite profound. Consider what would happen if Darlene got her wish. Start with draining the five quarts of motor oil and replacing it with potpourri, after scrubbing every last remnant of that awful icky slippery black stuff from every machine part. Turtle-wax the engine right down to the core of the crankshaft.

What you are then left with, is a beautiful thing indeed — inside and out — but it will also be immobile. The engine won’t run. If it runs, it will overheat. If it doesn’t overheat, the valves won’t work right and if they do work right, the brakes will fry. The car will self-immolate because you made it into a grease-free, bright, shiny, waxed, non-functional, self-destructive thing. The crankcase smells like cinnamon, the gas tank smells like lemon, all the guts are smooth, colorful and appealing to your delicate sensibilities, And the damn thing is inoperable, melting into a puddle when anyone turns the key.

That’s why there’s a war on now. You assholes got rid of Trump because he was coarse, salty, abrasive and he didn’t tickle your fancy.

The analogy breaks down a bit because without some actual gasoline somewhere, the motor doesn’t run long enough to fry itself. And a “Biden-mobile” doesn’t smell that sweet. Rumors of Grandpa Joe being more congenial and friendly, showing the proper behavior in the selected setting, discretion superior to his predecessor, etc….they’re greatly exaggerated. Not that any of this matters though. A mistake is a mistake.

By all means, extend your compassion. Hopes and prayers. Donate money and blood for the humanitarian crisis coming. But we’re living in your world. You wanted things your way and you got ’em. Never forget that, because I won’t. Not letting you off the hook.

The dumb throwaway line from the 45-year-old movie is there to show that some people, even if you could get them close to the innards of a machine, shouldn’t be allowed there. Well, in 2020 we allowed them there. Yes it’s that simple.

Well, since I wrote the previous about the ninnies among us refusing to think about things because it’s just too scary, it happened. Putin invaded the Ukraine. China may be involved, which inspires all sorts of dark thoughts about where this might be going.

Arguing on the Internet doesn’t help anything, people keep telling me. Then they go and argue about it on the Internet…

Well, I dunno. If we’ve just toppled out of the frying pan into the fire, we have done so because of the way people are. Blame this guy, or that guy, we’re supposed to all be the same, right? Or at least related. And the Internet, or before the Internet I guess it was just the arguing — exposes the human frailties that lead to situations like this. The “Too Frightening To Contemplate” fallacy mentioned in the previous post is one of these frailties. And, for those who were blindsided by this, it has led to the blindsiding. Oh no, World War III can’t start in my lifetime, that’s too frightening to contemplate. Well oops, what’s this?

Trump kept it from happening. At least, while he was in, it didn’t happen. Coincidence? A lot of people seem to think so, I notice…and this is based on…squat. Here’s another frailty. We see it in the endless debates about gun control, and criminal incarceration. I remember the debates about it during Reagan’s time in office, and immediately thereafter. Here and there, now and then, we discuss it but we don’t even bother with giving it a name. For lack of a better term, we could call it “malevolent intent properly intimidated into inaction” or some such thing. It applies to domestic issues as well as foreign policy: The house with a sign that says “We believe in gun control” gets burglarized before the one that says “Prayer is a good way to talk to Jesus, trespassing here will get you a meeting with Him.”

Liberals, and sweater-wearing, pearl-clutching Trump-phobes, think of bad guys and their bad deeds like random weather events, such as hurricanes. It’s odd. People who are sure the “economic sanctions” will somehow push today’s Bad Guy, Vladimir Putin, into the correct behavior, are all done with anticipating the Bad Guy’s moves once they’re done with that. They don’t really want to do this. Making a little bit of noise is fine, but they don’t want to play Chess. And so they don’t favor the idea that Bad Guys can be punished or rewarded. Seems they’re figuring, if they take the time to figure out what the Bad Guy wants, they’re making themselves as bad as him and that’s just wrong. So they don’t believe in the concept.

But history does.

This is important stuff because it all matters when it’s time to go voting. If Placeholder Joe really did net his 81 million votes, or even if he didn’t but came close, we need to discuss this a whole lot more. Because that would mean, once it became apparent that Donald Trump is scary to bad people, more Americans voted against him over that than for him. They didn’t put America first, and now we have a mess. We’ve been here before. A few times.

The ninnies will never acknowledge this, of course. It would make them culpable. Well, apart from finger pointing, we have reasons for wanting to explore this. America’s leadership, in theory at least, is something under our control. Russia’s leadership is not.

Trump at one point called Putin’s move savvy and genius, which set off the ninnies into an apoplectic fit. I find this telling. Apparently they live in a world in which you’re not supposed to appreciate an enemy’s positive attributes, even if doing so is the only way you can avoid underestimating your antagonist at some critical moment in forming your strategy. You’re supposed to hate, hate, hate, all the time, and when it’s time to assess your enemy’s battle acumen or some other type of wisdom, you should be calling him a dummy or poo poo head or something.

Well wait, aren’t I being what I call others? Shouldn’t I be presuming a greater sense of realism and practicality on the part of those who disagree with me politically?

Perhaps. But, I’ve already tried that. And I found out the hard way that these are people who will just let Putin do — whatever. They’ll pull him out of a utility closet as a prop to be used against Republicans at campaign time, they’ll make up a bunch of fiction about Trump being in cahoots or whatever…whenever Putin’s not useful for them, they’ll gloss over him again, making snarky one-liners about 1980’s history. And then Putin will actually do something and it’s surprise, surprise, surprise.

So I’ve tried respecting them; I’m ready for some disrespect now. I see them as political creatures who will anticipate things for the sake of political victory, and if there’s no prospect of political victory, anticipate nothing.

One can hardly blame them. If we acknowledge the simple truism that America’s enemies are acting in their own interests, and can therefore be motivated, and controlled on some level provided we think as pragmatically as they do…then, after evaluating what is under our control and what isn’t, we’d have no choice but to support doctrines of Peace through Strength. And then the ninnies who are professionals at the game of being a ninny, would be out of a job. Good for the country, bad for them.

Or maybe I’m wrong. But the only way to find out for sure would be to start discussing this: Can bad guys be intimidated into inaction? Or are they purely random events, like hurricanes? Would the ensuing discussion yield good points worth thinking about, on both sides? Only one way to find out that one. We should explore it. Shift the focus away from Tiger King and The COVID for just a little while.

I have seen lots of lists of “logical fallacies,” both formal and informal. But I have not seen an entry for what I would call, for lack of a better name, a fallacy of “the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.” There should be one. Someone should write one if no one has written one already.

The China Bioweapon must not be a bioweapon…must not have been a lab leak…must have escaped from a “wet market” or a Canadian postage stamp. Lots of people think that even though there’s no hard evidence to substantiate it. Because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

All these people bossing us around telling us to wear masks and take vaccines and stay home etc….they must have our best interests and our collective health at heart. They must. Not because we have reason to think they do, but because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

And they must have a plan. They must be competent. Because the alternative is too frightening to contemplate. I noticed this over the weekend while Mrs. Freeberg and I were out of town, with all these recaps of the Ukraine situation. Each and every expert interviewed, and there were plenty, talked up a storm about this might happen, that might happen, Putin may be doing this, or that, or thinking this or that…everything is up in the air. Except for one thing. Those who are managing the crisis, are doing whatever it is that should be done, and they’re not doing anything that shouldn’t be done. That one you could take to the bank…because the alternative was far too frightening to contemplate. Anybody with a brain in their heads they were interested in using, had to notice these absolutely-sure conclusions were entirely dependent on observations that loaded up chock full of questions and doubts, which should have been a problem. It’s not a problem for the ABC News audience though.

The people who are vaccine hesitant must be stupid, crazy, Cuckoo for cocoa puffs, believing in “conspiracy theories,” incapable of carrying coherent thoughts around in their heads…because if they have actually been paying attention and forming logical conclusions off things they know that others don’t know, well, that’s far too frightening to contemplate.

This isn’t just a persuasive logical fallacy. it is a deeply polarizing one. I think if you lined up everybody and sorted them according to how ready they are to dismiss credible possibilities, just because the ramifications are too frightening and for no other reason, you’d find the 0% and 100% ends of that spectrum densely populated, and the halfway point very sparse. In other words, people, generally, do it or they don’t do it. People do, or else they don’t, say “I’m ready to eliminate that as a possibility, not because the evidence compels me to eliminate it, but because my fears compel me.”

We should define this fallacy and learn to spot it.

It’s really everywhere.

Especially lately with this debacle with the China bioweapon.

Yeah, it’s probably a bioweapon…I know, I know…that’s too frightening to contemplate. So it must not be so.

I’ve lately been thinking about leadership. That President’s Day is approaching, may at first blush look like the cause, but if you have been reading about what’s going on in the world you understand that that’s not it, P-Day is just a coincidence. A trolley has come off the tacks somewhere, and it’s costing us big-time. Just a casual glance at our “leaders” today confirms this, and it’s not a United States thing. It’s a First World thing. Somewhere, somehow, a pricey sweet vintage of Riesling has turned to vinegar. Our history is swollen thick with legends of leaders, born with their gifts and then chosen by destiny, who pulled victory from the jaws of defeat. It happened both within and outside of the military. They showed by their various words and deeds that they weren’t replaceable. They rode their horses into musket fire and cannon fire without flinching. Their opinions were not all popular; sometimes they swam against the tide. They refused to segregate their troops by skin color or to disregard the advice of females, during times when it would have been accepted and popular to do such things. They had courage and they had principles. So we know what good leaders are, and we have had some.

Nowadays they’re all buffoons. It’s more than a pattern. It’s setting in as an ironclad rule. The most lightweight stuff is floating to the top. Listing examples would be futile, and far more time consuming than listing exceptions. Somewhere we’ve lost our way.

I’m talking about what, exactly? We could start with the resume, distinguishing past employment that involves actually building something that works, from “make work” jobs, “no show” jobs, “being in the right place at the right time.” Making decisions that change the course of cause-and-effect. Getting your hands dirty. This is enough to substantiate, although not necessarily prove, that I’m calling out something tangible here, that it isn’t all in my head. We’re looking for something and not finding it. We’re finding lots of things that try hard to look like it, but the goods aren’t making it to our doorstep, as if we’re bringing empty grocery bags home from the market.

I think it started when people began to associate leadership with certain mannerisms. Public school “education” got us started on this. In the 1970’s it became fashionable to “let the kids choose their own leaders,” and the kids would respond by anticipating which ones among them would be chosen by everybody else. And then this Captain of the Football Team, Class ASB President, would saunter up to the head of the class in his name-brand clothes and speak from behind the podium with great bumptiousness and confidence…desperately pretending to know what he was doing. Which would have been an act he had been performing from an early age. It was all about the swagger. Inspiring people to say “There’s just something about him I can’t explain it!”

But, nothing that came out of his mouth changed the course of anything. It was all a bunch of bromides.

Okay so that’s one thing; a real leader says things that are merely manifestations of the weighty thoughts he’s been having, a fake leader’s “weighty thoughts” consist mostly-to-entirely of how to word his speech to make himself look good. How does one distinguish? We must be looking for something apart from the default, something people are not born doing. This much we know, because we stopped finding it when we merely stopped looking for it. We didn’t engage in a drive to forcefully extirpate it. Except maybe for manhood, I suppose. Our current social climate frowns on carelessly intertwining rugged manly mannerisms with any notion of “leadership,” arguing this would potentially deny us the benefits of good leaders who are female. I think that’s correct. But, here there is a clue: If it’s something that’s been happening ever since my childhood, I remember certain things about my childhood. On television, good leaders were still manly. At school, where we selected our leaders from among ourselves, or where our teachers took it upon themselves to show what leadership should look like, they were all female or effeminate males. Looking back, it’s easy to see what was happening: Progressives were retooling our cultural framework, as they are wont to do, as they can’t stop doing.

The truth is, though, that the testosterone eruption possesses neither a superset nor subset relation to genuine leadership. But it isn’t mutually exclusive either. The progressives, once again, steered us wrong.

A real leader is engaged in cause-and-effect, and autonomously invokes if-then thinking. “If we don’t guarantee the right to vote to persons of all races, there won’t be much point to the prior guarantees we have made about banning slavery and equal representation under the law.” “If we don’t seize such-and-such a hill, or beachhead, the enemy can launch attacks and counterattacks on us without warning.” Fake leaders have thoughts about not having thoughts: “Who am I, to say marriage is between one man and one woman?” “How do we have any more right to be out here, exploring, than this Crystalline Entity that’s floating around killing people?”

Perhaps if we could thaw out someone who got frozen a century or two ago, this change in prevailing zeitgeist would become more apparent. “It’s a good thing he’s in charge, otherwise something worse would have happened…” has fallen off the table. We have a President of the United States who has done nothing good — and yet, he’s the right guy for the times. He speaks with great force, and creepy whispers, and if he knew where he was he’d be like a Terminator robot — can’t be reasoned with, won’t show pity, remorse or fear. That’s today’s “leader” for you, there’s no point discussing anything with him. There’s an impulse to just knuckle under and do what he says, like in times of old. But back then you did what the leader said because that was your best hope of coming through the battle in one piece. Nowadays, it’s more like a depressed sort of resignation. “Oh well, one year down, three to go.” And this is what we have accepted as leadership.

It isn’t just Placeholder Joe. You heard his partner in crime: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.” There it is again, the grand flourish before the nonsense, the swaggering confidence, the “pretend to have a thought in my head when I really don’t have one.” We have accepted this as a sort of new-normal in leadership. If we want to do what these people say, it’s no longer because that’s our best shot at coming out of something alive. It’s more like it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to argue with them. How did we get here?

I think we got here when we decided leadership had something to do with personality, and if someone was fit to lead us, they should be fun to watch. Maybe that was it. I’ve heard a lot of people say a lot of things about George Washington, but I’ve never heard of a contemporary say he was fun to watch. Super duper tall, commanding presence, persevered in the face of near-certain defeat, made good decisions, etc., yeah. But not fun to watch.

I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the cosmetics, though. Our obsession with appearances has refocused our attention onto characteristics that aren’t just irrelevant to the search for real leadership, but deleterious to our objective of finding some of it. This part is particularly hard to define. Real leaders move a certain way. It isn’t a swagger. It’s an ease with physical labor that reflects past activities and attempts. President Obama digging a ditch with His fanny sticking way out, was a good pictorial representation of it not being there. I recall participating in a lengthy online inspection into our male movie stars, wondering what had happened over there. How come thirty year old men today don’t speak, move and act like Sean Connery back when he was thirty? What’s different? Someone came up with the bit of trivia that young Connery, the man of a zillion jobs including pugilist and milkman, had actually been routinely punched in the face and maybe we’re seeing some of that. Yes; that could be it.

The change reeks of a bad trade, a “birthright for pottage” exchange, as if we’ve given up something irreplaceable, imbued with a value that escaped our understanding when we traded it away, for sake of something left on the table, that we didn’t even get. Placeholder Joe and Kneepads Kamala make dreadful decisions, and they’re not even fun to watch. I look at a picture of the G-7, and I feel like a huge reservoir of oxygen has been sucked directly out of my bloodstream, or I’ve lost a week or two out of my life just by laying my eyes on the spectacle.

Lefty loosey streaming service Netflix comes up with a what-if movie about the world ending, conceived, written, produced and broadcast to make liberals feel good about themselves, giving it a title that ends in a “phrasal verb” dangling preposition.

Professional critics, and members of the audience, give feedback on what they thought of it.

Smug lefty actor Ron Perlman offers his thoughts about the critics.

“Fuck you and your self-importance and this self-perpetuating need to say everything bad about something just so that you can get some attention for something that you had no idea about creating,” said the actor. “It’s corrupt. And it’s sick. And it’s twisted.”

He said that he “understands that it’s part of how the internet has almost killed journalism. And now journalism is trying to do everything they can to co-opt and maintain their importance.”

Later in the interview, Perlman delivered his opinion on Fox News hosts.

“I really don’t give a fuck [about them]. I’ve given up on those people,” he told The Independent. “They’re all vaccinated and telling you not to be. They know everything they say is a lie but they’re doing it anyway. They’re all fucking pieces of shit that can go fuck themselves.”

On the subject of Trump, the left-wing actor once again expressed his unconditional loathing of the 45th president.

“The heartbreaking thing is 74 million people voted for a man who has been impeached twice, groped 26 women, inflated his personal wealth and then deflated it when he needed to. I hope there’s a special place in hell for people who have exploited others’ vulnerability,” he said.

For the record, Trump was impeached twice because he was uncovering crimes, no one else elevated to that high office before or since had even been making the effort, and Washington is a swamp. That’s just my opinion, shared by others, but the evidence supports it strongly. Much more strongly than anything about the world ending due to a climate crisis anytime soon.

I really don’t see what his problem is. Somewhere-in-fifties from critics, somewhere-in-seventies from the audience. Four more percentage points and the movie would have achieved the sixty-percent threshold, “fresh” across the board. So the audience of liberals tuned in and it made them feel smug and good about being liberals. It did what it was supposed to do. Critics rated it according to whether it was an enjoyable viewing experience — for all of us, not just smug lefty libs — and, as one would expect, they were divided. But they didn’t pan the movie. Those among them who down-voted it acted within reason; it’s a little on the long side, and there’s not an awful lot happening.

Perlman talks about self-importance. Monologuing away for 138 minutes about a problem with no solution and getting all pissy when some subset of the audience, or critics, gets bored with it seems rather self-important to me.

And therein lies the dirty little secret about “Don’t Look Up.” If you take the time to actually watch the movie, you’ll notice this comet that is hurtling toward Earth, serving as an allegorical device standing in for Climate Change, is going to kill us all. It’s a certainty. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. The movie itself is a critique against our social milieu, or it’s supposed to be, but it’s really a critique against people who don’t panic when the liberals tell everyone to panic. It’s about how frustrating it is to the liberals when we don’t act like panicky puppets, dancing the right way when they pull our strings. “Don’t look up” indeed. The frustration that occurs when the puppetmaster can’t control all the puppets, achieves a high zenith somewhere during the second half, when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character goes on national television and suffers a meltdown. The liberals who want us to dance like panicky puppets liked that part a lot. So did I. I found it revealing.

Liberals, and Hollywood liberals in particular, can’t come to grips with the basics of activism: You state your case, and between the ears of each and every person who is on the receiving end, there’s going to be a tiny courtroom. They’ll conclude what they want to conclude about it. The case they’ve made is “It looks like our species is affecting the global climate a tiny bit even as the climate affects our species, isn’t that scary?” That’s it. We’re supposed to freak out and go into a Leonardo Meltdown because we may be having an effect on our environment…as most-to-all species have an effect on their respective environments. In a lot of cases, the answer is no, that’s not scary. There are reasons for this. It is how nature works, after all. And we’re still waiting on the evidence that is scientifically meritorious, and portending comet-of-death-like doom. That’s the reality. Leonardo can shriek about that as much as he likes.

Well…can we stop pretending?

It’s not really that big of a mystery to me why Perlman, and others, are disappointed. It’s not the disapproval. When you say F.U. you’re entering a world, and likely building it yourself, in which disapproval doesn’t mean anything. I mean, that’s the sentiment behind the expletive, is it not? The movie is a shout-out to fellow liberals about “Isn’t it frustrating when the puppets don’t dance?” and it was wildly successful. Liberals, famous and otherwise, joined together and shouted in unison “Hell yes!! Grrrr!! Me so mad!!” It did what it was supposed to do.

But it’s a mediocre, self-satisfied, self-gratifying project. Here it is the end of January, and we’re pretty much all done talking about it. There’s no reverberation. It’s not going to change the calculus of the issue, or the public’s perception of it.

And frankly, if that’s what it was supposed to do, it deserves more negative ratings. As an effort toward that, it didn’t even achieve basic competence. If the movie had a message for the malcontents like me who aren’t panicking properly on demand, that message was “This is what you look like to us.” It was a tantrum. How persuasive is it when a toddler throws a tantrum, and then in the middle of it stops and says “This is what you look like to me”? Not very.

If you develop the project with input from others who don’t think exactly like you, maybe you’ll see that. If you build it in an echo chamber, you won’t. This one was built in an echo chamber and it shows.

So…there was a bit of not-all-positive feedback, where there was a deficiency of competence. There was hope that we’d spend 2022 talking about the movie, and it’s not gonna happen…where there was a deficiency of competence.

Seriously Mr. Perlman, how surprising is that? You’re an entertainer, aren’t you? Isn’t that what you do? It’s all about gelling with the audience, anticipating their reactions. And you’re exceptionally experienced at it.

Maybe you should be a little less worried about your feelings of surprise and disappointment, and be putting a bit more thought into how & why you’re surprised. You and others.

You’re not inspiring me to look to you for prognostications about what’s going to be happening to us, our planet, each other, etc. Picking up the impression you’re not that intelligent about such things.

So over the holidays, or shortly after, I joined the swelling ranks of those who received notice their Facebook accounts had been restricted. I have been caught, so goes the tale, repeatedly spreading misinformation. The process of reviewing my sins is comical and sad at the same time. My assertion that such-and-such a link represented true information, is often missing, and in many cases my assertion is something very different — in one of them I’m specifically saying “OMG someone please tell me this isn’t real” or words to that effect. So the admins, or their algorithms, really don’t want anyone posting the contraband, at all, in any context. They’ve digitally-fingerprinted the links and they don’t want ’em anywhere. Good to know!

It goes without saying that we don’t all do things this way. If I ran the system and “caught” someone posting something I thought was untrue, my solution to the problem would be to discuss it rather than censor it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Facebook takes the opposite view. This doesn’t prove the truth is on my side, of course, but it raises serious doubts against it being on theirs.

A lot of people would like to keep the discussions about these things limited to “Do they have the right?” I imagine such discussions are consistently short, and not very enlightening, because of course they do. In a free society in which people have rights, among these must be the right to do dumb things; and if you have the right to do dumb things, a conclusion of “Do they have the right?” can never be final, for it must necessarily lead into subsequent questions of “But is it smart?” Or, if you want to consider different and competing interests, “What is the likely result?”

I see a result in which we, as a society, at least within the culture of things that are affected by social media — which is a lot — are becoming detached from the fundamental concept of truth.

This word “misinformation” is supposed to be applied to untrue things. If there’s one example of it that guides our current understanding, upon which I can look with the greatest sympathy, it is “Barack Obama was born in Kenya.” When that controversy was aroused years ago, and then re-aroused by Obama’s friend as a publicity stunt a short time later, I reviewed both sides, couldn’t see proof one way or another, and at some point became convinced it wasn’t plausible for Obama’s mother to have given birth in Africa because her known whereabouts didn’t place her there during this time. So today I believe He was born in Hawaii, but I’ll stop short of calling other people loony tunes if they believe otherwise. Then, as now, I concluded that questioning the Hawaii-birth narrative, and skeptically, is what reasonable people should be doing; the controversy exists because Obama created it. He acted sketchy. It worked to His advantage. But back to the claim…Obama born in Kenya…misinformation, therefore, false. Okay, I’ll buy that.

There has been a campaign to reduce “In the 1970’s, they were trying to scare us about a new Ice Age” as misinformation. Well, that would depend on who “they” is. As I understand it, the argument was “Hold up, that was a bunch of raggedy old magazines you read while you’re waiting in dentist’s offices, not scientists. This climate change stuff today is much more scienc-y, or something.” See the slippage? We’re going from…”Misinformation is something false, that I can prove as false, or at least bring some industrial-grade doubt against” — like Obama being born in Africa — to, “Misinformation is me going back in time to these old claims, and selling you on the idea that it was those people making them, not these people.” Already, we’ve slipped down a few notches and we’re not talking about false stuff anymore.

“The polar bear population has actually increased” is something else we often see identified as misinformation. As you peruse the various debunkings, you see we really don’t know what’s been happening to the polar bear population. We slip another peg. Now we’re applying the M-word to things that aren’t known.

Gender is the same as sex, and there are only two sexes — that’s supposed to be misinformation. Here we slip yet again. Now we’re applying the word to things we know are true, but that make certain people feel not very good. The intent of the movement is to reserve the word “sex” for the biological configuration, whereas “gender” is supposed to be how a person identifies. And, we must be ready for the situations in which these two are different. Well if misinformation is supposed to have something to do with deceptive things, the word should be affixed to that effort, because this is deceptive. “Sex” is measurement of, and “gender” is feelings about, a common attribute. Sex vs. gender is thought vs. feeling. It’s not like “hair color vs. height.”

Now that we’ve crossed the Rubicon of attaching the word “misinformation” to true things, anything is possible. And we’ve seen lots of topsy-turvy twisty-bendy nonsense take place before our eyes. It’s misinformation that George Floyd was strung out on Fentanyl when he died; that the resulting Black Lives Matter protests were coordinated, with plans deliberately put in place to wreck things and damage businesses; that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self defense. That COVID came from China; that Joe Biden, or his campaign, cheated in the 2020 elections; that Antifa members were involved in the Capitol Penetration event of January 6, 2021. All of these things are either proven true, or if not proven, at least highly probable.

Let’s stop pretending now. “Misinformation” means, if you define “truth” according to what’s not going to tick off people who have power over you, this stuff is in conflict with that. But deep down I think we all know, it’s wrong to define truth that way.

The M-word, now, means that we — some undefined “we” — have mobilized a campaign to make people doubt it, even though it might very well be true. Because people believing in it would be inconvenient to…someone.

Who is that “someone”? That’s the question people should be asking now that we’ve essentially re-defined what “misinformation” is.

This is an old issue. Ayn Rand pointed out,

It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

It’s a lot like that. Where we’re obliged to pretend true things are false because they’re not approved…or known things are unknown because they’re unapproved… someone, somewhere must be doing this approving.

And where this approval is being withheld from known, true things… someone, somewhere is lying.

Before giving me your latest so called “public health order” first answer these questions:

[ ] Do you have the authority? I mean, really? You won’t have to play these games of “take things away from you until you do it”? You can enforce because it’s really under your jurisdiction?

[ ] Are you taking ownership of the end results, like a Captain obliged to go down with his ship?

[ ] Does the current science support it?

[ ] Is it free of adverse/side effects?

[ ] Is it free of risk?

[ ] Is it clean of conflicts of interest, in appearance as well as in substance?

[ ] Are you doing this yourself?

I need to see seven check marks, otherwise stick a cork in it. That’s really the way everyone should be doing it; everyone else should be insisting on the same. Things have gone this far out of kilter because people haven’t been asking these questions. They just comply.

Like Zuby says…

I’m noticing with AOC and Jen Psaki running around, and Placeholder Joe in charge…or holding the place at least…this left-wing drumbeat of “Our guy is so smart that only a tiny portion of the populace can understand him” is in remission. Barack and Michelle are out of the spotlight. No one is taking their place. It’s weird because liberals are still swaggering around with their monotone about “You’re stupid if you don’t agree with us.”

But if you say “Like AOC?” they’ll go…”Who?” Their champions stop being their champions whenever it’s no longer convenient for them to be that. Until their profile is suddenly lowered in this way, they’re representing lots of things but intellectual horsepower is not one of those things, either in substance or in packaging. They don’t even try to pretend. I’m not entirely sure what this means. But it’s new. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, it’s in motion.

I’m thinking back and I see this idea of having an intellectual representative has been like a faulty flashlight, flickering on and off. It seems to have started off as a way to explain their losses, beginning maybe with Adlai Stevenson. “He’s too smart, the public didn’t get it.” Carter and Mondale used this excuse against Reagan, to lick their wounds after the “likeable dunce” decisively defeated them.

And then Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. In the aftermath, we remember Clinton for just one thing, and it wasn’t that, but at the time we got that Rhodes thing rubbed in our faces over and over again. You must be dumber if you don’t agree with Bill, he’s a Rhodes Scholar.

John Kerry had “nuance” and could “see things in shades of gray.” This was an unusually well defined critique against the evil others; implication being, if you weren’t on their side, you were like a Sith, dealing in absolutes. But it was projection, of course, because read that sentence again. If you’re not with them, you’re terrible. An absolute.

After Kerry there was Obama…the Lightworker. Obama often applied the Kerry pattern, speaking often of “false choices.” The guiding narrative had something to do with a splendid, capable mind dealing with delicate things, and until He came along we were struggling in the darkness coping with 21st century challenges with 12th century techniques or something. Lightworker was constantly intoning His higher wisdom to us about what we could and could not do, blowing our minds with His newfound wisdom that had never dawned on us before…usually followed by lots of “uh” sounds to make sure He got it absolutely, positively, right. It became quite tiresome, I think even to the people on His side, although they’d never admit it.

Hillary Clinton, of course, was the smartest woman on the planet.

Things are not now the way they were before. Since 2016, the democrats are just…not Donald Trump. That’s it. They don’t have to be smart. People used to make fun of John Kerry for not being George W. Bush, but you know, in addition to that he had to be this nuanced deep-thinker guy. Now the “not Donald Trump” guy is…Placeholder Joe. Kneepads Kamala. Gray Goose Nancy. “The Squad.” You can plausibly accuse these weirdos of lots of unsavory things, but overthinking something is not one of those things.

It may be the manifestation of a new generation with a bad attitude. Many’s the journeyman or master who took on an apprentice from this new “Apple Ear Buds” crowd, and come away with the observation that it’s so hard to tell them anything. They seem to have the attitude of, If it’s really worth knowing, they must know it already. Their hero is Rey from Star Wars, who instinctively knows all about everything in the galaxy, both technological and spiritual. People wonder why she doesn’t capture the imagination like her predecessor, Luke Skywalker. The obvious answer is that we got to see Luke learn. He made mistakes, sulked like a loser, banged his head against things. Then he learned. Rey just knows everything, so she’s learned nothing. She’s failed as a successor-character who captures passions, but never forget she’s also supposed to be an emblem of this new generation. And there, evidently, she’s a success. They generally don’t value the process of learning.

Of course, as the democrats market themselves to this crowd with this mantra of “Who cares if I think on anything deeply, I’m not that other guy” — they have yet to find real success. They had to cheat to get Joe in there, and their rebuttal against anyone who noticed the cheating is to forbid us from talking about it. The discussion seems to be limited to “Who cares what you say, we’ll just remove your post.”

This is not good. Are they resorting to censorship because of what they’re able to do? Or…because of what they’re not able to do? They want to be thought of as intellectual titans, but their champion is the bug-eyed Brooklyn bartender, and others like her…and whether they realize it or not, the rest of us get to form whatever opinions about it we like, nevermind whether our posts can survive any length of time on Facebook or YouTube.

I have to predict the youngsters are in for a series of unpleasant surprises. Not any great variety of them. Just a lengthy series of similar, unpleasant surprises. It’s just not realistic to force people to respect your intellectual acumen, by clamping down on, obfuscating and altogether prohibiting any discussion of your intellectual shortcomings. That doesn’t make people respect you as some kind of a genius. It’s not how it works.

Everybody likes to be on “the right side of history.” A lot of times in life though, you can be very sure of your position going into a situation, but then when it’s all over you find out you were wrong. What do you do then? Some people try to deny it, but when that’s no longer an available option, they get angry, and they focus this anger on the people who weren’t wrong.

There is rage and resentment against people like me, who supported Trump’s re-election, and lost that bid. I’ve noticed this antipathy is more intense, and more widespread, now that we’ve been proven to be right, than it would be if we weren’t proven right.

There is rage and resentment against people like me, who opined that the pandemic was a “plandemic” or “scamdemic,” a naked power grab by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. Here, too, we’ve been proven right, and the antipathy is more widespread and intense than it would be if it had yet to emerge how right we were.

The antipathy against those of us who correctly perceived “Black Lives Matter” as a Marxist organization that doesn’t care about black lives, is more widespread and intense now that we’ve been proven right, than it would be if we had yet to be proven right.

People who were snookered by all this stuff are avoiding us, regardless of how cheerful, pleasant, courteous, trustworthy, thrifty brave clean & reverent we may be. It’s as if they feel obliged to admit they were wrong next time we see each other, and cannot bear the thought of it. But we wouldn’t even insist on bringing up these topics. Not like they did, back when it had yet to be established we were right and they were wrong, and they were so sure they were the ones who were right. Back then, they were in our faces, all the time, chanting their mantras and their talking points. Now their positions have become indefensible and so they’ve scattered. Maybe they think this looks stoic, wise, or macho. It looks petulant and childish. Cockroach-like and cowardly.

They’re making one error into two.

It isn’t right, or just, but it’s the way people operate. So often you have to choose between being in the in-crowd, versus having the right ideas.

The real tragedy is that they think they’re alone in enduring these stinging, unpleasant learning experiences. Not so. “I Told You So” situations like these, are painful for both sides, not just the side that’s on the business end. We’ve all been learning. It’s a good time to do some learning, even if you were right about the important things. I’m learning too, and it’s not fun.

My trust in authority figures has cratered now. My respect for organizational hierarchies at this point is subterranean.

I no longer believe in flawed humans who have “the best” ideas. Best I can manage, post-pandemic, is a grudging acknowledgment that someone might be least-wrong. And if I’m looking at whoever’s managed to draw in the highest esteem from others, most votes, etc…he’s probably not the guy.

The Chinese Bioweapon has taught me some things about how people behave, when they make important decisions in groups while they worry about social uplift and altitude, that I will never forget if I live to be a thousand. My confidence in group-think and committee decisions was already lower than a rattlesnake’s belly before this started. Now it’s tunneled into the bedrock.

I think I’m not alone.

Here and there I have blogged and Facebook’d about “Process People” and “Outcome People.” Like my late Uncle Wally told me (somewhere), quoting one of his editors from the olden days: The world is divided into two groups of people, the kind that go around dividing everyone into two groups, and everyone else…

Point is, although we all want credit for showing fidelity to the proper process and generating good results from it, we distinguish ourselves from one another when the time comes for us to make a choice. Which we inevitably have to do, because no process is perfect. There comes a time where you realize you have to blaze a new trail, even on an unnoticed, low-altitude micro level, to get things to come out right. Do you want good results? Or do you want to follow the process? Which?

Biden’s President, Kamala is in the second spot and Grey Goose Nancy is House Speaker. No one is proud of any of this. Their ascendancies do not speak well for the process we’re following. They are a blight upon the system. Parts of it may be good, but the detritus that’s rising to the top definitively proves there must be flaws in the rule book, because we followed it and here we are.

Liberals run everything. They have no good results to offer anywhere and they don’t care. That’s because they’re “Process People”; you can tell because when the time comes for them to list their achievements, they talk about the steps they’ve taken which are supposed to be above reproach. MASK UP REGARDLESS OF YOUR VACCINATION STATUS!! I’m running out of patience! Black Lives Matter! Woman’s Right to Choose! WE’RE GONNA FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!! But the results stink on ice. Unemployment up, stock prices down, prices up, production down, plywood in the windows, smash-n-grab, etc…you notice any of this stuff, they just stop speaking to you, as you’ve selected yourself out of their intended audience. “Process People” don’t give a shit about results, they just worry about following the “right” steps. After that, everything should fall into place. If it doesn’t it doesn’t matter, because they’re not paying attention, and they expect you shouldn’t pay attention either. I’ve gone over all this before.

Today though, I’m thinking more about how they see things. Process People neglect the outcome because they’re focused on the process. But what’s the process? It’s not like they’re following some intricate detail-saturated flow chart that covers a wall, full of decision-boxes. No…

Process People neglect the result to focus on the process — and the process, very quickly, degrades into a bunch of nothing.

Nothing but an endless series of empty, genuflecting gestures. Such gestures, by the lower classes, continually reassure the upper classes that their subordinates are still paying attention to what they have to say. The lowers have to constantly reassure the uppers that the uppers are still in charge. That’s all that really happens, and the job of reassurance is never quite all the way done. That could be because, deep down, the uppers know they’re not really where they should be, that there’s a bunch of post turtles. And so both the lowers and the uppers repeat circular laps on a silly-go-round. Wear your mask. Take your vax. Salute properly. Use “Dr.” when referring to First Lady Jill. No leather jacket for you. No deadnaming. Tune in to listen to Mr. Thompson’s speech as he addresses the crisis…

This is, I think, why after a hundred years we’re still waiting for communism to take over the world. It’s not going to happen. Throughout that century it has always been the same: Process People selecting process over outcome, neglecting ramifications, neglecting results, sacrificing everything else to follow the process, and the process devolves like a melting snowman, into just obeisance, supplication and pandering. Eventually that’s all that’s left, and no one anywhere appreciates it because they’re starving.

I don’t like being manipulated. I’m old enough to remember when that was true of most people. Nowadays it seems that’s a fringe-kooky desire, and the more mainstream desire is to just love love love being manipulated.

Twitter has a new boss and he’s going to be the same, or worse, than the old one. Here is a key difference between conservatives and liberals: If a powerful and influential conservative stepped down from his position, the liberal narrative would be “ding dong the witch is dead” and it would reverberate before we even knew who his replacement was. Jack Dorsey steps down, his replacement is worse than he was, and conservatives are unfazed. By & large, they were pessimistic from the get-go. And realistic.

Silicon Valley won’t ever change, unless it is forced to change by some larger event. I’m still waiting to see how that ultimately goes. History doesn’t guide me. Henry Ford had political opinions, many of them quite unsavory, but political opinions did not altogether guide the modern industrial revolution. In 2021, we have a left-wing truth and a right-wing truth. It’s gotten philosophical, piercing the fabric of “truth,” as we perceive it, itself. One cannot help but wonder what cars would look like today if the earlier revolution had been like this. Powered by hamsters, maybe.

People aren’t saying this because to a lot of us, it’s self evident. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear a lot of other people can’t see it so someone’s gotta say it.

When you monopolize mass communication and then start “fact checking” things, it doesn’t look like real fact checking. It looks like what it really is: A last resort. That is to say, the persons responsible would prefer the matter not come up at all. Their preference would be to keep the statement away from me entirely. I don’t know what they’re successfully keeping from me, because if they’re succeeding at it, I’m not finding out about it. And so I have to wonder what else they’re keeping from me.

I know they think my opinion is important enough to be manipulated. But I also know they don’t trust me to form it on my own. I know they think it proper and fitting to “guardrail” me into having the opinion they want me to have, like a dumb cow being guided within the lines on a cattle drive. It comes back to that ancient question, how much do you trust someone who doesn’t trust you?

Furthermore: Because this all has to be explained to them, or if it is explained it has no impact upon their decisions, I know they must exist and work within an echo chamber populated by others upon whom it has no impact. The whole overlaying/guardrailing value system exists within a cloister of limited thinkers, who can’t be trusted because they don’t trust others. They’re a bunch of Ernst Stavro Blofelds, a bunch of puppetmasters. They have made this decision because it makes sense to them, because they’ve reached their decision without conversing seriously with anyone outside their bubble.

That means they likely make all other decisions the same way.

And this gels with common sense. Am I really supposed to believe they were in Hawaii in August 1961 watching Barack Obama being born, when they tell me He was born there? Am I really supposed to believe they personally watched the vote counting in Georgia, when they tell me the vote counting in Georgia was on the up-and-up? No. They might be making the right decision about things, but they’re making it the wrong way, by passing on what someone else has told them, and then strutting around, peacock-like, as if they personally know it, when they don’t. I mean, look at all the other judgment calls they made, that turned out to be wrong. They were surprised Jussie Smollet turned out to be lying. They were surprised there was “vaccine hesitancy.” They were surprised Dan Rather’s Texas Air National Guard memos turned out to be a fraud. They were surprised Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self defense, and that the “mostly peaceful protests” weren’t peaceful. They were surprised Joe Biden is a bad President. They were surprised the Mueller Report turned out to be a boondoggle. But none of these things surprised anyone who had a working brain and chose to actually use it.

I’m better off following the counsel of a Magic 8-ball than following the counsel of these limited thinkers.

History isn’t going to remember any of this fondly.

We are living in an era that is uncomfortable for a reason. During the middle ages, with Divine Right of Kings and so forth, the privileges of aristocracy were mostly pure privilege. We had liege lords and the law recognized everything underneath them, people included, as their personal property. The outstanding concerns were limited to famine and conquest. So if you were nobility, you were all good with the liege above you, you weren’t starving and nobody was coming to take your land by force, your jurisdiction was essentially your plaything and you could do as you pleased. With The Enlightenment, we began to fasten power to accountability. Eventually, people could be born poor, earn for themselves a little bit of money, and become customers. After hundreds of years of little people bossing around big people, empowered to say “I’m canceling this contract unless…” we’ve taken the blessings for granted, and have started to let it go. We’ve been shifting power on to people who can’t, or won’t, assume any responsibility for the end results of the commands they give out, and the decisions they make.

Dr. Fauci says he thinks it would be a great idea if we did X and it would be just terrible if we did Y. He does not say whether he has these opinions because science backs them, or because he’d like to hang on to power and get rid of Trump. There is no reason for him to so declare. No one asks. He labors under no responsibility whatsoever for the ultimate outcome.

Elected officials appoint people who don’t even know what sex they are, to be public health officials. Their responsibility for such appointments is limited to the negative effect such appointments might do against their electoral prospects…which is nil.

The dysphoria patients elevated to these lofty positions, shut down billion dollar industries, unilaterally, ostensibly because of the China Bioweapon threat. The responsibility they assume in making these decisions is zero.

The People’s Republic of China — come to think of it — assumes zero responsibility for their weapon. We know they did it because the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else. But all across the world, we have to be very, very careful about where we mention it. We labor under the responsibility of choosing and muting our words, with real consequences looming for us. They labor under none, for having built the damn thing.

Black Lives Matter and Antifa have “demonstrated” for “racial justice,” spending all last year and a good part of this year setting crowded cities on fire and smashing windows. There generally are no consequences for them for having done this.

There dang sure are some consequences for the “January 6 insurrectionists.” Many falsehoods have been presented to the rest of us, and then solidly debunked…but there are no consequences for those who fabricating these falsehoods. Even the ones who got caught fabricating them.

Hipsters want us to use heavy grocery bags, which we’re supposed to reuse to help save the environment. It turned out to be the wrong plan because the China Bioweapon made it impractical and unsafe to reuse bags. There is no responsibility assumed by anybody for having made the wrong call. The hipsters want us to use paper straws, and are cool with forcing us to do so by denying consumer choice. They assume no responsibility to go along with this power.

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom has signed an order for us to be “all electric,” as in electric cars, by 2035. The numbers say it is unlikely, to impossible, for the grid to support such a demand. He assumes no responsibility for this. There are no consequences looming for him over this.

Quite to the contrary, his presidential prospects, dead as a doornail since he was caught dining in a fancy French restaurant sans mask right after ordering us to stay home…have been revived through puppetry schemes like this one. No consequences. Oh, a recall petition surfaced against him because of the French Laundry scandal. Which he survived. No consequences.

And President Biden? Well, what is there to say. He makes the wrong move on everything. I don’t need to make a list. No one disagrees except his Psectretary Psaki, who fakes everything. No consequences for Biden. And Psaki is repeatedly caught lying…again, it’s redundant to put together a list. No consequences for Psaki.

Florida is reporting the lowest number of daily PRC Bioweapon cases in the entire nation. This, taken together with prior indicators that Florida’s doing at least alright, proves the other states with “tougher measures,” lived a lie. Now the officials of those other states have been caught. No responsibility, no consequences.

Labor union concessions, and rules, and antiquated regulations, have conjured up an acute “supply chain crisis” that is threatening Christmas, and in some cases, lives. The crisis came from nothing, just bad judgment. Now it is enmeshed within a many-layers deep finger-pointing melee among elected officials, the port authorities, longshoremen, truck drivers, appointed officials, etc…no responsibility, no consequences.

Hillary Clinton STILL isn’t in prison. No one knows why.

Dan Rather lied. No consequences.

Brian Williams lied. No consequences.

The news lied over and over again about Trump. Then they lied some more. No consequences.

I could go on and on…at this point, if I pause to merely point out that I think I’m seeing a pattern emerge, if you’ve got a brain in your head, you’ll get it.

But there are consequences to this no-consequences thing.

As Professor Frankfurt pointed out in his book On Bullshit, the difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that the liar has to care about what’s true, so he can make his effort to deviate from it, whereas the bullshitter doesn’t care. We’re buried up to our armpits in both of those.

Also, we’re buried up to our eyeballs in strutting martinets seeking power. Not just authority, which implies an indelible record of the fact that such-and-such a person made such-and-such a decision. But power, like a beach bully stomping sandcastles. And there is conflict because such power cannot be shared, but so many are pursuing it. And why in the world shouldn’t they? There’s no responsibility to go with it. No consequences.

If we’re buried up to our armpits in bullshitters and up to our eyeballs in these Little Napoleons seeking power…we’re over our heads with mistakes. Mistakes come from making the wrong call. The determination to avoid making the wrong call, and try to make the right call, comes from…consequences.

And there aren’t any.

Okay so that’s two. Two liberals who have been haranguing me about my obligation to believe everything the government tells me about vaccines and the Chinese Bioweapon, with all sorts of disparaging remarks to be made about my moral decay and deficiency when they find I don’t obey & believe everything. Take that shot, darn it. Oh sure, I have the right not to take it; but also, the moral imperative to go ahead and take it.

And they both want to bitch about the government’s incompetence, laziness…and, when circumstances warrant, its corruption and dishonesty.

How to reconcile this? See, this is why I think libs just want to be unhappy and angry. They want to complain about the problems. But they don’t want to solve them. They want to scold people, and act like they’re trying to scold them into doing something. But they’re not.

Lefties believe in a strong central government that is such an important aspect of our lives, that it can say what’s morally right and wrong, even on topics in which it lacks legal authority. it is in the nature of left wing to obliterate personal religious faith, and then replace it with the state. They talk about “separation of church and state,” but what they’re talking about is kind of like separation between a first wife and a second wife. Never the two shall meet, because one is replacing the other. That’s the dirty secret of leftism.

So now these government officials have defined what the right thing is for me to do — today. Not from here on out, although the government officials, big-government advocates, and lefties act like that’s what they mean. But they really just mean today. That’s another thing about lefties, the concept of time. It escapes them. They think like the mayfly, which lives for just a few days. It’s all no past, no future. The science said fifteen days to flatten the curve. Then it said otherwise — biggest betrayal of our lives. The science said get your vaccine you can take off your mask. Then it said otherwise — second biggest betrayal of our lives. Lefties don’t remember any of it because they live in snapshot mode, history always began this morning.

Their rebuttal to this is that science is all about learning, and as such must change. If we don’t get that, we don’t get science. Well, that’s all true. This is why we don’t form policy around “the science says.” That’s the part they don’t get about science. We have buffers. We have tests. We hear from dissenting viewpoints. It’s not a matter of “Find out what Dr. Fauci says and then do it.” The problem with that is much bigger than the problem that he hasn’t been elected to anything (although yes, there is that).

The House of Representatives has passed the monstrosity bill. We don’t really know how much it costs because, let’s face it, we can’t count that high. Once it goes into the trillions, all our news sources just sort of make up numbers. Our alleged President says it won’t cost anything. No one can defend this lie. His most ardent supporters simply change the subject.

The problem with our model of government is, this is the rule and not an exception to it. Government is run by people who have built up seniority and have been in it their whole lives. If they’ve been in it their whole lives, they don’t have experience in anything else, and it shows. Their solution to every little thing is to throw money at the whatever. Yeah we have that outside the government too. “But could you meet this arbitrary deadline if we provided you with a staff of junior programmers to help you?” That’s what you hear when the wrong people are in charge. With what we call “government,” that’s how everything is done, because the people at the top just churn money that represents wealth they did not create.

It seems to me like conservatives and liberals both recognize incompetency in government, but the liberals don’t have any idea what to do when you recognize incompetency. I guess they just get huffy about it so they can complain, and a minute later they forget all about it and are back to tut-tutting people like me for not obeying & believing.

Conservatives look at incompetence as a weak, rotten, creaky floorboard: Don’t put your weight on this, and if your weight is already on it you better get the fuck off of it. Because that’s what incompetence really is. Liberals, just like with everything else, are clueless. They see the incompetence. They’re clueless about what to do.

But the biggest problem lefties have with reality, and with this ongoing attempt to impose their vaccine lust on the rest of us, is that they think in passive voice. You have an obligation to take the shot because they said to take it. They want a government that can say “Here stupid, drink this” and we’re obliged to do it…so, government owns our bodies. No rights left for us at all, whatsoever. But who’s saying this? Elected officials? Appointed officials? “Science”? Point is, the lefties don’t care. That’s what I mean by thinking in passive voice — there’s no subject of the sentence.

If they could be compelled to think in active voice, and specify who has this authority, and why, they wouldn’t be so fond of their governmental model. They’re heaping so much authority on these strangers that they can’t even keep track of how much authority they’re heaping on them — literally forfeiting ownership of their own bodies — because, and only because, the trustees are not known to them. Because, and only because, they’re strangers.

Summarizing all the above: They simply don’t think like grown-ups. It’s not any more complicated than that. They haven’t accepted responsibility for making their own medical decisions, beyond the decision to be scared of things. So they don’t want anyone else accepting it either.

“Jussie Smollett got mugged” was disproven. No lefties anywhere, as far as I can see, ever acknowledged the error.

“Critical race theory is not taught” has been disproven. If it were in fact true, it would be unprovable. Lefties are still running around saying it as if they confirmed it firsthand, which is impossible.

“Kyle Rittenhouse traveled across state lines” is entirely irrelevant.

The Left says The Right lies, The Right says The Left lies, but the situation is not symmetrical. The Left has no idea what truth is. They are in a rubber dingy adrift in an ocean of talking points. Someone somewhere concocts them and disseminates them, the lefties swagger around relaying them as if they know what they’re talking about when they don’t know anything.

Then they recite statistics to make it look like they know something.

The statistics are also talking points.

A lot of these talking points, though, carry with them a tacit admission that talking points is all they are. The thing about CRT-isn’t-taught, for example. That’s black-swan stuff. As I pointed out above, there is no observation you can make that would prove such a thing, only observations you could make that would disprove it. You can’t inspect school curricula and come away with a validated observation that CRT doesn’t exist, just like you can’t study birds and prove black swans don’t exist.

What you can do is dial in to a zoom meeting or a podcast, or receive an e-mail, enumerating a collection of talking points. And one of those talking points could be “CRT doesn’t exist.” That’s the only way you could “learn” such a thing, taking your place in a command chain of puppeteers.

If that’s what “news” has become, in my opinion they should come clean about it. Maybe consumers of news really do want to just be told stories. But I would speculate a lot of them want actual news. You know, information.

They don’t want to go to Thanksgiving dinners, getting in arguments with their Republican Uncles, telling them “I watched the news and CRT doesn’t exist” only to be embarrassed when the Republican Uncle says “Here’s some.” When you send them in with a short lance like that, you’re doing them a disservice. And I think they look at it that way.

I honestly don’t understand why we hear that particular talking point so much. I don’t understand a lot of them, but in particular, I don’t understand that one. I can’t explain it. At least, not without starting with an assumption that there are people walking around, with influence over the process of coming up with and promulgating these talking points, who lack self respect.

So I had another one of those dreams. I don’t get these very often. Last time I had one like this it was thirteen years ago, back before Emperor Barack The First, and it had something to do with people ostracizing other people and losing track of the fact they were ostracizing themselves. Since then, recent events have made it known to me that this is essentially all of human history, after you strip away the inconsequential bits of it.

This time, I’m standing out in the middle of nowhere just looking off into the distance. I have been exiled from civilization due to my general coarseness, my inflexibility…I keep “deadnaming” transgenders, wishing people a “Merry Christmas,” calling illegal aliens illegal aliens, referring to riots as riots, and the powers-that-be have decided it’s better for everyone if I just go away.

So there I am.

I hear a noise behind me, so I turn around and see…

…a flatbelly hottie girl in a weird hairdo handing me a lightsaber.

Ha! No, not her. But some sort of coalition sent out from mainstream society to find me. A couple guys, maybe three. Or a diverse committee. It doesn’t matter. They ask me — Why didn’t it all work? How did I know?

Civilization, in the aftermath of my forced exit from it, didn’t work out so hot. A few, or some, perhaps most, have figured out I must know something that all the smart people didn’t know. The coalition has been dispatched to seek me out, and figure out what exactly it is that was kept hidden from them, or that they failed to see.

How did I foresee that Biden/Harris really lost the 2020 election after all? That Slow Joe never won Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania or Georgia?

That the beltway crowd played up the Chinese Bioweapon as a way to get rid of Trump?

That mail-in voting would invite fraud?

That Fauci has a “God complex” a mile wide and isn’t the right professional for the role in which he was placed, because he can’t handle dissenting opinions?

That masks are useless?

That the efficacy of the vaccines was overstated? And the side effects were understated?

That Obama’s “Infrastructure Repair” was a boondoggle and a money grab; and a decade later, we’d be doing it all over again?

How did I know Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self defense?

That Jussie Smollett was lying?

That most-to-all “hate crimes” are hoaxes?

That the zillion-and-one-genders movement was just a big scam?

That monitoring of transactions over $600 had nothing whatsoever to do with national security?

That the whole concept of “microagressions” was, and is, a dangerous shitshow?

That “Critical Race Theory” is mostly to all mythical, a toxic mythology?

That when you load up a whole generation with potential reasons to get “triggered” and turn them into human landmines, you end up with a generation of neurotics who require medication and “fidget spinners” to focus on anything?

How did I know that all the Charlie’s Angels remakes would crash and burn? That Marvel Phase 4 would implode?

That Joss Whedon and James Cameron aren’t “feminists” who respect women?

That Hollywood is filled with perverts and pederasts?

That all the most popular non-anthology shows on cable and streaming, ever since X-Files, are only pretending to advance the plot throughout the season, or seasons…and the episodes are, in fact, entirely interchangeable just like back in the olden days?

That Hillary Clinton is not the smartest woman in the whole world?

That “Caitlyn Jenner” is a man after all?

That all the militant feminists would live unhappy lives all alone in their big houses, to keel over, die, and have their faces eaten off by dozens of cats?

That women are happiest when their men are happy?

That nobody, but nobody, likes James Bond any better when he drinks fewer alcoholic beverages, smokes fewer cigarettes and sleeps with fewer women?

How did I know that when social media platform providers flag material as “misinformation,” it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it’s true or false?

That the “Black Lives Matter” protests of 2020 were coordinated, after all? How did I know they weren’t “peaceful protests” after all?

That “Defund the Police” would turn into such a dangerous disgrace?

That Pope Francis I is an imposter and a tool of Satan?

That democrats don’t want “equality”? That they want poor people to starve some more so they’ll keep voting democrat?

That China is not a neighbor in good standing? That they’re out for world domination and will stop at nothing? That they’re not nearly done infecting us and reinfecting us with deadly strains?

How did I know that all the girls want to dress up as Slave Leia and not Rey Palpatine Skywalker or Jyn Erso? How did I know all the drab, rag-wearing, high-kicking “badass” StrongWilledWomen would fail to achieve a fraction of the currency of Baby Yoda?

That printing and spending all this money on bogus stimulus programs, would cause inflation?

That paying people not to work, is not the way to go?

That spending millions or billions of dollars to “fight the homelessness problem” would not end homelessness, but make it worse?

That when you hire based on gender, skin color, religion or sex preference instead of who’s bringing the best & most appropriate skills to the job, you don’t get the best?

How did I know that remote learning would turn out to be so ineffective?

That removing selected persons from rice, margarine and syrup packages wouldn’t promote peace or racial healing?

How did I figure out that our cable channel programming is designed to turn our sons into prison bitches and our daughters into whores?

That it would be good, after all, for little kids to learn how to drive stick shift cars, and to read cursive?

That radicalized Shiite and Sunnis are still intent on taking over the world just like they were thirteen centuries ago?

That, if “science” practitioners enjoy a built-in excuse when they get it wrong, because it’s inexact and we should show we understand by accepting that — that means, they don’t get to tell us how to live our lives, and they need to pick a damn lane?

That “climate change” is just a big swindle, and the people telling us it’s a serious problem don’t think it’s a serious problem?

People have been wondering how I got so much right when all the people they respected and trusted got it so wrong.

They have been searching for me far and wide because they need my help. They’re just so confused and baffled that all these things took them by surprise. There must have been signs. After all, I’m not that bright.

And I say, in response to their inquiry…you’re right, I’m not.

I just avoided emotional reasoning.

I didn’t surrender power and authority to people who can’t, or won’t, accept the associated responsibility.

I never accepted second-class citizenship, of any kind. I will not make that bargain of “You can eat lunch with the cool kids today, but you have to sit at the far end of the table.” Will. Not. Do. It. Live as sheep among sheep, or as a man by himself, you see which one I chose.

I didn’t think things just because large numbers of others already thought them. I sought, as Dennis Prager says, clarity over agreement.

Please come back with us!, they said. You have to help us!, they said.

I said no, you don’t need me. Stop forming foolish opinions, stop thinking like fools. Act like things matter. Think like they matter.

Then I walked past them to go get some green milk.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Andrew Sullivan notes the mainstream media “got every single one wrong,” in his list of news boondoggles from the last few years.

Brit Hume retweets it, adding a list of his own. In my recollection, few to none of these are facts-on-the-ground type things, like “We previously reported the man bit the dog, but it turns out it was the other way around” stuff. I remember the news media waded into these stories, and others, and specifically did what it isn’t supposed to be doing. “Some say this and some say that, and we’re here to tell you don’t listen to these people listen to those people instead, because these people are a bunch of poo poo heads.”

To all this, we can add — striking out any duplicates after we have done so — each item on Sharyl Attkison’s Definitive List from the Trump Era, now standing at 156.

Something is changing. There must be a common cause. What is it?

A lot of this trouble could have been avoided had the news whatever ya call it…industry…institution…”free press.” If it had simply stuck to what it was supposed to have been doing all along. But they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Lewis Wallace said it first & best: Objectivity is dead and I’m okay with it, from Trump Day #8. He kicked off the era, or his commentary manifested an effect already underway, that kicked off the era. Perhaps there were problems in existence long predating Trump, which were intensified when Hillary lost against him — something that “wasn’t supposed” to happen.

The mainstream news media, so goes the theory, saw this upset as a failure on their part to properly educate us, and resolved to do “better.” Since then, we’ve been watching the medicine bring about a sickness worse than the disease it’s supposed to treat. With the arrival of “fact checkers” the prescriptions reached a second stage, even more harmful than the first. They didn’t treat the root cause of the problem. They didn’t get the news media out of the business of telling us what opinions we’re supposed to have. Instead, they ensconced it further therein.

All the “sensible moderates” out there, watching their morning/evening news, dutifully taking their vaccines and many boosters and wearing their masks, wondering about the various trust issues harbored by people like me…have no idea.

Maybe we can blame youth worship? It takes a certain number of years on the planet to be able to distinguish a fact from an opinion. It shouldn’t, but it does. Fact checkers, I’ve often observed, are younger than much of my selection of socks and underwear. People find that amusing because it’s ambiguous; you could take it as a commentary against the fact checkers, or my underwear. Perhaps both. It becomes only half-funny when you figure out “both” is likely the right answer. These kids think they know it all because they haven’t reached that stage of life where you figure out maybe you don’t. Separating out facts from opinions? That comes much later…and here they are, checking our “facts” for us, bringing us our “news.”

We have to rely on critical “tweets” for our record of how much & how often they need to correct things. Whatever the cause may be, kids, you’re not doing so hot. Might be time to reboot & recheck. The patchwork is replacing the quilt.

The one thing people are not talking about is the one thing everybody says they want: Happiness.

I myself can find happiness in a cup of dark, rich, hot coffee watching a sunrise, the farther away from civilization, the better. Within my age bracket, in this way I represent many. But I recognize that’s because I/we are experienced in dealing with problems that are not present in the coffee+sunrise setting. If, say for example, a six-year-old grandson were to join me he might get joy out of sharing something with his grandfather for a few minutes, and then he’d get bored, and likely leave the scene wondering what the appeal could possibly be. He, too, within his age bracket, in this other way would also represent many. The appeal is the absence of unpleasant things, which saturate the experiences of people our age, but are not known to six-year-olds. Happiness can be one or several things that affect us negatively, and have gone missing; there’s nothing wrong with that.

I doubt very much that you can find happiness by simply thinking about it. However, I do think we should spend more of our time and energy thinking about it as a concept, because we spend so much of our time and energy with things the way they are, making other people happy. This is a mistake when we’re laboring for the pleasure of people who will never know pleasure this way. When we try to make people happy who will never be happy. If this is indeed a mistake, it’s a mistake we make often. That’s why I think we should think about it more than we do.

If someone wants to be unhappy, we should recognize it, and let them. Somehow, it’s become our default course of action to make other people unhappy on purpose, who would be quite willing to be happy if they were given an occasion to be that way, for the sole purpose of making other people happy who are never going to be happy. How do we go about doing this pigeonholing? Must make this person unhappy, to make that other person happy. That, too, should be getting more thought out of us.

I would be remiss in closing this without including something my Dad said, that I thought was poignant, profound and wise. It’s also pretty darn simple: The purpose of life, is not to be happy. This made an impact on me because I notice, when people live life making it a high priority to be happy, they very seldom end up doing anything positive for anybody else.

Also, like the people who don’t want to be happy, they seem to have a greater influence on our cultural mores than the average. It’s like we’re in an oxcart pulled along by those two: The people who want to be happy and think that’s the whole point to living, and the people who go around demanding things to make them happy, who actually will never be happy.

Other than the foregoing, I don’t have much of an opinion about it.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. — John 15:13.

In 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan came out in theaters and shocked everybody when Spock sacrificed himself to restore warp drive in the Enterprise, saving everyone aboard from the exploding Genesis device. It was the most shocking demise of a central character since Old Yeller.

The following year, Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader, laid down his life to save his son in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. Gotta tie up those loose ends.

And then Mayday sacrificed herself in A View To A Kill. Sybok sacrificed himself in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Miles Dawson blew himself up in Terminator II: Judgment Day. Dillon and Ripley offed themselves in Alien 3. Léon, the Professional, blew himself up in Léon: The Professional. Russell Casse famously yelled out “Hello, boys! I’m back!” and blew himself up in Independence Day to save the world. Jack Dawson sank like a stone to save Rose in Titanic. Harry Stamper blew himself up to save the world in Armageddon. Don Diego de la Vega received a mortal wound, sometime somewhere…? In The Mask Of Zorro. Jericho Kane sacrificed himself to save the world in End of Days. Qui-Gon Jinn received a mortal wound in Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace and Maximus received a mortal wound in Gladiator. Also, Maximus received permission from a female to go ahead and die…how touching. Hawk Hawkins sacrificed himself to send the deadly nuclear warheads into deep space in Space Cowboys.

Data replicated Spock’s feat, blowing himself up to save the Enterprise and Earth as well in Star Trek X: Nemesis. Jean Grey buried herself under a lethal mass of water so the X-Men could get away in X-Men 2: X-Men United. The titular Bill did was he was titularly supposed to do, in Kill Bill Vol. 2, and momma and child lived happily ever after without the dumb ol’ dad. Tarantino repeated this momma plus child minus dad formula in Planet Terror with the death of El Wray. Neville blew himself up to kill the zombies in I Am Legend. Walt Kowalski got himself all shot up with machine gun fire to send the murderous gang members to prison in Gran Torino. Rorschach said “do it” to Doctor Manhattan, who then obliged, obliterating him in Watchmen. Flynn sacrificed himself to take out Clu in Tron: Legacy. Captain America took down the plane in Captain America: The First Avenger. Ella blew herself up to take out the aliens in Cowboys and Aliens. Batman seemingly atomized himself hauling the nuclear bomb out of Gotham in the Batwing in The Dark Knight Rises.

Superman: The Man of Steel offered a triple play of white males sacrificing themselves for the greater good: Colonel Hardy, Emil Hamilton and Jonathan “Pa” Kent. Groot sacrificed himself to save his fellow Guardians in Guardians of the Galaxy. Nux sacrificed himself in Mad Max: Fury Road. Pietra Maximoff used his body as a shield to save a small child along with Clint Barton in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Superman offed himself to save all of humanity, lancing Doomsday with a Kryptonite spear in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Barbossa allowed himself to be consumed by the ocean to save his daughter, and others, in Pirates of the Caribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Yondu froze himself to death to save Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. Steve Trevor blew himself up to destroy the poison gas bombs in Wonder Woman. Merlin blew himself up to save his fellow Kingsmen in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Silas Stone sacrificed himself so that his son, Victor, could track down the Mother Box and save humanity in Justice League: Snyder Cut…and, presumably, in the theatrical cut as well, we just weren’t able to see it happen. Some guy named Toshi and some guy named Heller sacrificed themselves in The Meg. Vice Admiral Holdo engaged hyperdrive at point blank range, a suicide move, in Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, and then later on Luke Skywalker did a cool thing with Force projection and then…just kinda vanished just because. Natasha Romanov sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone in Avengers: Endgame and then later on Tony Stark did himself in with The Snap. He, like Maximus, received permission to die from a female, how sweet. Granting permission to die. Just makes your heart melt.

And then…spoilers, those who have not yet see No Time To Die might want to skip this…highlight to read…James Bond blew himself up by engaging the blow-up-bad-guy’s-base trope one more time, but skipping the escape-with-moments-to-spare trope, because his body was irreversibly infected with nanobots that would have killed his estranged wife and daughter if he ever came in contact with them again.

To say that a pattern has emerged would be understating the issue. Those who are sufficiently interested to track the years by what I’ve listed above, will notice there’s been an acceleration; the self-sacrifice started out as a rarity, and nowadays it’s a rarity if it isn’t there. To say I find it offensive, as a straight white male, would be engaging in a falsehood. I was never offended by it. I skipped straight from blithely ignoring the pattern, failing to notice that what in my childhood was an exception had now become a rule — to — pure and sincere boredom. Yesterday, Saturday, I was staying home enjoying a marathon streaming session with Mrs. Freeberg and it came time to pick the third movie. Noticing the previous two movies (I shall not say what they were) were just build-ups to dumb-noble-sacrifices from straight-white-males, I made the request that we find something that doesn’t have that.

It’s not a matter of offense. And it really isn’t purely a matter of boredom. A lot of these movies, when they have a dumb-noble-sacrifice from a straight-white-male at the end — all that comes before that, is relegated to being merely a lead-up to that. Well, that’s a solid block of at least two hours. Movies used to be a hodge-podge of beautiful things, and genuine surprises, non-tropey ones. They were a delight. You never knew what you were gonna get. Now you kinda do. Some hackneyed noble sacrifice, usually, and invariably from a straight white male. The observation I’m making here is about shifting norms. A sort of death-worship has crept in and gone mainstream.

I imagine I should be more concerned about the suicide rate among white boys. I really don’t know how that shakes out over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if suicide is as high, or higher, in non-whites, but males have been leading the suicide statistics for awhile. It’s the worldview that really concerns me the most, whether it leads to suicide or not. It’s the unwritten rule. Save the world, fornicate like a happy tomcat over it, live to fight another day, leave the audience wondering what exciting adventure you’re going to have next — it seems, now, that that just can’t happen. Someone’s banned it. It’s slightly less intrusive than banning happy endings altogether.

The idea of younger generations filing into movie theaters conditioned to ask themselves: “I wonder who’s going to off himself?” is troubling. Back in my day, we used to wonder what to wonder. Death worship of some kind might happen, but so could anything else. It was a real smorgasbord, if the movie was any good. A real grab bag.

The concept of remembering the sacrifice is a solid swing-and-a-miss. There’s always some subtext about the importance of remembering the fallen. Seems the build-up is always there, and the payoff never is. The other cast members, and the audience, will make darn good & sure to celebrate the life of the decedent, and never, ever forget them and the sacrifice they made. For about ten, fifteen minutes. After which, they’ll be replaced by a more diverse cast, and never mentioned again.

Well, if you’re a Christian, you belong to a religion that does not, and cannot, see martyrdom as something trivial. That’s another concern we should have. It’s being trivialized. When Spock did it, it was sacred. Now it’s like an empty box to be checked as the script makes its way through various drafts.

Some of this has to do with natural attrition. Actors get tired of roles, and part of a writer’s job is to find some coherent believable way to make the necessary cast change happen. Where it’s the white males biting the bullet, oftentimes it’s a planned scrubbing. This is why the “we’ll always remember your sacrifice forever and ever for the next five minutes” bait-and-switch comes to pass. The remembrance is what’s promised, but the forgetfulness is what’s planned. That’s the real social norm that is crystallizing before our eyes: The scrubbing of people, from existence and from remembrance. More often than not, because of their sex and their skin color.

We’re paying for creativity and we’re not getting it. The field of available plot elements should be expanding over time, and instead it’s being narrowed, sharpened like a pencil. Central characters, particularly white male central characters, off themselves simply because the scriptwriters don’t know any other way to do it anymore, and maybe the audience doesn’t know how to watch anything else anymore. Perhaps the mindset now is one of all-or-nothing: The thing you’re doing is so much bigger and more important than you are — and we require a suicide to make it obvious, this being a movie & all — or else, it’s not worth anything at all, and why are we bothering to watch? So there’s an expansive middle ground between the two extremes that’s gone missing. That’s very rarely any kind of good thing.

One liberal has acknowledged that the science of COVID has been infused with a “tinge” of politics…but just a tinge. Another liberal has refused to concede even that much. Most liberals don’t talk to me, so my sampling here is limited. But based on interactions like these and other things I’ve seen, I think this to be the big disconnect between emotionally-invested, self-identifying liberals vs. normal people.

What is all this fuss about the ‘Vid? Science, or politics? I think most people who are thinking on it with some clarity, would acknowledge it’s a mixture of both. The question then must arise: How much of each? What is it — predominantly?

People like me might be inclined to ask: Can science and politics co-exist anywhere, without the latter dominating the former?

Well, as we look into that, first we have the masks. In theory they ought to be at least partially effective. But we just haven’t seen a correlation between mask mandates versus slowing the spread, and that’s after…what, a year and seven months? So nineteen months. That could be because mandating masks is not the same as actually wearing the masks. But there’s been so much nanny-nanny-boo-boo and tut-tutting about masks, and so little science. Masks are elevated above other remedies because they’re visible. I think everyone who’s been watching what’s gone down, understands this, or should. We pivoted away awfully quickly from “wash your damn hands like your mama should’ve taught you,” even though COVID did wonderful things to educate us on how many people hadn’t been doing this. Some of whom work in food service. Yuck. Anyway. I would hope everyone with a brain still undamaged, would concede there’s been very little actual science overlapping with these masks.

Next we have the fired health care workers. Science would say…hey wait a minute, these are health care professionals. They’d rather suspend their careers than get the shot. What do they know that we don’t know? But also…if this is so serious, how can we afford to fire so many of them? The only explanation that makes sense is that this is about control, not about a real pandemic. Politics, not science.

The third thing is the natural immunity. There is such a thing. It’s science. How come the powers-that-be are playing it down the way they are? It’s got something to do with being powers-that-be, obviously. That’s politics. It isn’t science.

And then there is Tony the Tyrant. Perhaps it’s escaped everyone’s notice, but we don’t need “The Nation’s Top Epidemiologist” to tell us the things he’s telling us. Let’s review: Don’t doubt the statistics, even though we were caught red-handed counting a motorcycle crash fatality as a COVID death. Believe everything. Stay home, wear two masks, wash your hands, Rand Paul doesn’t know what he’s talking about, socially distance, wear masks even if you’re vaxxed, I’m so glad I don’t work for Trump anymore, if you attack me you’re attacking science, the droplets are how it’s spread so wear your masks…and gee, I dunno about this “vaccine mandate applies to people who already had COVID” thing so I’ll take a pass on that. Wear your masks. That pretty much covers it, right? Now a lot of these are opinions, that are reasonable, but conflict with other opinions that are also reasonable. We could have discussions about these. As far as being science, they’re not advanced science so there’s no reason to pick out our “top expert” and forget about what everyone else says. That’s not how you do science. That’s how you do bureaucracy and phony-consensus-building.

And then, fifth thing, is China. We’re not allowed to say, or even recall, that it’s a China Virus. It’s just like O.J. Simpson murdering his wife, the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else. Except that analogy breaks down because we were allowed to say “O.J. killed Nicole.” There we go again with those powers-that-be. When they’re telling us what not to say and what not to think, how in the world could that not be politics?

This is not the first time China has infected us with a deadly strain. If we were really into using science to protect ourselves from this, the scientific questions to be asking might include: Say, what’s China working on right now? Getting ready to hit us again? I think that might be the fifth or sixth deadly infection, I’ve lost count…

Another thing is our attitude toward the “vaccine hesitant.” It’s just weird, and I’m in a position to know because I’m one of them. I’m not anti-vax, but I’m definitely hesitating, waiting to see how this whole thing plays out before I go injecting something into my system I can’t pump out again. Discussing this has made me tired…ah, ha ha! That’s not true. We haven’t discussed it even a tiny bit. Which is weird and strange, given that vax-hesitancy has taken everybody by complete surprise. They did Nazi it coming! Well, whether we discuss it or not, I can monologue about it so allow me to expound on this one…

Accountability used to be a real thing, and no longer is. Think on this: Our alleged President likes to throw out numbers, dates and ultimatums. So maybe slip this one into his hopper…”If we can get the vaccination rate up past ninety percent we’ll get rid of the COVID. If we do that and it doesn’t happen, I will resign as President at noon Eastern Time, November 30th.”

No, I don’t really want that. There’s no such thing as getting rid of COVID, and I wouldn’t want that giggling whore running so much as a lemonade stand let alone the executive branch. But apart from those problems, you know I know you know you’re never going to hear him say something like that. It would involve accountability.

We The People are supposed to perform, and provide our “I’ve been vaxxed” cards if we want to eat, work, travel or associate with anybody. The people telling us to do this performing, keep their jobs no matter what happens. In fact, for him to say anything even vaguely resembling what’s above, he would have to define a goal. “Daily new cases” or “positive per 100,000” or something like that. We receive those reports. So we know they can be measured. But we don’t hear about any goals. All we get is “keep wearing your masks,” “get vaccinated” and “we think we’ve turned a corner.”

For, closing in on two years now. Strange, innit? Real science would be intrigued and want to know more. What we’re dealing with here, doesn’t want to know anything. It’s got this –>||<– much curiosity about why people are hesitant, what it might take to make them not-hesitant, what exactly it is we’re trying to do…etc…

As a side-point: People who are oriented toward specific goals, shouldn’t take direction from people who aren’t.

But anyway, I just don’t see very much science in this. I see people with degrees wearing white coats and using science-buzzwords as they appear on teevee. Did you know, politics can look like science? It’s like the metaphorical wolf wearing a sheep costume. This particular costume, up close, when you take the time to inspect it, isn’t very convincing. It only looks like a sheep from a distance. It looks like real science if, and only if, you refuse to ask any questions…

…you know, the way the powers-that-be want. Believe everything, don’t ask questions, get your shot or you’re fired. Seems political…but, that’s just my initial impression. My temporary, fleeting, nineteen-month opinion.

Way way back in the olden days, back when going to a movie or dinner at a restaurant was simple, I had comments to make about process vs. outcome. Since then, the Trump Era has come & gone…for now…and we’ve been battling the China Virus. I’m reminded of what my Uncle Wally told me about what one of his editors used to say to him: “The world is divided into two groups of people, the ones who go around dividing everyone into two groups, and everyone else…”

There are “process people” and there are “outcome people.” How do you tell them apart? Remember that old saying that insanity is repeating a consistent behavior with the expectation of an inconsistent result; that’s how.

Process people engaged in a bad process headed toward a bad outcome, won’t care about the outcome. They’ll defend their adherence to the details of the process, nevermind the fact that the process, also, is bad. Their defense is that there’s some authority or weight invested in this bad process, and they’re adhering to it. Their hope is that whoever is in a position to adjudicate, will put all the emphasis on following process and ignore outcome, the way they did. If it works, it works, and if it doesn’t work, they just appeal to a higher authority. So they never learn they did it the wrong way, because there’s no reason for them to learn this.

If you listen to them carefully, you can hear them ‘fessing up that this is how it works. “Our response was/is in line with guidance from the CDC.” It’s an answer to a question no one was asking.

No-on-recall, keep Gavin Newsom, was all about process versus outcome. Who in their right mind is going to defend the outcome of having Newsom in charge? Taxpaying residents heading for the hills, shit on the sidewalk, the place is literally in flames…but our guy in charge does have a defense. It’s all about “gonna follow the science!” — not about what’s supposed to be the whole point of leadership, leaving things in a condition better than how you found them.

When process people defend themselves this way, things get awkward fast because they’re bolstering a claim of premiere excellence, atop an accumulation of evidence that supports nothing better than adequacy. You can’t do an excellent job of following a process; that’s strictly pass-fail. But this doesn’t stop them from trying. Lookit me following the science! I’m following the CDC! They yell jump, I say how high? Clearly, I’m irreplaceable!

Everybody likes to be thought of as intelligent, but intelligence is the ability and the willingness to learn. Learning is a non-instinctive behavioral change. You have to screw up and admit you did it wrong. Only outcome people can do this, because only they monitor the outcome, with a genuine potential for saying to themselves, if the situation calls for it: “Well, that sucks. Let’s do it differently next time.”

When we debate taxing businesses, we’re actually debating destroying businesses. Outcome people tend to be pro-business, because you really can’t run a business while ignoring outcomes, unless your “business” is some government agency that never runs out of money. Conversely, you aren’t going to fit into any of those “businesses” in any capacity, unless you’re a process person.

The China Virus has polarized us deeply, because we’ve responded with a thorny thicket of rules rules and more rules, which are refined day-to-day by process people. You’ll notice this refinement, back to the very beginning, has had very little to do with results. That’s why. Meanwhile, the people who are fixated on these rules rules and more rules, and obliged to live under them, are outcome people. We care about the results. “But my shelter in place order was the approved method at the time” doesn’t mean an awful lot to us.

“Masks are how we keep each other safe!” is fraud, not because it’s demonstrably untrue (although certainly, support for it is lacking). It’s a deceitful statement because it’s what process people say when they’re pretending to be outcome people. They don’t care about keeping each other safe. They’d prefer people be safe versus not safe…maybe….but they really care about following and enforcing rules.

“I’m following the guidance from the CDC” is, at least, honest. It’s a process person presenting himself or herself as a process person. The final outcome which is on everybody’s mind, is a mere afterthought to such a person, but at least there’s no effort spent to pretend otherwise.

When people are forced to give up one thing for another thing, and thereby make clear what their priorities really are, the thing that rates highest to everyone with a working brain is a good outcome. When push comes to shove, no one with functioning intellect really cares about process, except as a means to an end. We’d sacrifice it in a heartbeat for the other, because we’re rational. But we’re not letting outcome-people actually make any decisions about anything. From the beginning, we have invested all the authority in process people. Here we are a year and a half into it, wondering what we did wrong. That’s what.

Mask maniacs, cornered by the obvious problems posed to Mask Theory by real science, lunge for this loophole of “It’s good manners” or “It shows we care about each other.”

I am one of the people who understand they shouldn’t be doing that.

See to me, if something comes naturally to me because Mom raised me that way, it’s not included in “good manners” because I don’t have to put in any effort. Someone else might think “Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you'” means good manners, but for me, it would be much harder not to do it. Good manners, for me, include only things that are difficult…for me. So in my case, since I have opinions other people don’t have, good manners must include what’s hard for me to do: showing proper respect to people who disagree. I have to work a little harder to keep in mind that people who reject my opinions, or maintain other opinions I find to be opprobrious, might very well be intelligent people. There are people who think, for example, that if women ran the world we would have less fighting. There are people who think the Washington Redskins should have changed their name. There are people who think Barack Obama is a “lightworker.” It gets very hard for me to show proper respect and keep in mind these people might have brains in their heads…which, maybe, they’re not using.

Other opinions are even worse. There are people who think paper straws and single-use plastic bags will save the planet. There are people who think increasing the minimum wage doesn’t impact employment, or might even result in more businesses hiring. There are people who think we’re (somehow) living in The Handmaid’s Tale. Opinions like these, for all purposes, logically exclude the possibility that the holder of the opinion has a working brain. In these cases I can’t bear in mind a possibility that isn’t there, so I have to pretend. Good manners, to me, have a lot to do with all this. Occasionally people will object to what I say and remonstrate me about keeping such things to myself. The response to which is…snowflake, you should hear the things I do keep to myself. And then I have to make that one of the things, and leave it unsaid. This is all very challenging and that’s what makes them good manners. In my case.

So if masks are good manners, we’ve got a big problem here.

That’s because Dr. Fauci is apparently getting bored with epidemiology and is branching off into manners. Hence, the problem. When the subject is epidemiology, people insist I should defer to Dr. F’s vastly superior knowledge and experience. This makes sense to me, and I so defer. But I will not defer to his understanding of etiquette or “showing each other we care.” I refuse. It makes no sense for me to do such a thing.

When it comes time to show proper respect to a person holding an opinion he doesn’t like, Dr. Fauci is not the top dog, or the go-to. He’s not on the bottom either, but he’s close to it. He’s definitely in the bottom 50%. Maybe even in the bottom 10%.

From all I have seen over the last year and a half, when Tony the Tyrant is speaking off the cuff and encounters an opinion he doesn’t like, or sees one of his own opinions questioned in a way that doesn’t suit his fancy, he turns into one of the rudest little cunts I’ve ever seen. He does this rather speedily, and reliably, like he thinks he’ll be subjected to a tax or penalty if he leaves behind any lingering doubts about his disrespect for the dissenting viewpoint, and the person holding it. He is very far from any sort of Manners Master, about as far away from that as someone could get. No. I will not enshrine him this way. Absolutely not. An alley cat would be a better choice.

“Wear a mask because Dr. F. says it’s good manners” isn’t going to wash, with me.

All your life you have heard “Women fought for and won the right to vote” and it makes it sound like men were the Evil Galactic Empire and women were noble brave Ewoks on Endor…but, no. It was a constitutional amendment that had to be ratified by 3/4 of the states, and in order to ratify, you had to be a man. Men gave women the right to vote.

Ever since then, we have been dominated by what we might call The Hystericals. These are people who are driven into hysterics when they figure out there’s danger around…just humdrum, everyday, ordinary danger. In network security we call it “residual risk.” It goes with simply living life. When The Hystericals figure out residual risk has not been reduced to zero, which is an impossibility anyway, they insist on turning everything upside down. They don’t feel completely 100% safe yet, because they’re not, and so everyone else has to do some more accommodating. We need more taxes and more rules, to suit The Hystericals.

This is why we have a “pandemic”…or “shamdemic.” “Plandemic.” All our official diktats are built around calming down and soothing The Hystericals. It’s not about “following the science.” The science says forcing little kids to wear masks is a futile endeavor, and a cruel one. The science says there’s no point imposing a vaccine mandate on people who’ve already been infected, and recovered. This propagation of an evil deadly virus is a hundred year event, and we’ve gone through it before, but a hundred years ago we didn’t handle it this way. Woodrow Wilson never said anything about Influenza, did you know that? Not one word. He actually caught it and nearly died. That’s your tip-off: Everything we do with this problem, and all the others, is about soothing and mollifying those who refuse to be soothed or mollified. That’s what politics is now, and it started with Women’s Suffrage.

Here’s the thing though.

All women are not Hystericals. And all Hystericals are not women. When we gave women the right to vote, we created a new potential for marketing irrational progressivism, and the progressives took the opportunity to do the marketing and they’ve never stopped. They manufactured The Hystericals. It’s really no different from the boost progressivism got when they lowered the voting age to eighteen, even though all progressives are not 18-21, and all 18-21-year-olds are not progressives.

But then here’s another thing.

Ever since we’ve gone down that path of kowtowing to The Hystericals who go apeshit whenever they figure out there’s residual risk…we have put women in a danger they didn’t have to face before. As “civilized” society has gelded itself, it has made itself more hazardous to women in general. A lot of this has come from the erasure of definitions. We’re supposed to refer to Alana McLaughlin as “her” and “she,” but that’s a dude, dude. And now that society is ball-less and slap-happy with slapping down definitions of things, he gets to rough up women and punch them in the face. It’s sick, disgusting and wrong.

Mark Steyn wrote of the “culture of positivity” shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, making reference to earlier carnage:

Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the ‘Montreal massacre,’ the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine. As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not [the shooter] but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over…they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

And now we have the tragedy — we think — of Gabby Petito and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. He came back from the cross-country trip without her, and her whereabouts are unknown. Mr. Laundrie is not talking. Police have already tried to question him, and that’s supposedly reached a dead end because supposedly, the Constitution says if he doesn’t want to tell anyone where she is, or isn’t, nobody can make him. So he lawyers up, and anyone who wants answers out of him has to settle for pre-fabbed statements from his attorney.

Yes it’s supposed to be constitutional, but we’ve had the Constitution for a long time. Once again: Men are being unmanly, and women are facing new dangers. It’s a new thing. The Constitution didn’t make it this way. You see, this is why it’s important to study history, and to think logically about such things. We are abandoning women to terrible fates at the hands of not-quite-men, because of the Supreme Law of the Land…which predates our doing such a dreadful, passive, pusillanimous thing. This tells us, however much we may wish to deny it, that there’s more to our actions than just the law. There is culture too, and ours must be on a rapid decline. If it’s on one, someone must have put it there. The enemy is us.

Someone should say something, because we have a lot of women who are not Hystericals. They, being mature grown-ups, can accept residual risk, and it has not gone unnoticed by me that some men could learn a few things from such women. But such women are capable of accepting reasonable residual risk. They do not plan on being smashed in the face by Mr. McLaughlin, or filed into a room to be perforated by the likes of Mr. Lépine and his Ruger Mini-14, or to be driven out in the middle of nowhere and abandoned or who knows what else by Mr. Laundrie.

The Hystericals have made it popular for everyone, particularly those in positions of power, to assume testosterone is “toxic.” In fact, they’ve made it hazardous to assume anything else. The rest of us are supposed to take note of their issues, that they’re still falling short in their goal of complete safety and security; and leap to the conclusion that everyone else has to nudge them a bit closer to that unattainable goal, by getting rid of the testosterone.

Experience, on the other hand, is counseling us toward the opposite. It is this drive to get rid of testosterone that is putting the women in danger. A lot of these women never fell for the ruse in the first place, and those others among us who are still falling for it, are doing them a dangerous disservice.

It’s time once again to extract civilization’s cranial unit from it’s own sphincter cavity. The reminders are coming at us thick and fast now, and they’re all symptoms of a common problem.

There are at least three occasions in The Bible in which flawed humans have to be rebooted because there’s just no fixing ’em (us): the Great Flood; the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; and the Apocalypse.

That we’re flawed, is not a matter of degree that changes across time — we just are. And I discard as a possibility that the dates are predetermined (except maybe for The Flood I suppose); something deteriorated to a level where there emerged a decision-point. Therefore there had to be what one might call a “social dynamic” that had degraded to the point where it was no longer salvageable. The collective forms a social code, which may be viable or not, and social codes can slouch over time like fruit on the ground, rotting. Eventually you get to the point where good conduct, at the level of the individual, doesn’t matter. You create a collective situation in which you have to be an asshole in order to survive. At that point, an overseeing deity would have to merge the rotten collective with a good one and hope the cultural absorption would work in the right direction, wait for the bad behavior to dissipate by way of attrition, send His son into the middle of it to preach some & get crucified, or flush it all.

Anyone who’s attended public school K-12 is going to understand the situation.

And you can see it now. People start off their little speeches with their drive to “follow the science” and their determination to avoid being seduced/distracted away from it…by what, one wonders? And then that translates into a resolve to be obedient…to whom, one wonders? And before they’re three or four sentences in, they’re celebrating that someone got sick and died, or looking forward to it.

No, I don’t think these are End Times. I’m sure God has much bigger things on His plate. This crisis, in my view, is just an advance preview, a “revelation” of sorts of what people are like inside, what they show when things get tough. It’s not pretty. Yes we have some heroic first responders, but those are individuals. The group dynamic is deteriorating at a rapid rate. “Death-wishing” should, by rights, be an unpopular thing, and instead we see it is quite fashionable. It’s emerged as the first-and-foremost way people deal with their day-to-day stresses & distresses: Seek out, or imagine, those with disagreeable opinions, and wish death on them.

The Supreme Court has declined to intervene with the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” for now. There is sure to be more drama coming.

It’s like the 1980’s all over again. Everywhere, I see people offering their opinions about abortion, and a lot of these opinions consist of nothing more than a showy cranky statement that some certain set of other people shouldn’t have opinions. Of course that’s a dishonest way to present a non-argument argument. What they’re really trying to say is “We want this other set of people to have a license to kill, but we know if we argued it that way we’d lose, so we’re going to argue about not arguing about it.”

That’s the way they presented it some forty years ago. We did what they said, and for the most part, stopped arguing about it. I can see now, the “Abortion is a done deal, let’s stop arguing it” people were wrong. We did what they wanted us to do, and for a long time. Now that abortion is a thing to argue about again, it is evident there are a lot of people out there who look at men, women and children all cock-eyed. Their viewpoint, which has gone mainstream, is what used to be a fringe-kooky radical viewpoint and we haven’t noticed this because we’ve been so busy not-arguing about any of it.

They think children are liabilities and not assets. You’ll notice our whole society is built around this idea now. “Who’s going to take care of him or her?” “How are you going to afford child support for three kids?” “Oh you are collecting child support from him, aren’t you?” “Better keep her happy fella, she’s a Fertile Myrtle and that would be one expensive divorce.” “He has special needs, how are you going to get him the help that he needs?” Etc….it used to be, the poorer the farmer, the more kids he would have to have. Children were assets, even if you were heartless, and if you had a heart they were a blessing. We don’t look at it like that anymore because, let’s be honest, we can’t. Liabilities aren’t blessings.

Before the child is born, these people think he is an illness that has happened to the woman’s body, like a disease. How is she going to get access to health care? What do you mean, she’ll have to pay for it? How dare you!

The man putting her in that state, has done something to her, taken something away rather than adding it. To even inform him that there’s a plan to murder his child, is the exception now, with the rule being that she’ll have to clean up after him, the way we pick up candy wrappers and potato chip bags in our corner lot left by who-knows-who.

If she keeps the child, she still doesn’t have to tell him. There is no expectation that she should bother to do so. No expectation that he’s anywhere around to find out about it.

If a mother mentions the problems she’s having with a child, be it schoolwork, discipline problems, kid getting picked on by bullies, losing his equipment & supplies, medical misadventures, etc., it has become socially expected that she won’t mention any father involved. Also, that if she doesn’t, no one will ask. This seems like good manners until you stop to consider: We have now accepted the idea that there’s no father. We have accepted a new default in which humans breed the same way cattle breed. The “bull” is expected to do what it takes to get things going, and then move on to other things. An exception to this would be just that, an exception.

And then we busy ourselves with rewriting history, imagining things have always been this way and that men were never held to any kind of obligation, legal, social, any other kind, to take care of women. There was no Code of Chivalry, no social code in which gentlemen offered ladies their seats, opened doors for them, walked on the side of the sidewalk facing traffic, etc. That never happened, it was just thousands of years of exploitation. And since we’re wrapping up five thousand years or so of men exploiting women, supposedly it’s time to turn things around and see to it women make all the decisions, run everything, that they graduate from college and earn degrees in higher numbers, that any decision any one makes is above question and beyond appeal.

Oh, you certainly can heckle a woman in power if she supports Donald Trump. Marjorie Taylor Greene knows all about that. But, our culturally-accepted woman-in-power is not like her, not at all. We have a great understanding of what a powerful woman should look like, and she’s a termagant in a pantsuit. Part of the reason congresswomen like MTG and Elise Stefanik get heckled, is because they don’t fit into the required mold. We’ve put together a fairly complete, crisp profile: Hardcore left-wing, pantsuit every damn day, scold scold scold, maybe shake a finger too, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, living in an alternative reality, launching into a how-dare-you monologue anytime anyone mentions 2+2=4; negative, toxic, unpleasant and shrill. I’m talking about which one? So many fit into it, and every year there are more because it’s what we expect and accept. For all my description, I could be talking about any one from a vast number and I’ve specified nothing. Pelosi and AOC. Klobuchar and Clinton. Boxer, Feinstein, Warren, etc. etc. etc. etc…….

Being male, I’m only mildly annoyed and bored with it. If I were a woman, I would be insulted. We have granted women — in fact, they always had — the power to say go, and to say stop. Let’s do this, let’s not do this. Pregnancies, by default, have to be stoppable because it would never work out right with that guy? But she picked him. Yes feminists want us to imagine rape scenarios, and all of the time, whenever we argue about abortion. They don’t think all pregnancies come from rape, but they’d be pleased if everyone else thought of them that way. Well…back in the olden days, Daddy picked the dude. He had veto power, and a lot of the feminist movement had to do with rebelling against Daddy, “empowering” the woman to pick her own dude. Now it’s just so terribly important to terminate pregnancies? What does that say about the terrible, awful judgment of women? Feminists seem to think women are a bunch of dummies, who would have been just as well off leaving the crucial, life-making decision up to Daddy. Insulting doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s wrong with this.

So I’m glad we’re arguing about abortion again, in a way. It’s tiring. But it exposes this idea that men are a pestilence, children are liabilities not assets, and women should be acrid, acidic shrews who go to Washington and systematically mass-produce terrible ideas about how to control others. The alternative is to not discuss any of this…but allow the idea to reign supreme. That’s been given a fair shot now, for many years. I’m not pleased with the results. So by all means, let’s go back to arguing it again.

“Liberals question things and conservatives don’t” is an axiom that’s been wandering afield. It has been losing fidelity to what’s real — but not, I see, popularity or currency — about as quickly as “democrats are the party of the Little Guy and Republicans represent rich fat cats.” And for pretty much the same reason: The democrats and the liberals have been chasing dependent, unproductive people as a constituency, along with casual lazy thinkers who don’t question the things they’re told.

Between those two, it is the question-things change that has lately had a greater impact, and is more sneaky, sultry and seductive. We have become accustomed to it happening and now it’s just a matter of routine. Liberals, or those who fasten their interests to the interests of liberals, say “You see, what we’re trying to do is make a new world in which there’s no blah blah blah and/or everyone has access to blah blah blah.” And with that simple declaration of mission-statement, you have something people can choose to believe uncritically, to question, or deny altogether. As an aside, there’s an interesting binary-choice playing out here. Liberals can’t seem to think about increasing or decreasing something; they have to drive it from the planet forever, or flood everybody & everything with it so you can’t get away from it. Between those two extremes, in their world, there isn’t anything.

Get rid of mask hesitancy, vaccine hesitancy, any notion that there are only two genders, this that & that other statue, this emblem, that brand, any & all unsavory opinions, make sure white people are properly outnumbered, gas powered cars and trucks, Imperial measurement system, meat, family, capitalism…

Saturate everything with eco-cups, heavy plastic bags, the masks, paper straws, gay gay gay make everything gay…

Lazy thinkers say, as they’re supposed to say: Great! Who could possibly be opposed to this? Whoever opposes this, must be some kind of monster!

And then it falls to conservatives to ask the necessary questions:

Why?

How then is anybody going to do X, that relies on this thing you’re eliminating, or on an absence of whatever it is you’re promulgating everywhere?

How exactly is that going to work? California’s under-powered and incendiary electrical grid, just magically fixes itself in time for everyone to be driving an electric vehicle…everywhere?

How do you know what you think you know?

Could you be cocking up the incentives by doing this? What’s that do to supply and demand?

How is this going to affect the upbringing of children? Apart from pushing more of them to become liberals…

Is the technology really ready for that?

At what cost?

We’re left with a persistent problem of polarization, which is due largely to the liberals maintaining their problem with labeling. A deceptive, or mistaken, caption under something will snooker ’em every time. They cannot distinguish between packaging and contents. They see someone saying “twelve years left to save the planet” to get attention…we know these are people who will not stand to be cornered, a year from now, with “So now there are eleven years, right?” The honest ones will say: I exaggerated to get a little bit of extra attention. The less honest ones will change the subject. Meanwhile, the well-mannered liberal won’t factor in any of that, then or now. He will simply think what he’s told to think. Twelve years, start that clock. Run around screaming and panicking, and a little bit of arms-flailing-overhead wouldn’t hurt either.

I don’t think “liberals question things and conservatives don’t” has been a good rule-of-thumb since somewhere around LBJ’s time, if even then.

One of the Quora kids who think they know everything, tries to make the point that what would have passed for lunacy in 1999 is standard Republican intellectual fare today.

An opinion can be well-founded and/or well-reasoned. His is neither, but it’s important anyway because it reflects the feelings of so many. Ah, there’s that problem again. Feelings. You see the damage being done when you stop to realize: None of what the Quora commenter listed is nearly as off-the-rocker as “I voted Biden/Harris in 2020 and I’m not sorry.”

The President is senile. Electronic and print media are pretending he isn’t. His communications apparatus is presenting his embarrassing failures as successes. The media is doing little to nothing to correct this.

We have this new industry of “fact checking” that answers to no one and forms questionable conclusions in a bubble and as a monolith. They label things as “misinformation” that are not false, and in some cases, are provably or demonstrably true. We have become numb to this, after years of seeing persons in positions of authority add their signatures to things that are known lies, forced to conclude what people must say in totalitarian dictatorships: “Maybe it’s a lie, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so whatevs.” If any one resource is “caught spreading misinformation,” someone somewhere with power takes steps to disconnect them. There is usually no appeal and we almost never know who exactly is making the necessary judgment call. They cite “community standards” that do not exist in any written, open format that could be cited or referenced. They just suspend/disconnect and that’s that.

Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats suspend or shut down entire industries on the shaky pretext of a deadly pandemic, leaving literally millions unemployed. They don’t suspend-until some such-and-such a specific date. They just suspend. While those affected stumble around wondering when or if they’ll ever see an honestly-earned dollar again, these decision-makers get to collect a regular paycheck.

And then there is the Afghanistan embarrassment. The news is still changing too quickly for me to insert an excerpt or a link, we just have to keep watching it. It’s sort of a combination of “hard to look away from a derailment” and “I can’t trust anybody’s version.”

We need to update our “misery index” again, because you need to start with that before adding in unemployment/inflation, bank lending rates, etc. Economic indicators are like the top floor of a building. The overall mental health of our society is like the foundation.

None of it is doing too well right now.

The people who were lining up to get rid of Bad Orange Man are very quiet. I have to say, I’d be quiet too.

So, it’s “Please wear masks regardless of your vaccination status.” And apparently everywhere, multiple counties. China Virus stats are up, so our leaders are clamping down hard…on us. Good to know.

We’ve been through this before. A few times. Once again, it’s up to me to point out the obvious…to point out what everybody with a brain knows already, but people with better manners are going to leave unsaid.

What we’re seeing play out here, is a conflict between two ways to look at medicine. There are the very loud people, what I call the “Puppeteers and puppets” people, who perceive it’s the job of the medical authorities to tell us what to do…and our role is to do what they tell us. This seems reasonable, at first, until you ponder the most obvious question: Are they sure? And the clear and obvious answer is, no they’re not, and that’s okay. It’s science, which is supposed to constantly evolve as we learn more things. It’s science about what is still essentially a novel virus.

And then there are the people like me, who understand what’s wrong with that. The puppeteers are not sure, and that’s okay. But the central premise for everything we’re doing, is that they are sure. They’re scientists, after all! Are you a scientist? Am I a scientist? No and no. They outrank us, so let’s pretend they’re sure when they’re not.

So I guess you call us the “No Pretend” people.

“Puppeteer and Puppet” people will demand to know, with some justification…what does it matter? If they’re not sure, but they know more than we do, we might as well pretend they’re sure even if they’re not sure. Are you worried there’s a danger with the vaccines? Are you worried there’s some perceived cost involved in wearing the masks? The answer in my case is no & no. I just refuse to pretend.

If we see things as they really are, and think about those things the way they really are, we have to admit to an unsavory truth: It’s the Puppeteer-and-Puppet people, not us, who can’t handle this lack of certainty. We, as a whole, are romping around in the tall-grass looking for a Cracker Jack prize…we’ve been doing it for nineteen months now…haven’t found it yet. So it’s worse than a lack of certainty. We literally don’t know what we’re doing. They can’t handle that, so they’re observing this sanctimonious never-ever-circumvent hierarchy, with Tony the Tyrant on top, as a substitute for knowing what we’re doing. The people at the top are supposedly giving us the very best of known science, which is probably true. They’re probably being candid and sincere, usually, about everything they know. The problem is they don’t know. So the Puppeteer-and-Puppet people want this rigid chain-of-command observed, and all of the time, as a substitute for knowing what we’re doing. because they can’t handle the truth that we don’t know what we’re doing.

We won’t do this pretending. The Puppeteer-and-puppet people say that means people like me are putting them in some kind of danger. But that’s just more pretending. They pretend the science backs them up on this, but every now and then they have to deal with the fact that the science doesn’t back them up on this. So then they have to veer off into this “manners” thing, protesting that we have to wear masks to show we care. They want to pretend their Puppeteers are authorities on manners, rather than medicine. Well, anyone who’s actually dealt with a few doctors knows why we shouldn’t put doctors in charge of manners. We No-Pretend people aren’t ready to pretend that either.

Maybe this is my bias talking, but I think we No-Pretend people are the ones who have it right. We shouldn’t pretend clearly unknown things are known, or that clearly false things are true. It’s important we refrain from doing that, because pretending leads to more pretending. Now we’re supposed to pretend a higher vaccination rate is what’s needed to get rid of COVID, and that we’re almost up to that level, but not quite there yet. This, as a foundational premise, would legitimize more puppeteer-and-puppet rule-making, so a lot of people want that. We can pretend that’s “evidence” if we want to pretend that. But it isn’t.

A lot of people are “string” people. They’ve been making real nuisances of themselves. They fancy themselves to be superior to the puppets, and they want to tell the puppets what to do, but they have to receive instructions from the puppeteers about what to do. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in this chain of command, in which they take up this middle-position, playing no role in formulating the commands, but rather in enforcing them. They are often heard issuing the final conclusive staccato note in these deliberations, something to the effect of “just do it!” They’re accustomed to the puppets complying, because they seldom to never are confronted with the obvious rejoinder: That’s not a logical argument. That isn’t even an assertion. It’s just being pushy.

We’re divided right now because we’re being prevailed upon to pretend good crowd management is the same as good individual management; someone has taken a stab at the vaccination rate needed to bring about herd immunity, and their guess is that it’s very high. So the narrative is that unvaccinated people are selfish and harmful. We’re all supposed to pretend there are good scientific arguments in support of that, when there aren’t any, and the No-Pretend people aren’t pretending while the string people are yelling “just do it!”

Puppeteer-and-puppet people are prone to buy into “Let’s Try This Let’s Try That” medicine. That’s where the doc sees he’s not going to figure out exactly what’s wrong with your kid, or your pet, anytime soon, but the parent/owner is just a little bit off her rocker so he’d like to get her out of his office, but he’s figured out his role is more like a psychologist than a medical doctor, and he sees an opportunity to fulfill expectations without finding anything definite. So he prescribes something to treat the whatever…let’s just try it and see what it does. This makes the kid/pet into an experimental subject, which lends cachet. For a lot of parents/owners, that’s a huge plus. It makes for a good story to tell. But, it also just might possibly work, so there are valid reasons to opt into this, and there are valid reasons not to opt into it. It’s generally a good discussion to have. It’s also generally a discussion that, when all’s said & done, doesn’t happen.

“Let’s try this let’s try that” medicine is popular…with some. That’s another reason we’re divided. The Puppeteer Class has been wrong so often in this thing; people point it out, and the rebuttal is “Yeah but that’s to be expected, it’s how science works.” So it is! But because that’s how science works, y’all can stop pretending, anytime you want, that the No-Pretend people are hurting you just by being No-Pretend people. Also, let’s stop pretending the puppeteers are taking actual responsibility for end results. They aren’t.

You have your vaccines now. If you’re worried about the China Virus, take your vaccine. And your booster shot too. Pretty soon, there are going to be multiple booster shots…and the people who’ve taken all five of them, will be blaming the people who’ve only taken four.

But let’s not have any more pretending about “We’d be all done with it by now if it weren’t for that guy over there,” or about “doing this” or “getting rid of it once and for all” or “kicking COVID’s butt.” Y’all aren’t doing that.

Lately it seems like we’re living in a Twilight Zone episode. In fact, I notice among the loudest of us, there’s an idea that if we’re not living in one yet, something’s wrong, and we have to get started on it a.s.a.p.

Let’s see…have I got this right? We had

1. Those dirty rotten unvax people are keeping us from reaching herd immunity; but then it emerged natural immunity was as effective as vaccine-driven immunity. Fauci The Great just wasn’t a fan of it, so after we admitted he wasn’t being straight with us it was

2. Those dirty rotten unvax people are unwittingly using their bodies as petri dishes to make new variants of the virus, like Delta for example; but then it emerged that a lot of us were still testing negative for the virus and antibodies as well, meaning we hadn’t contracted it; so then there was

3. Those dirty rotten unvax people are shedding the virus; but then it emerged that vaxxed people were shedding it too, so then we had

4. Those dirty rotten unvax people are shedding the virus more often and faster than the vax people; but then it emerged that that wasn’t true, so then we had

5. Those dirty rotten unvax people are filling up our hospitals, and all the deaths are unvax people; but then it emerged that a) When you’re dead, you’re no longer filling up a hospital and b) here, there and elsewhere there are some deaths from COVID among vaxxed people, our experts had just been covering them up; so then we had

6. Those dirty rotten unvax people are getting sicker than vaxxed people when & if they get the ‘Vid! Well yes, that’s true; that’s the whole point of having a vaccine. It gives your body a leg-up on forming the necessary resistance to fend off the virus, should you ever be infected with it. The problem is, that substantiates “I wouldn’t be doing it this way if I were them.” It doesn’t substantiate “They’re hurting me.” You can’t have a good witch hunt without they’re-hurting-me.

As these arguments have failed, one after another, like tumbling dominoes; those who rely on them to do their witch-hunting have slipped easily from one to another, as if it’s expected at a certain time, like changing underwear. Being right is fun, being wrong is not-so-fun. So they haven’t noticed the ground shifting beneath their feet. “What exactly are the unvaxxed doing to hurt you?” is a question that only burbles up to the surface, every now and then. It’s guaranteed not to happen if you never allow the target of your ire to say anything in response, or if you don’t listen. The “Why Aren’t You Vaccinated?” Karen-types are often seen falling short at one of those, or the other. So they don’t notice that while their lecture stays consistent, the support for it has to swivel around, changing over time. The overarching objective that endures, is to blame the right people for…whatever. To live in this pretend world of they’re-hurting-me.

Vax-tivists say they don’t owe anything to unvax people. That’s not wrong. In fact, that’s the problem. Unvax people don’t disagree. You have to have disagreement over something to have conflict, and you have to have conflict in order to achieve the true goal here: Making the designated group the target of widespread public hatred, preferably as the scapegoat for the misery China has brought down on us all.

What China has accomplished here is truly remarkable. They, the communists, have managed to acquire leverage over us, to tell us what to think by telling us what not to think. But our own government, sprawling out of control or any sensible restraint, still lacks the power to tell us what not to think. For that, you need large, corporate entities. We don’t think the virus came from China, because Disney won’t let us think the virus came from China. And who owns Disney? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count. Disney, in turn, owns just about everything. Don’t piss off The Mouse!

And because we aren’t allowed to blame China, when the evidence doesn’t point anywhere else, we fall for these smoke-and-mirror parlor tricks. We end up living on Maple Street, blaming each other.

Like a bunch of filthy rats, eating each other. Like communists.

The China virus has communists acting just like capitalists, and us capitalists acting just like communists.